Re: We need a forum!

[Philippe Lhoste <PhiLho@...>]

Michael Cumming wrote:
> I have been mostly a passive subscriber to this list for the last year.
>  
> The volume of useful information that comes through this list is amazing.
>  And yet, it is lost to the email archives, making it difficult to 
search and retreive.
>  Threads are often broken and disconnected.
>  Valuable help and examples become lost like a needle in a hay stack.
>  
> We really need a forum!  Is there a reason (technical/cost/time) that this hasn't happened?
>  What can we lua users do to help?

Going back to the original post...

Indeed, downloading the whole e-mail archives is a bit daunting, at 
least when you have a slow connection. And updating it is a bit 
annoying: either you just re-download the whole file, or... or what?

Here, a little script allowing to pack up a zip/gz file with a defined 
range of dates would be useful. Merging the resulting file with local 
archives should be easy then.

Now, I am not sure why searching the archives is so difficult, if you 
have a text editor able to load large files. Indeed, you can get a lot 
of false hits, and you cannot search multiple words inside a single 
message, but I am not sure a forum would do much better.

Note that I believe somebody (Diego?) wrote a Mime parser in Lua, 
perhaps one can write a Lua program to do such search inside mail archives.

Edgar pointed out many problems with forums, like needing to go the page 
and log in, being slow, needing to be on-line (and the server not being 
down...), etc.
Plus it makes two places where to check infos: the mailing list and the 
forum, it seems a bit redundant.

Note on the Wiki: it is a great tool, but sometime it is hard to find a 
given information. Perhaps I am missing a site map, which doesn't make 
much sense in a Wiki since pages are not hierarchic (but can be 
hierarchized by somebody taking time to create such page).

And indeed, some precious information like Wim's list of dependencies 
should go immediately in the Wiki, but who will take time to do this?

No tool is perfect, and all depends on their use by people, anyway. But 
I don't feel a forum would be such a great idea/help.
It could be in a new project which have not other tool yet, but not for 
Lua. Just my opinion, of course :-)

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Philippe Lhoste (Paris -- France)
Professional programmer and amateur artist
http://Phi.Lho.free.fr
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