Process: Forum software?

Robert A. (Bob) Morris ram at CS.UMB.EDU
Fri Nov 30 07:12:37 CET 2001


DON'T REPLY TO THE LIST:

As I mentioned in Sydney, we have now established an instance of the
vBulletin web-based forum software (see www.vbulletin.com) and are prepared to
host a forum here for the current discussions if there is any desire
to do so.

Forums provide better threading than email (it is not based solely on
the Subject field) and also permit participants to consider things
somwhat more at their own schedule and according to their own
interests. The board administrators can set how long postings remain
at the forefront, so that it is easier to understand what is
current. vBulletin allows you to be notified briefly by mail when
something of interest appeared on the forum.

There are a few disadvantages to moving this discussion now: (a)Quite
a bit has transpired and people might feel they need to restate things
in the forum [that could be an advantage....]; (b)we are new to this
software and might not administer it as seamlessly as a mail-based
system.

So as not to clutter  the list. I would urge
people to /privately/ reply to me with their sympathy for or against
the issue. I'll summarize and post the results and then people can
discuss it, if warranted. Send mail to ram at cs.umb.edu. Your "Reply"
facility will likely send to the list.


For a glimpse of how vBulletin forums operate, see those at

http://vbulletin.com/forum/index.php

http://forums.progresstalk.com/index.php
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/
http://www.ntcompatible.com/vb/index.php
http://www.webdevforums.com/

As far as I can tell, vBulletin is the software under the forum parts
of sourceforge.net



Bob Morris

p.s.

Forum software is aimed at community building, so vBuilder has lots of
flashy features like smiley face annotations, personal avatars, polls
about the quality of a thread, "buddy lists", etc. I don't expect that
SDD forums would operate with that stuff in your face, especially as
we gain administrative experience.




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