[TYPO3-typo3org] TYPO3 Jive support forum

[Alex Heizer]

Hi all,

The support forum that I had set up for the TYPO3 community is mostly 
ready to go at http://support.typo3.us . I have imported most of the key 
groups, especially the incredibly large English list, and have secured 
the license for it so that we can use it free of cost from the very 
generous and open-source-friendly Jive software developers. I haven't 
imported the German list, which is equally as large as the English list, 
but this import is planned for the near future. Since it will take 
approximately 3-4 days (72+ hours, at least), I intended to start the 
import after all of the other groups had been imported.

A lot of the questions on the English list are recurring questions that 
have been answered many times in the past, and in the past month I've 
seen quite a few "search the newsgroup" replies to new users.  So having 
the forum go live could certainly help with the dissemination of 
knowledge. I plan to offer the forum to the US and English lists as 
available for people to begin using as *the* TYPO3 support forum in beta 
mode for a week or two to get some real world feedback. This will start 
getting people looking for answers and using the forum on a regular basis.

Since the forum has an integrated knowledge base, it's very easy for any 
forum member to suggest that a post/thread be a KB article, and it's 
very easy for a KB admin to convert a forum thread to a KB article. So 
as the site gets used more the KB can easily grow based on all of the 
existing posts of the last 3 years.

Questions/thoughts:
- Currently this forum is at http://support.typo3.us -- where should it 
eventually go? And if it should go on a typo3.org subdomain, when should 
we set up the domain parking, before or after the beta period? I 
personally would recommend 'http://support.typo3.org', but that's just 
my preference.
- Do we also want a separate knowledgebase subdomain in addition to a 
forum one?
- There is no single sign-on for mailinglist or typo3.org users to 
integrate with the forum. This means to post to the forum users will 
need to sign up with a new account and put in the email address they use 
for the mailing lists in order for posts to be sent through the lists. 
If the email address is the same as in the mailing list, they will be 
posted once they are posted to the forum. The real world test will be to 
see what happens if the email address doesn't match. Current testing 
indicates the posts don't get accepted by the mailing list but still 
appear in the forum.
- The forum has the default design, but we plan to use the typo3.org 
design to coordinate (modified to accommodate the forum's wider content 
area).

If people are happy with me offering this as-is to the community for 
open testing before going "live", I'll do that in the next few days.

Cheers,
Alex