Posted by gouessej on Oct 14, 2014; 8:22am
URL: https://forum.jogamp.org/Forum-improvement-tp4033326p4033341.html

elect wrote

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 ***** 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.

Some developers who chose one of our competitors ended up switching to JOGL when they learned that the third version of the library you talk about drops AWT support, when they got a lot of troubles with its second version or for another reason. Moreover, I don't think that its website is noticeably better organized than ours because you can easily find the download section on both (2 clicks to download our archive, at least 3 to get its archive), the Java documentation, the forum, the IRC channel and the wiki. Actually, we waste a lot less space as we don't show useless news on the homepage. In my humble opinion, the newbies can make the "wrong" choice at the beginning, it isn't the end of the world. JGO has a lot larger audience than our forum, it won't change any time soon and its moderators are against us. Getting a better forum shouldn't be done to attract more newbies.

elect wrote

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.

I almost always advise StackOverflow users to post rather here so that Sven can give them some good advises too. I have no plan to die yet, I have been in the JOGL boat since 2006 and I am almost sure I'll be there (if alive) in 2026 but I see what you mean. Depending on a very few people is neither healthy nor safe for a project. However, we prevent nobody from contributing.

I still think improving the appearance should be done for better reasons because those newbies who would technically grow could still discover JOGL later. Keep in mind that despite its limitations, WebGL is attracting a lot of developers. Don't expect our community to become a lot larger than now.

elect wrote

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

I already said that I have nothing against phpBB which is under GPL

elect wrote

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

We aren't sure that such a migration wouldn't break the permanent links.

As far as I know, phpBB supports the mailing lists.

elect wrote

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

I don't know, I'm not responsible for that.