Joseph Garvin <k04jg02 <at> kzoo.edu> writes:
I actually prefer forums because there's less of a barrier to get started. I can continue working through my browser, and I don't have to setup a message filter.
I don't have external mail or nntp access at work, so I just use http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.emulators.wine.devel
For the most part this operates very similar to any of the forums I regularly visit. There are a couple of qwerks, but all in all very easy to use for the non-NNTP users out there. If it wasn't for this site I'd never be able to procrastinate in the office ;)
Even if there's not a forum where developers participate, but just a forum on winehq for users to help each other, I think that would be much better than no forum. More users have experience with forums than mailing lists, so it's much more likely they'll sign up.
A user forum might be useful. I'd have to admit there are a lot of new users who seem to easily manage to find Linux forums. I see this often on Rage3D's Linux forums as well as Ubuntu and Gentoo forums.
The problem is that there are already well-established wine forums, currently in mailing list format, and they will never go away. So the most likely solution would be a web-nntp gateway, which is exactly what news.gmane.org is. Whether wine decides to host's its own gateway software or not I would leave up to the winehq admins.
- Aric