Do you like the forum?

[Stefan Arentz]

The Spring team recently decided that a forum is a better method to have online discussions. What do you think of that choice?

[Stefan Arentz]

Ok, so I was the first to vote No

What I don't like about forums is this:

They force me to be online. I cannot read messages offline like in meetings, in the airport, in the park or in my hotel.

There is no way to have access to the messages in an archived form.

It is hard to keep track of unread messages. The forum only remembers your last visit and marks ALL messages read instead of the ones you actually looked at.

Searching does not work as well as with email based forums that are archived/indexed in your local mail reader or through a search engine.

Weird things happen to the formatting of the forum when people start pasting stack traces with lines that are 300 characters long.

A mailing list is usually a good newbie filter; forums tend to have hundreds of unanswered silly questions. This puts way too much noise in the search results. JBoss is a good example of this.

[kantorn]

Hi.

I personally much prefer the forum type before the mailing list. Several reasons; above all easier to browse for specific issues and frankly, I don't feel like reading shitloads of mail every day. Better to enter the forum when you have a moment for it and can be able to concentrate fully.
Also I think the forum by time can become an invaluable source of knowledge.

I think the new forum is great, as is Spring!

[CameronBraid]

I'd have to agree with all of Stefan Arentz's points about the issues with using a forum.

kantorn's issue about shitloads of emails every day can be solved in one of two ways :
1) unsubscribe and read the archives online
2) unsubscribe and re-subscribe to the digest

Some new things that I don't like are :

1) the online forum is MUCH slower than a mail reader

2) unread / read management is MUCH easier on a per message/thread basis in a mail client - as compated to the naive forum attempts to track unread messages. (as Stefan pointed out)

[Martin Kersten]

I prefer the forum, since it feels more comfortable.

[vagif]

It is intresting to see, that I'm first one to vote for newsgroups.
What's the matter ?
Newsgroup has all the advantages of forum and mailing list.
You can read it online and offline.
You can see which messages you read and which are new.
You can attach files is you want
And better yet, there's no need to talk about java on a PHP BASED WEB SITE )))

[davison]

I agree with Stefan and Cameron, I voted against a new web based forum. Whilst phpBB is arguably the best there currently is in BB software and is VASTLY preferable to the old SF forums (shudder) it simply doesn't compare to a proper mail/nntp setup. It's potentially better than a mailing list for the casual user looking for the odd specific answer to a question, but it's way more difficult and slower to use than a good mail or news client for regular posters. The idea of the browser as the "universal client" is taken too far in this instance - HTTP is just not a good protocol for this sort of application.

The arguments about accessibility, especially for newbies, doesn't really hold water either since a good web interface to the mail archives or news group is not difficult to find (GMANE, MARC, GoogleGroups).

Anyway, too late now

Darren.

[dmiller]

This is a quote from the mailing list (submitted by Colin S.):

Now there is in fact an 'Email Digests' mod available, which can send a daily or weekly digest of new posts. We may enable this, although I am a little bit ambivolent about using it since this effectively makes us run a mailing list from that host. There would not be anything wrong with this, but you get situations where people forget they are subscribed, and report you to the likes of SpamCop, and then all your outgoing email is affected. Since the mail server on the host used for the forums is vital for the operation of a lot of services, there is a bit of danger.

Couldn't the email be sent to a (preferably read-only) sourceforge mailing list so people could subscribe to that? Then you would avoid the problem of people reporting the springframework.com domain as spam, as all email would come from sf.net.

One other thing to keep in mind is that if you are a logged in user, when you hit the forum site, you do have a link available on the top right to view all posts since your last visit. This effectively gives you a chance to see all activity that has gone on, in a pretty nice fashion. You can then right click on each header that interests you for exmaple, and open it up in a new window or tab (Mozilla).

I am in agreement with the other complainers on the fact that the "new posts since last visit" feature is way bad. It's not nearly every time I want to visit the forum that I have enough time to look over all of the new posts since my last visit. Is there a mod that would keep each messages "new" until that message is specifically viewed? I also heard something about an RSS feed for the forum. Can someone tell me what the address of that feed is? I'd like to try it.

I do like the new forums. They are very nice for searching--a thousand times better than the sf.net forums.

[mraible]

An RSS Feed would be awesome. Is it already integrated and you just need to turn it on? If not, I found this:

http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=144548

[vagif]

Things that i like about spring is - it does not reinvent the weel.
It uses best ORMs, does not create its own. It uses implemented remoting protocols, does not try to implement its own. it connects to existing JMS implementations. This is the spring way.
But making this forum is not a sping way. There's well established protocol for forums - NNTP, news server.
It's extremely easy to setup and maintain. It has very good, easy client tools, integrated almost in any modern email client program.

And last point. News servers are indexed by google !!
This gives you much wide audience. Millions of java developers search newsgroups on google to find answers to their problems and questions.
By hosting this forum on news server, you quickly get attention and awareness of thousands of newbees and people intrested in solving their particular problems.

Let's port this forum to news server, while it is not too late. )