Hosting project help forums on LQ

Is there any chance LQ owners/operators might be interested in hosting, as a subforum, a forum dedicated to specific free open source software packages for user help purposes?

I'm quite tired of the frustrations and hassle of mailing lists. If project developers want to exchange among themselves for their development work using a mailing list, I think that should be their choice. But for end user help, I'm finding I am part of the ranks of a growing number of people who don't want to deal with mailing lists.

In the past, before the age of spammers, mailing lists allowed non-members to send mail ask help questions. Answers would come back to the questioner via CC: maintained in the headers. The user didn't need to join the list. Spammers ruined that.

Now to send to a mailing list, one must join. That's hassle step number one. Technically, it's a hassle to join a web site like LQ, too, but that only has to be done once for a wide range of topics. But with a mailing list, that has to be done for each and every project that uses them.

Once on a mailing list, you get all the mail. You get every other question, and all the other discussions. And it is just not organized like a web site is. And some of these lists are poorly run and in many cases a lot of spam gets in, anyway. Then after it's all over, you have to unsubscribe from the list. None of this is an issue on websites unless you want to leave there (but for broad coverage sites like LQ, that would be much less likely).

These are the big reasons I hate mailing lists. I'd much rather have all the help be done on a website.

What would be the possibility of having a "specific project help" area with a subforum for each hosted project?

I could not say what would be the best criteria for inclusion. There are thousands and thousands of projects, and I don't think having a subforum for them all would work. But make for the ones that want to move away from doing "official help" over a mailing list?

I've been asking help questions here in a general area, mostly in "Linux - Software". And that works. I even answer some I know the answers for. So it might be sufficient to just stay there until the volume suggests a split. OTOH, if there were specific project areas, it might encourage more people to discuss about such projects. I even have some projects of my own that I would not want to run a mailing list for, but would be interested in following a web forum for any help questions.

I wasn't aware that mailing lists were still a viable option. I assumed that any project large enough to require a mailing list had long since moved on to using an actual forum.

LQ runs help forums for many Linux distributions, and some of those forums don't have more than 50 threads. So I suppose in terms of volume, there is no issue. But there are thousands and thousands of open source projects out there, and if LQ opens the doors to hosting forums for them, there is no telling where it will end. I don't think the administrators here want to deal with 500 low-volume sub-forums.

I'm not sure of LQ is really the place for this, but I don't think it is a bad idea either. Sort of how Freenode is an IRC server available for any open source project, perhaps there could be a site that hosts forums for any open source project. Maybe it could even be a spin-off of LQ.

Originally Posted by MS3FGX I wasn't aware that mailing lists were still a viable option. I assumed that any project large enough to require a mailing list had long since moved on to using an actual forum.

Almost all of them seem to still be using mailing lists. Many even consider the suggestion that just the help questions be moved to a web forum to be an insult. I swear some of those people must still be using UUCP

Originally Posted by MS3FGX LQ runs help forums for many Linux distributions, and some of those forums don't have more than 50 threads. So I suppose in terms of volume, there is no issue. But there are thousands and thousands of open source projects out there, and if LQ opens the doors to hosting forums for them, there is no telling where it will end. I don't think the administrators here want to deal with 500 low-volume sub-forums.

And I can certainly understand that. OTOH, 500 free project developers would not want to set up a web forum, either I know I don't. But my projects are so low volume I just tell people to email me via an obfuscation of my email address.

Originally Posted by MS3FGX I'm not sure of LQ is really the place for this, but I don't think it is a bad idea either. Sort of how Freenode is an IRC server available for any open source project, perhaps there could be a site that hosts forums for any open source project. Maybe it could even be a spin-off of LQ.

I do think it would be great if someone would. I just wanted to try and see if LQ might be interested, because it's already a great place. A spin-off would be good. Sourceforge probably should have done this, but they went with mailing lists (and theirs are just full of spam). And I don't know how well they could have accomplished it because I find their fundamental site hard/complicated to use (I put my projects there initially, but did nothing more than just get free download hosting).

+1 to looking for an alternative to mailing lists, Skaperen; I too find them very inconvenient. At least one (bacula-users) is mirrored as a forum but anything posted from the forum to the list upsets the list members if any HTML formatting such as CODE blocks is included so that does not work well.

In addition to the inconveniences Skaperen listed:

• Having to re-configure the mail client from the now conventional for email top-posting and original message inclusion (and maybe HTML) to the mailing-list preferred bottom-posting and original message indentation-with-prefix (and must be plain text).
• Although mailing lists archives are publicly browsable, the ones I use are not netsearchable.

I actually like mailing lists for specific things that I am focused on, because they are more timely in the sense that there aren't the delays in response associated with the time that goes by before I get around to looking at the forum. For example, the SunManagers list is pretty directed, not too high volume, and gets me responses that are usually quick and on the mark. I tried the git mailing list for a while and ditched it real fast, because it was high volume and lumped development, help and announcements all into one mailing list.

Many projects have both lists and forums. SourceForge also provides forums, although they don't seem to be very high volume in their traffic. For example, Amanda has mailing lists for users, developers, and announcements. But, it also has forums provided by Zmanda, SourceForge, and the reflection of the mailing lists at BackupCentral. There are also questions about Amanda that often appear here on LinuxQuestions under various subforums.

Part of the advantage of a place like LinuxQuestions is that there are people with a lot of general knowledge who inhabit the forums and they may answer question across a wide range of topics (e.g., catkin). So, you can drop in here and ask questions about just about anything Linux/Unix related and reasonably expect to get some response. On the other hand, if you want help with Amanda, your best bet is the users mailing list. The Zmanda forums are a second best, but suffer a bit from the effort and timeliness of people checking the forums to see if someone needs help. I keep an eye on things here on LinuxQuestions, but I don't have that much time to check. I probably look once or twice a day, and I typically find less than a question a week (or sometimes month) regarding Amanda. Fortunately, there is lots of other stuff going on here, so it is fun to be here and there are many other questions that are interesting to try to answer. I don't think there are any other forums as lively or with as many participants (but I don't really know). It's the broad scope of LinuxQuestions that makes it work so well (as well as, of course, the management).

If a mailing list matches your expectations of volume and proportion of interest, that can be a good thing. Of the couple dozen mailing lists I'm on, only one of them matches that for me, and it's one I am interested in doing some development on (though I have not done any, yet). All the rest are where I went for some tech support. Although that tech support generally was available, it came at a cost. In the past, I did mailing lists from my regular email box. That was a disaster. Briefly I was creating distinct email accounts for each mailing list. That was almost as bad. Gmail added a tagging feature, so now have a couple gmail accounts to do the mailing lists (one for personal lists, the other for work related). It's now less annoying.

The more volume a list has, the more likely someone will know the answer to your community support question. The less volume it has, the less chance of an answer. Unfortunately for me, my tolerance of the volume is low, resulting in a situation where the level of tolerable volume is lower than the level of chance of getting an answer to the point it just isn't worth it.

And then there is the issue of giving back. I do like to help others when I know the answers (and that is for a lot of things). But with a mailing list, I just don't feel that spirit. I want to get my answer and get out. So after I unsubscribe, I am no longer helping out. On LQ and some other forums, I feel no pressure to unregister when I have nothing to ask, and still sometimes look around for questions to answer (usually aiming for ones with few or no replies since reading a long thread to determine the state is more time consuming).

So, basically, I like forums much better. I just don't even like mailing lists at all, anymore. I wish there was a simple way to have every FOSS project on a forum. And I wish I would not need to become a forum admin to get my own projects on a forum. And[2] it would be nice to not need to register again to access the forum of the next project I have an interest in (and I'm still not trusting of OpenID type stuff).

Thanks for the feedback. It's possible that LQ would be interested in hosting official forums for Open Source apps. We'd have to work out the logistics and details, however.

--jeremy