Re: Forums Proposal

Hi Marc,

On Sat, Oct 06, 2012 at 08:23:03AM -0400, Marc Paré wrote:
> We are hoping to hear from a lead in this list (after discussion
> with your members) as to whether you would like to:

Not claiming to be a leader of this list, but providing the following opinions to consider.

> * not use the forums at all (at which point the forum would be
> deleted from the forums site).  OR

I expect both development and QA to rarely use the forum and most work to
continue on the lists. However, I would not want to see development and QA
being without a forum as it is a valueable entry point we should not miss. I
expect us to do basic "do your first build"/"do your first triage" help there
and then pick people up to the mailing lists. As such I propose to have a join
"QA and development" forum (they wont have too many posts esp. in the
beginnning and we want to prevent a 'empty hall' effect there)>

While we are talking about 'empty hall':
 - Marketing and Marketing US should be joined (unless we have a 20 head US
   marketing team that I dont know about and that would overwhelm the rest with
   their posts)
 - 'Installation and Configuration' for all non-Windows users should be joined.
   While we have enough Linux talent to warrent an own forum, on OSX the
   userbase is thinner and the linux users can often help out on OSX too
 - LibreOffice Applications should start as _one_ buzzing forum when we do
   'open beta'-testing of the forum. Once we announce the forum as 'official',
   we can split out forums from there _if_ they warrant that by their traffic.
 - Templates are unlikely to support a forum on their own from the start. I
   would suggest to split 'Extensions LibreOffice' into 'Extension Users and
   Support' and 'Extension developement (incl. macro and UNO)'.

Also we have way too many meta- and announcement forums in the proposal. That
will lead to cross-posting and people missing out on announcements because they
only check one forum etc.
Everything we say 'officially' to our users should be relevant to our
contributors. And since we want our users to become contributors, we shouldnt
exclude them from 'contributor announcements'. Thus join those forums.

Discuss should be joined into 'projects' (the third forum with announcements in
the description). If you 'discuss matters affecting the LibreOffice project' it
should better be relevant to the projects too.

Finally, 'LibreOffice goes social/Lounge/Off the wall/whatever' can have any
name that wins the competition, but it should _not_ have LibreOffice or TDF in
the title as it is specifically intended to be for offtopic stuff. And yes,
having that forum is essential, if only to be able to move irrelevant or
offtopic posts from other forums there without offending the author too much
(compared to deleting).

My two eurocents.

Best,

Bjoern