Re: [libreoffice-website] Re: On forums for LibreOffice

Hi *,

Am Dienstag, den 26.04.2011, 20:17 +0800 schrieb David Nelson:
> Hi, :-)
>
> I've updated the Getting Help page on LibreOffice.org with links to
> some external forums, and also added information about the Nabble
> gateway to put it forward more prominently. See [1].
>
> [1] http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/
>
> David Nelson

I know there are a lot of discussions already going on in this thread
but do we already have a consensus about linking to webforums not driven
by the document foundation?

Apart from minor problems, like if one specific forum has to many/the
wrong type of ads, what do you want to express with such a link. I would
say most of the visitors will see it as an "we approve and recommend
this forum" whatever the exact phrasing of the sentence above the links
will be.

But can you really officially approve a forum that is not running on
your own infrastructure? What do you know about the privacy of the
userdata and if it they are processed accordantly to the different laws
(see the SONY/Apple discussions now in the media). What about rude
behaviour/harassment in personal messages as an other example. The
hardest consequence you can take if the forum gets out of hand is to
remove the link and this is a rather weak one. But that this forum was
linked officially linked from our website will be remembered much
longer.

On the other hand what can we gain from it? The most often heard
argument is that the ordinary user expects a web based forum, but to be
honest if this user already knows about his preference of web forums
instead of mailing lists, does he really look for a link on the
libreoffice webpage or does he rather go to google.com and type
"libreoffice forum". 

I do not feel that these links are worth all these mails, discussions
and anger.

If somewhat later there are enough resources to build up an forum on own
infrastructure with a detailed plan how to connect threads about bugs
with bugzilla in both directions, how to take input from the forum into
the mailing lists / teams / committees and how to keep the users up to
date about the discussions on the mailing lists. 
Then is the time to think about the topic web forum again.


Michael


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