Calling development teams

Sat Feb 21 02:37:35 GMT 2009

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ABSTRACT:
Looking for more cooperation between KDE Community Forums and 
development teams.

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FULL MESSAGE:

Hello all,

This mail was sent to members of many KDE (related) development teams.

We would like to make a few suggestions that could be of benefit to us 
all. These suggestions concern hosting forums for specific applications, 
hosting private, restricted forums for your team, sending forum posts to 
IRC channels, and sending forum posts to Jabber accounts.

While KDE gains popularity, it gets less 'nerdy'.
Altough we all agree this is a good thing, we must also be aware of the 
fact that new ways of communicating must be investigated: many of the 
new users (and even some of the old ones) may prefer other channels of 
communication than IRC or mailing lists.

The KDE Community Forums [1] try to fill a gap here.
We are aware of the fact that developers (usually) prefer IRC and 
mailing lists. We are also aware of the fact that many users don't.
This is why we developed (and will continue to develop) a few ways to 
bring these ways of communication together.

On top of that, forums have a few advantages over IRC and mailing lists:
- everybody knows how to use a forum, unlike IRC or mailing lists
- messages posted to a forum are saved and searchable
- forums are moderated
- forums bring people in different timezones together
- forums look more attractive; this may not be important to developers, 
but it is to users
- our forum centralizes knowledge about many applications and platforms 
into 1 location

The KDE Community Forums have no intention to replace IRC or mailing 
lists; we try to complement them.

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Application specific forums.

Not all development teams have enough resources to host and moderate 
their own forums, yet each development team needs to communicate with 
it's users. KDE Community Forums would like to offer development teams 
the opportunity to host application specific forums at forum.kde.org. 
There would be some conditions, of course: a member of your team, or 
someone appointed by your team, should be present regularly to answer 
questions our moderator team doesn't know the answer to, and so we can 
be sure the user feedback is actually heard by the development team. 
Also, your forum would have to generate some traffic, because we 
wouldn't want to end up with a forest of forums where nobody ever comes.
Important note: since our forum can generate RSS and Atom feeds for each 
forum [2], send new threads to IRC channels [3], and even send 
notifications of new posts to a Jabber account [4], moderating a forum 
would, for the larger part, mean keeping an eye on your preferred 
communication medium.

If you are a member of a KDE (related) development team, and you are 
interested in hosting a forum for your application, contact us at 
admin at forum.kde.org.

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Private, restricted forums.

KDE Community Forums would like to offer you the opportunity to host 
your own private, restricted forums to be used by your team. These 
forums would be invisible and inaccessible to people who are not members 
of your team. This would give you as a team a central location to store 
reminders, to hold discussions you would like to save for the future, 
and to have discussions with members who are hard to reach, for example 
because they are in different timezones.

If you are a member of a KDE (related) development team, and you are 
interested in hosting your private, restricted forums at KDE Community 
Forums, contact us at admin at forum.kde.org.

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Forum posts to IRC.

Developers prefer to communicate on IRC; users prefer to communicate at 
forums. For this reason we developed a way to have new threads to 
specified (sub)forums at KDE Community Forums to be posted to specified 
IRC channels [3]. With this, a development/porting team can keep track 
of posts to our forum without having to visit KDE Community Forums.

If you are a member of a KDE (related) develoment team, and you are 
interested in having new threads to one or more forums sent to an IRC 
channel, contact us at skreamer at forum.kde.org or join #kde-forum at 
irc.kde.org.

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Forum posts to Jabber.

JabberBot is a plugin for MyBB (the forum software) we developed to sent 
new posts to Jabber accounts [4].

If you are interested in having new posts to certain forums be sent to 
your Jabber account:
- log in at forum.kde.org
- click the link UserCP in the top-left of the page
- in the menu, select 'Edit profile'
- fill in your Jabber ID
- hit the 'Save' button
- in the menu, select 'Change settings'
- check 'Enable Jabber notifications for subscriptions'
- hit the 'Save' button
- subscribe to the forums you wish to receive notifications about (there 
is a Subscribe link at the top of each thread listing)

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If you have any other suggestions that may be of benefit to you and/or 
us, please contact us.

Sincerely,
   The KDE Community Forums team

[1] http://forum.kde.org
[2] http://forum.kde.org/misc.php?action=syndication
[3] 
http://forum.kde.org/skreamer-brings-forum-kde-org-to-irc-channels-t-29872.html
[4] http://forum.kde.org/new-plugin-jabberbot-t-10106.html

-- 
forum.kde.org
Communicate.

administrator team:
   admin at forum.kde.org

moderator team:
   mods at forum.kde.org

IRC bot team:
   skreamer at forum.kde.org

news suggestions:
   news at forum.kde.org