On 07/24/2010 10:42 AM, Frederic Muller - SFI wrote:
Dear all,
We've been considering a move to using a forum as our main discussion platform based on the following reasons: - More open and visible - Searchable
The archiving software for the mailing lists should handle those two points. What did you have in mind in regards to more open and visible? Does the archive need an RSS feed or clicky links to social networking sites? The archive is already searchable. Perhaps more prominent advertisement of the URL to the archive might be in order in the list's footer or on the wiki or other web pages. http://mail.sf-day.org/pipermail/sfd-discuss/ Mailman is nice software and there might be a way to activate the List-Archive header for mail sent by the list: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4021#section-2.1.31
- Mailing list are usually for developers. Our community is definitely not developers oriented
There are a great many people who are not developers and use e-mail. If an individual list is a problem, how about a mailing list for non-developers?
- Better for search engines indexing
Again, that's dependent on the mailing list archive software.
- More pleasant to read
Conversely, no choice in client. With mail, there is a very wide choice of clients and filtering and sorting capabilities.
- And you get to add a little icon for yourself ;-)
x-face used to be standard in most mail clients (a loooong time ago). It might still be available, and/or there might be other options nowadays. I see in Thunderbird, the 'Display Contact Photo' add-on using the X-Face or Face header. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/58034/ http://nntp.gnus.org/circus/face/
Since you'll be using it, I wanted to get a initial feedback of what (FOSS) software you believe would suit that purpose.
Personally, I am very tired of forums because they are so inflexible and usually difficult to follow. Usenet without either Spam or Astroturfers would be near ideal.
We've been looking in PhpBB but are definitely open for anything else that does the job and is Free Software.
A gateway would be nice. Messages posed in the mailing list should turn up in the forum, the messages in the forum in the list. Gateways used to be de rigeur, and useful enough to be worth keeping. Ivan mentioned GMANE, perhaps that would meet the need. Since it uses NNTP, one is not limited to the web UI it provides. There is a lot of forum software out there, so PHP can be successfully dodged. Most PHP software has to be re-written to get closer to practical security. If we go the forum route, let's look outside PHP. There are overly fancy tools, like Sakai, and very old, simple ones like COW. No matter which forum is used, a lot of time will be spent adjusting it and then, after that, on maintenance. Forums require a lot of maintenance, including technical maintenance and should time be spend maintaining infrastructure or helping people get the idea of Freedom? It's not an either-or dilemma but each person does have only 24hrs per day and not all hours and days are equal. Regards, /Lars