[maemo-community] Maemo forums going beta

[From: Andrew Flegg]

On Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 3:08 PM, Henri Bergius <henri.bergius at nemein.com> wrote:
>
> Most of the old email archives have now been imported to the forums,
> and therefore I'm now opening them to beta:
>
> * maemo-developers: https://maemo.org/community/maemo-developers/
> * maemo-users: https://maemo.org/community/maemo-users/

Cool. Hopefully it'll increase people's participation at maemo.org and
that's gotta be a good thing.

My initial reaction is one of being lost, this may be because of the
import being half-complete; but let's say for the sake of argument
it's not:

  * Dates are shown as MM/dd/yy - this is instantly confusing to any
    non-USians. Let's have ISO8601 dates: yyyy-MM-dd.

  * The URLs above both show the date as a heading, but then there
    seems to be the threads below it, neither relating to that date
    nor in an immediately obvious order. Am I looking at the most
    recent content? Today's date suggests I am, but then the top
    thread on -developer is from 2006 (followed by one from 2008).

  * The styles, although incomplete, are similar to some of the
    other pages on maemo.org and it takes up a /lot/ of space.
    Perhaps some form of tabular layout, similar to web forums like
    on ITT would save space *and* be more familiar to users.

> The idea of the forums is to have full web access to the maemo.org
> mailing lists, enabling users to choose whether they want to use the
> lists via email, web, or both. Messages sent to the list will be added
> to the web forum via cron-based lurker addresses, and messages posted
> via web will be sent to the lists.

How often will the cronjobs run? Will there be unread ability on the
forums, allowing people to really, properly, follow them online?

> When posting via web, the address used for sending will be the primary
> email of the maemo.org profile. Other email aliases will be matched to
> the user when importing emails.

Sounds good.

Cheers,

Andrew

-- 
Andrew Flegg -- mailto:andrew at bleb.org | http://www.bleb.org/