[Tb] A couple community issues (epic)

On Feb 5, 2004, at 1:31 PM, Lee Phillips wrote:

> 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).
>
This sounds like a fine idea to me. There have been similar gateways
between mailing lists and usenet for years. Shouldn't be impossible to
do the same for a web forum. Mailing list to web forum could be done,
in the worst case, by sending list email to a script that posts to the
forum. Not sure about the other way, though.

> 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'll wait until we hear from the forum admin to see what facilities the
software provides for an email gateway. I'd be willing to help out
with this if the hooks are not already present.

> 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.
>
Well, they are alive indeed. I think I have a different idea about
what constitutes thriving. I don't mean to imply that high traffic is
necessarily the only criteria, thought that would be nice, but that
many more ears would be better. That is to say that the more Tinderbox
users at least subscribed to the list the better. As it is, I think we
have a small subset of even those that use the wiki.

>
>> 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.
>
Hmm... Well, first of all, I think all software products need some
sort of formal bug tracking system. That is not to say that it should
be exposed to the end user. So long as there is some sort of
trackability this can be avoided. If Eastgate hands out a bug ID or
somesuch, that would suffice. I think, though, that it would still be
better if the known issues were visible to end users. It would save
everyone some time. Better still, if there was some information about
targeted release for issue fixes and the release in which an issue was
fixed. I'd rather see this in something more controllable than a wiki
page.

BTW, I'm not trying to say that Eastgate is not responsive, I've heard
nothing but good things about them in this regard. I was just
proposing something that I think would be helpful.
Received on Thu Feb 5 16:34:59 2004