[Tb] A couple community issues (epic)

On Thu, Feb 05, 2004 at 11:38:00AM -0800, Garth Corral wrote:
> [....] When I first went searching for a
> discussion forum I had followed a rather circuitous route before
> finally landing here at this list. I was overjoyed to find something,
> anything, that wasn't a wiki. Since then someone was kind enough to
> establish a web-based forum for the community. Excellent! However,
> now instead of having one scarcely used forum, we have two scarcely
> used forums. While I'm certainly not opposed to choice, I think it
> might serve the community better if we had one central place where
> everyone could go for discussion about Tinderbox.

Your friendly mailinglist administrator here.....

I've been thinking about this, too. Some people prefer a web-based forum, and some people (like me) prefer a mailinglist. (Nobody seems to prefer a wiki.) I had a thought that this mailinglist and the web forum (two volunteer efforts) could be merged in the following sense: posts to this mailinglist could be echoed to the forum, and vice versa, automatically; that way, there would be one unified discussion that you could follow through either interface. I would continue to be committed to maintaining archives forever, so there would be more than one interface to the discussion archives as well. Eastgate could even echo the discussion to their wiki if they wanted to, but I doubt that they will (see below).

I am putting this proposal out here so that the maintainer of the volunteer web forum can let us know if he is interested in cooperating to set this up. I don't know if this arrangement has been tried before and I don't know how difficult it would be; it would seem to depend on the flexibility of the web forum software. If there is anyone here with technical knowledge about this, please pipe up.

> [....]I realize that consolidating the list and forum isn't going to increase
> the usage of either, which brings me to my next point; sanction. It
> seems that for either to thrive, they need the endorsement of the man
> himself, Mark Bernstein.

No, they don't. We are thriving without anyone's approval. The moderate level of traffic here is a feature, not a bug, and pretty reasonable, considering that Tinderbox is a niche program with a very small user base. I am committed to keeping this mailinglist available for people to use whenever they need to, and it's not very important to me if that amounts to one posting a month or a dozen a day. The archives will always be available, and will not some day suddenly disappear, as did Eastgate's forum archives. Dr Bernstein is not very happy about a forum where people can talk about his program without his censorship, although he's been very generous in chiming in here to offer help. However, it's clear that he is not about to officially sanction any forum that he does not control, and one shouldn't expect him to, considering his position.

 
> The next thing that I'm curious about is bugs. How are people
> reporting bugs in Tinderbox.

Just email them (support__AT__eastgate.com [?]). They are very responsive; I don't feel the need for a formal bug-tracking mechanism for this kind of product.
Received on Thu Feb 5 14:31:13 2004