[Openstack] Creating a forum

Everett Toews everett.toews at cybera.ca
Tue May 3 03:06:01 UTC 2011


For user support, one of Jordan's original intentions for this thread, I
think forums are out-dated. Forum threads tend to get very noisy and it can
be difficult to discern what top answers are for any given topic. What is
needed is a system, like OSQA (osqa.net), that uses the knowledge of the
community to filter out the noise. This applies to the questions as well as
the answers. Based on feedback from other users, the question can be edited
and it too will improve over time.

This more or less sums up my motivation for promoting a system like this.
Less noise.

I'm also definitely against dozens of forums to watch. With a system like
OSQA there is only one site, one place to go and all the questions get tags.
New project that becomes part of the OpenStack ecosystem equals new tag, not
a new forum. Question that covers more than one OpenStack project equals a
question with multiple tags.

If email is your preferred form of communication, it appears as though OSQA
has that covered (
http://meta.osqa.net/questions/1582/what-emails-does-osqa-send). Can't say
I've tried it though.

This style of Q&A has merit. According to Alexa StackOverflow.com is ranked
120th in traffic (
http://www.alexa.com/search?q=stackoverflow.com&r=topsites_index&p=bigtop).
It's popular because developers are getting the answers they need.

So, that all said, I've never deployed OSQA so I can't speak to how easy it
is to install or maintain but it is a Django app and there are a lot
of knowledgeable Python devs on OpenStack ;)

Everett

On Mon, May 2, 2011 at 7:05 PM, Thomas Goirand <thomas at goirand.fr> wrote:

> On 05/03/2011 07:10 AM, Soren Hansen wrote:
> > I totally understand that I'm reasonably alone in this (the endless
> > amount of forums with even more endless amounts of users all over the
> > Internet clearly demonstrates that I'm at least a minority), so don't
> > let me hold you guys back if you all love forums. I just know from
> > experience that try as I might, I'm not likely to maintain any sort of
> > motivation to participate in forums for any useful amount of time.
>
> You are not alone, which is why I know there are projects so you can use
> forums AND mailing lists. Posts to the forums are going to the list and
> vice-versa. Too bad that I can't remember any project names, but I know
> it's possible, at least.
>
> I 100% agree with what you wrote about having dozens of forums to watch.
> It's very annoying, and lists are a lot more convenient to monitor.
>
> Thomas
>
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