Forum Reorganized

Submitted by Waldemar Kornewald on Fri, 2006-08-18 11:30.   Tags: 

You've probably noticed a few changes in our forums. ;)

What happened?
We finally got rid of those team forums. Only the Creative Design forum survived (for now?). Old posts were moved to the general discussions or support forum, so NOTHING IS LOST!

Why?
There were too many communication methods which confused a lot of our users. For development we already have mailing lists. The team forums were never really used by our developers and there were far too many forums about nearly the same topic (Developer + Developer Support, Suggestions + Feature Requests, ...).
We changed the forums to simplify communication and make more obvious what the forums are intended for.

Future
The new official Haiku website will focus on development and collaboration with companies. You will also find all official content like logos and instructions for distributors. We want to have a separate community website for end-users which will be available in different languages and focus on bringing users together. This doesn't mean that the official website doesn't target our end-users. It will be the central place for most up-to-date Haiku news, developer blogs (DarkWyrm, axeld, etc.), and status reports like "Weekly Haiku". The information will be more technical and detailed, though.

The problem is that the community would produce a lot more content than the official Haiku team and if we let everyone post to our official site it will blow up with content, making it very difficult to filter out the important information like tutorials and RFCs. For example, look at the official Drupal site (search results are overloaded with forum posts and comments).

You will still be able to create an account on our new website and everyone can post to his blog, but posts will be moderated before they're published. So, if you want to write a tutorial or RFC you can still do so. Interesting and important content will always be accepted. Comments on articles will be allowed, too, but rants on RFCs and other developer documents will be purged because our developers must concentrate on work and important suggestions. They don't need one-line comments like "Linux is much better than Haiku!" or "Haiku is full of buzzwords!". That doesn't interest our developers and collaboration partners.

The community site will be a place for everyone's personal blog and discussion forums.

If you have any suggestions, please tell me.

ar1000
Submitted by Austin B. on Fri, 2006-08-18 15:20.

I think the website page should have survived while we make our transition — and I am certainly glad the Creative Design section still exists.

I dunno — seems a bit disorganized. I would have just renamed them from "Website Team" to Website Discussion. Although I am biased because I despise the mailing list.

wkornewald
Submitted by Waldemar Kornewald on Fri, 2006-08-18 15:39.

Please use the mailing list to contact the website team. But maybe for the community site we could introduce a "Website Discussions" forum. For now, I'd prefer if people started using the official communication method instead of posting everything to the forums.

umccullough
Submitted by Urias McCullough on Thu, 2006-08-24 01:45.

In my spare time, I will probably start moving threads to the appropriate category. In other words, development-related threads will probably move to the development topic, suggestions will move to the suggestion box, support questions will move to the user support topic, etc.

This should hopefully make it easier to find old threads, and search for them.

If I stumble across threads that are relatively unrelated to Haiku, they will most likely end up in the Off Topic section.