Posted by elect on Oct 14, 2014; 7:16am
URL: https://forum.jogamp.org/Forum-improvement-tp4033326p4033339.html

gouessej wrote

Actually, we disagree. Let me rephrase that: In my humble opinion, spending tons of time in improving the forum shouldn't be done only with the hope of attracting new users because the kind of newcomers it would attract wouldn't deserve such efforts. In the real world, there are tons of people attracted by eye candy things but we aren't computer graphics artists and this forum targets the developers. Nevertheless, I'll look at your suggestions because I assume that some efforts could be done but for better reasons.

No, I think we do agree :) When you say

Personally, if a developer prefers using another API because its forum is more beautiful, I will just ignore him. I don't mind. This isn't the kind of developer I'd like to attract and I'm probably not alone to think that the JogAmp contributors have more important tasks to do than switching to a more "modern" forum. I don't see the interest of attracting very superficial developers who might switch to another API every month just because it's "cool".

I share this opinion too. It is true, but you also have to look how the world is. Practical example, when I was a newbie (ok I am still  a little) first had to choose between jogl and lwjgl I looked at the websites, their was better organised and the forum looked also better. You know which was one of the main reason I choose jogl? Because google showed me among the first results, so I though larger community, bigger documentation, easier to find help and resolve problems. But I didnt know the difference between the two, since I was completely newbie and I think I couldnt even understand them deeply if anyone would have told them to me, since I didnt have the background to get them. But today I learnt a lot, I know many more things and if I would go back I will choose jogl again. But at that time the choise was based on not-so-important things.
Think about the community support, mainly forum and stackoverflow. If you and Sven werent there, how would it be? What will happen when you and Sven and maybe the other (few) important users wont be anymore there to help us for any reason the life can bring?
I think strongly the appearence it is important, not only for usability reasons, but also for attraction because maybe 2 of 10 new users you attract, maybe those 2 will grow, technically I mean, and then in the future they will make the community bigger, more solid and will keep forward the project.

gouessej wrote

I disagree about the poor usability of the forum even though it is far from perfect, some other open source projects (including OpenJPA) use Nabble too. I have nothing against phpBB.

Maybe there is a problem with the usability of the website but it's another topic and we are still open to suggestions. Personally, I would appreciate a big green button to download the latest version as a 7z archive and a mean to put forward the Java doc but I'm already happy with the current homepage.

Let me put this way, it looks so 2000.. Let me also say I dont know how much big will be a jump to the phpbb, but I do know for sure that the jump to something like this http://www.invisionpower.com/apps/board/ (but unfortunately it is proprietary) is definitely a huge step.
Anyway phpbb is used by debian, kde, gentoo, joomla, openoffice, sky, virtualbox and many others.
But there are many other possibilities, I will edit the first post to list them all

Sven Gothel wrote

All good, and thx for your thoughts.

We discussed this month ago, i.e. hosting a forum/mailinglist
on jogamp.org directly.

And yes, we go stuck in importing it.

Mark Raynsford did some digging already, i.e. patching the nabble DB,
which we put in hold due to resources.

I invite Mark to rejoin this discussion.

For me personally, I only use this forum via its mailinglist feature,
i.e. I only see and reply posts as email - yes, me an old dog :)

So for me: whatever flies with importing nabble emails,
but I want my plain old mailinglist/email 'frontend'.

Cheers, Sven




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I found this regarding import from nabble 2 to phpbb3

http://support.nabble.com/Can-I-export-Nabble-2-to-phpbb-3-td2283361.html

Anyway I guess all the software forum cited so far have the mainlist feature :D

Ps: another lack of nabble, eliminating all the empty lines I inserted to make my wall of text more readable..

Anyway, how is now the situation, where is hosted the forum? You guys are paying anything for the maintenance or is it completely free?