Mike Hearn wrote:
It's not meant to replace wine-users, and especially not wine-devel of course.
Why a forum rather than a mailing list?
That question, plus all the 'advantages' you list, indicate that you do indeed intend it to replace wine-users, at least for some users.
A web interface that let you post to the mailing list would be fine. A web forum would not. It would mean that, if I wanted to answer user questions, I'd have to get used to another strange interface that probably has crappy indexing and is full of fruity HTML that gets in the way. I have read linuxquestions.org a bit, and don't like it much; I dislike the idea of encouraging people to use closed discussion forums like that, which don't support any sort of external archiving.
Now, if you want to make things easier for users, there's room for improvement on the winehq forums page. For starters, the Forums link on the main page is buried a bit; it ought to be higher up (say, right after FAQ; the HowTo link should be part of Documentation). On the Forums page, the wine-users@winehq.com list should probably be the first thing on the page. The newsgroup link is currently wrong(!); it's currently news://comp.emulators.ms-windows.wine/ but should be news:comp.emulators.ms-windows.wine
And we should probably link to the newsgroups at gmane.org, too.
Shall I prepare patches for the website to implement these changes so people can see what I'm suggesting? - Dan