[TYPO3-english] Why there is not an " official " online Forum for TYPO3 ?

[Denyer Ec]

For *me* and it appears others, maillinglists are not the ideal. I
ONLY use mailling lists for TYPO3 because I have to, every other
project I am involved with or seek information regarding ultimately
leads me to a forum.

Different people prefer different ways of interacting with information
and right now I see an artificially high barrier for entry not only
into understanding TYPO3 but also in entering the community. Responses
like "Learn German" or "Learn to use mailling lists" and so on are the
kinds of attitudes that allow such barriers to persist. Whilst being
inundated with inexperienced and insincere users who are after an out
of the box magic trick is not necessarily a good thing I am in no
doubt that potentially valuable contributors may be turned off by the
current state of affairs. MooTools has a similar problem, the almost
elisist community attitude experienced there has seen them suffer
massively in the popularity stakes compared to jQuery which is to my
mind (And evidently the minds of many others) is far more
approachable. It boils down to what is important to the people at the
steering wheel of the organisation and whether or not a low barrier
for entry is a positive or negative thing. (Again, I stuck it out and
used MooTools, but the observation is no less valid).


Coming back to forums, are the existing powerusers under some
obligation to set up new communication methods? No, of course not.
They have enough to do and are busy with power usery things. However I
see little merit in discouraging the people who think it might be a
good idea. A good reason a lot of other typo3 forums seem to have
failled is because they're not really directly related to
www.typo3.org and thus don't come with perceived officialdom. If I
visit a product's website, I don't expect to have to go to another
domain to find the support forum.

How about this for a proposition:

Step 1: Ask for a volunteer community manager and team of people to
step up, allow them to set up a forum that has a direct link from the
www.typo3.org frontpage. There's space next to "downloads". Don't hide
it under "Community", "Community" doesn't say "FORUM". (There's
resources for community related things under the community link yes,
but sometimes people don't associate forums with communities, they
associate them with technical support.). Make sure it's hooked into
the existing typo3.org user system so you don't end up with multiple
account madness.

Step 2: Ensure that forum posts can be monitored via RSS

Step 3: See if it works

I'm not bashing the current approaches, I'm one of the people who
sucked it up, learned how to use maillinglists and is currently
actually learning German (!!) , but I believe this ethic:

"Our vision: inspiring people to share"

"Our mission: to jointly innovate excellent free software enabling
people to communicate"
(Words Copyright TYPO3.org)

Telling people to learn to use a newsreader or a foreign language to
me is not so inspirational or enabling :)