[TYPO3] Mailing list or forum?

Steffen Müller typo3 at t3node.com
Tue Sep 16 01:46:47 CEST 2008


Hi.

On 14.09.2008 17:02 H. Hahn wrote:
> 
> After all, news groups are popular within inly a limited group of
> internet users. Many serious web developers do not use news groups and
> consequently have no experience with them. Forums are much more

Here's a little story about what happened the past few years on this "we
need a forum" issue:

Some years ago, there was a section on typo3.org [1], which provided all
the forum stuff you were begging for. It had colors, threads, search
bars, self-explaining forms and list views,
make-a-faq-out-of-this-thread buttons and even mailing list
synchronisation for the prehistoric and/or non-serious - especially
Kasper, who used to answer on each bugreport by personal e-mail.
With TYPO3 then getting more and more popular, the number of postings
grew exponential. The TYPO3 driven forum couldn't manage the increasing
flow of "newbee agony" and became slower and slower. In the end, the
performance issues got out of control and the forum was taken offline [2].

Shortly afterwards, the whining about the missing forum started, but
nobody was willing to manage the refactoring of the forum on a TYPO3
basis. Instead, some kind of "free-as-in-beer" proprietary java tool was
hyped and became part of the typo3.org subdomain family. But the project
failed very soon. I can't rememeber exactly why, but guess there were
some unresolveable but free-as-in-beer technical issues.

Thanks to the contribution of Steffen Kamper, we now have a new forum,
which is again based on TYPO3 [3]. Basic features are implemented, we
can read and search postings. More features to come, and as always, more
contributions welcome. To make it a "real forum system" for the "serious
web developers", this projects "consequently" requires sponsoring in
terms of constructive criticism, code or money.

I can't remember when the newsserver was exactly started [4], but it
gave us the opportunity to easily read, post and search all archived
postings since 2003 of all(!) TYPO3 lists/groups with one tool at a
maximum of speed. It was flexible, stable and fast most of the time, no
matter how much the number of postings were growing. We even did not
need to worry about presentation, because one could choose his/her
favorite client (even web based ajax solutions).

My personal summary of the story: In the long run, the newsnet
architecture promises to be a stable basis, as it has proved in the
past. A forum would need more helping hands and has to prove to be
stable with growing demands and features.


[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20040219104347/http://typo3.org/1422.0.html
[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20060221142433/http://typo3.org/1422.0.html
[3] http://support.typo3.org/
[4]
http://web.archive.org/web/20050319133844/http://typo3.org/community/mailing-lists/use-a-news-reader/

-- 
cheers,
Steffen

http://www.t3node.com/


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