Hi,
The idea of a user forum was raised on IRC a few weeks ago and Jeremy White suggested we use a web based forum as the newsgroups and mailing lists were too hard to use/outdated.
I've talked to Jeremy Garcia who runs linuxquestions.org and he said he'd be willing to host the forum, probably as a subforum of Software if the Wine project was to officially recognise it and a few developers agreed to keep half an eye on it. I'm willing to do so, I already answer questions on LQ occasionally, and I expect out of all of us here we can rustle up a few more.
The advantages of using LQ would be:
* Only effort for Jeremy Newman would be to apply a patch that links to the forum from WineHQ * It's already very well indexed by search engines, and has a good search facility built in. * It's popular and well known, for some it's a first port of call when the docs don't help. * Wine developers can get a "title" by which they can be recognised in the forums. I think having an entry in the changelog is good enough criteria for this. * Wine tech support already takes place there daily. It might as well be officially recognised.
I'm willing to put the work in to get this started, if people agree it's a good idea - ie I'd write a patch for WineHQ, moderate the forum, write some sticky threads and so on, but obviously I'd need help to actually answer the questions.
What do people think? Good plan? Bad plan? thanks -mike