Totally agree with sugarshack here. At every iteration, the forums have gone worse, IMNSHO. So reading through a mailing list or nntp would be absolutely great.
- elias
If you do use a mailing list, please make sure there’s a good web interface to it! I personally operate through dial-up, so can’t afford to increase my volume of email much. I’ve currently subscribed to games.dev.java.net in digest form to see how it goes, and so far it’s been fine (one post ;D), but I suspect it’ll really pick up in future.
Although a tad cumbersome I think message boards offer far more advantages than mailing lists. I’ve also participated in communities that had newsgroup, message board and mailing list all tied together, all feeding off the same message pool. Probably a ripe pain to set up though.
I can’t stand mailing lists.
Cas 
[quote]Totally agree with sugarshack here. At every iteration, the forums have gone worse,
[/quote]
Hmm then maybe the lesson is don’t complain?
Seriously. Changing the forums has been an incredible pain in the ass for us during the life of JGO. We’ve only done it because YOU guys have insisted we find software with various additional features.
If everyone had said “we love the forums, don’t change them” then we’d still be on the first software.
JK
[quote]Hmm then maybe the lesson is don’t complain?
[/quote]
ROFL! ;D
[quote]If everyone had said “we love the forums, don’t change them” then we’d still be on the first software.
[/quote]
Well, the first software had some functionality issues, then we changed to this one and got a few configuration issues, then there’s a part I’ve blanked out where something horrific happened, then we got this forum back - with all the config issues solved!
I have to disagree with Elias and say that personally I think that now this forum software is fantastic! 8) And much appreciated, thank you.
ok, to be fair I actually only miss one crucial feature - the “new posts in the last 24 hours” button. Right now, I have to click through every topic with “today” in it’s last updated field. Additionally, the notion of “today” is broken compared to “in the last 24 hours”. If I check for new updates at 00:00, no posts are marked today, even though someone might have posted 5 minutes ago.
- elias
Hmm. Don’t you get the red folder icons against things you haven’t read? It’s a bit more clicking, but seems to work…? ???
It still gives people an incentive to run up their duke-count (and therefore the noise level) just to be able to wield absolute power (veto) in the community.
In a community-driven web site there shouldn’t be any “veto” ability at all, unless it be by the admins. The projects that don’t get much attention will fall by the wayside and the more popular projects will get all of the attention anyway, which should cause them to rise to the top.
Sourceforge doesn’t give other sourceforge project owners veto ability on new projects. Why should we?
What we probably should have is a project list that is sorted by most active or most popular, which is what sourceforge does, and which seems to work pretty well.
As an alternative, maybe you could have multiple votes if you have a higher duke-count? That way the more experienced posters carry more weight, but don’t wield absolute power. Personally, I don’t think we even need that, tho.
My only comment is that when you wait for a week or so for a project to be approved, you shouldn’t have to then wait again for the project owner to give you permission to VIEW the files. Please set Project View as an inherent permission for all projects. I just don’t understand why this isn’t the case.
[quote]Please set Project View as an inherent permission for all projects. I just don’t understand why this isn’t the case.
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I fully agree with Gregory. It might even help with the approval process if you knew what you are talking about. ;D
Two points:
- I’ve worked on similar collaborative systems in the past, and the second most effective thing (after providing forums, of course ;)) was the tieing together of multiple feeds so that they all revealed the same data (as someone already suggested); even those of us (including me, at first) who thought it wouldn’t have much effect were seriously impressed by how easy it became to discuss things when you could use whichever interface you wanted from day to day, depending on what task(s) you needed to perform with it.
You have some raw data, and most of the issues people are bringing up in this thread are to do with the presentation of that data, not the data itself. This is a simple problem, architecturally - provide multiple views, and allow people to select whichever they prefer.
FWLIW, it’s actually pretty easy to setup, assuming moderately good software. The last time I was doing this was several years ago (NNTP + mailing list + forum all in one, using off-the-shelf free / OS software) and I’d imagine it must be even easier today…although I can think of lots of unfortunate reasons why - in this particular case - it might be hard. Still, I generally found it was easier than I feared :).
- The functionality you’re trying to set up is voting. Forums are not for voting (although they’re great for COMMENTING on a voting process), nor (really) are mailing lists (which are great for keeping people appraised of recent changes. And it’s easy to create bots that will take voting data from a mailing list, so they do get used as a easy-to-create voting system).
If you want us to vote on things, I’d love to go to a page where the currently pending projects are all listed, one row each in a table, with columns for:
project name - proposer - votes for - votes against - proposal date
and hyperlinks from the cells in the two “votes” columns into forum topics.
Each of those forums would automatically spew all posts to a mailing list too, and listen on the mailing-list “Reply-To” address for responses that could easily be posted back onto the forum, automatically (surely there’s nothing difficult about programmatically posting to a web-based forum!).
Maybe there’s already software that can provide this kind of voting front end?
PS: the current incarnation of the forums is excellent, with lots of usability issues improved for mozilla and other non-MSIE browsers, although the broken email-notification and the tiny tiny text size are a bit of a pain. Still, it’s definitely been improving monotonically IMHO
[quote]My only comment is that when you wait for a week or so for a project to be approved, you shouldn’t have to then wait again for the project owner to give you permission to VIEW the files. Please set Project View as an inherent permission for all projects. I just don’t understand why this isn’t the case.
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This was my mistake. I approved the project but didn’t move it into the games-middleware project from the (private) games-inbox. It should now be visible to everyone, Observer status or no.