[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] how we can enhance the maemo.org

[From: Weinehall David (Nokia-M/Tampere)]

On tis, 2005-06-14 at 16:00 +0300, ext Karoliina T. Salminen wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I think we have been thinking about adding wiki and that it would be a 
> good idea.
> However, I have another improvement idea in mind:
> 
> How about discussion forums? I think they are easier to manage
> than mailing lists, but that is just my opinion as I am a forum heavy 
> user and not
> all are like that. Could you by the way tell your opinion about forums, 
> do you like or dislike
> them? Adding e.g. phpbb running on the server wouldn't be a huge task I 
> think.
> We have several forums running on our home server already with phpbb and 
> the configuration
> (including the MySQL database setup) was one evening task or so.

I find discussion forums useful only for short-lived discussions; any
discussions where I might want to go back to something that was
discussed a long time ago, I much prefer e-mail.  Also, e-mail allows
the use of a real editor (vim) when writing something, while I'd be
forced to use the sucky input field of a browser to post something
to a discussion forum.

Finally, another thing to think about is that we'd have to have a
registered users only forum, otherwise trolls and spambots will attack
it pretty soon.  And while spam is common for e-mail too, deleting a
spam from my mailbox is easy, since I have a local copy, but someone
with administrative rights needs to remove forum posts that are
superfluous.

All this said, I dont't mind *adding* a discussion forum, as long as my
precious mailing-lists doesn't disappear =)

> One of the benefits with forums is that they are very easily accessible with
> the 770, I surf some forums with the 770, easy interface to check topics 
> that I am just
> interested to and nothing else without waiting for ages the e-mail 
> buffer to be
> transferred via (my mobile phone's) GPRS to the device (I don't have 
> EDGE or UMTS on my
> phone yet, therefore I don't have the luxury to download huge amounts of 
> data when I am
> not connected to WLAN with the N770, however, looking what is new in a 
> forum is
> a few seconds long task with the N770 even with a GPRS-connection :) ).

You've never tried reading a nested discussion forum like Slashdot with
the N770 then, right? =)

[snip]


Regards: David Weinehall