Re: Forums

(12/01/06 3:33), Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> I'm interested in what the majority preference will be, and the
> discussion has already hilighted associated issues that might be fixed
> in other ways :) There seems a clear sentiment that what exists now is
> alienating new people and isn't enjoyed by a substantial number of
> existing www-style members.

Speaking of majority preference, I would like to mention that the
WHATWG, which has a bigger community then the CSS WG community, has both
a mailing and a forum, but the forum isn't popular and I see few, if
any, useful discussions on it. Consider that this situation is similar
in a majority of big open source projects: core development on a mailing
list, user community on a separate forum, I think all existing Web
development sites with a CSS user forum already serve the need of those
who need forums. You might want to open yet another forum focusing on
standards development and advertise it here then (This is the jQuery
standards team's approach). Some spec editors and members of this list,
if they have time, could choose to participate in the discussions on
that forum, but really nothing can be guaranteed here.

(12/01/06 5:06), Jon Rimmer wrote:
> The W3C is trying to open up to wider participation, but the
> infrastructure side of things still seems a little opaque. If therewas
> a degree of co-operation from the W3C guys, providing access to the
> relevant data and services, then the community could take the lead in
> creating a gateway between mailing lists and the web. It seems like
> there'd be a lot of people who could contribute to such a project.

I think a path to make this happen is to download the W3C Patch for
Hypermail[1] and to either start hacking it or host it on GitHub (if
someone is willing to take the lead, I might contribute. But I have to
say i am really on the mailing list/newsgroup side.), to try to make the
archive forum-like (something Boris and Tab suggested) in the sense that

* The new archive/forum should have thread display closer to a forum.
* For the thread display, there should be a form acting as the
archive/forum-to-mailing-list-gate-way
* For the thread display, each thread should have one RSS feed.

and submit those patched to sysreq@w3.org and the W3C staff might be
happy to patch the existing one which is 5 years old now.

Like any open source project, this really depends on those who find the
current situation unacceptable. Not sure if the W3C is willing to pay
the effort.

[1] http://www.w3.org/2004/12/hypermail-w3c-patch/

The data side of this can be fully accessible from

(12/01/06 4:41), Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:
> You can in fact access this list through a
> Netnews gateway which also happens to have various web interfaces,
>
>   http://blog.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.css.general
>   http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.css.general

Note that a newsgroup allows downloading the whole archive so any kind
of mirroring should be doable, but you shouldn't need this if you are
patching W3C Hypermail. By the way, is there a list of all W3C lists
that are on gmane? Particularly I want to know if public-webapps is on.


Cheers,
Kenny

Received on Thursday, 5 January 2012 22:39:40 UTC