Do you like the forum?

[Colin Sampaleanu]

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. )

Unfortunatley, most (public) newsgroups seem to have become a mechanism for spammers to harvest new email addresses, which has made a lot of support newsgroups (ie. Eclipse) require registration. At that point, you lose the Google indexing...

[Colin Sampaleanu]

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

This is a mod on top of the base phpBB. The problem is that even putting aside the initial work to get them in, the mods are a bit of a maintenance nightmare, especially when the site offers a number of templates, all of which must be modified.

Colin

[vagif]

require registration. At that point, you lose the Google indexing..

Dang ! Did not know that !
That's bad.

[davison]

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

This is a mod on top of the base phpBB. The problem is that even putting aside the initial work to get them in, the mods are a bit of a maintenance nightmare, especially when the site offers a number of templates, all of which must be modified.

Colin

You're joking right? To turn on an RSS feed you have to edit skins??

Sounds like a bit of a design flaw somewhere - RSS should be totally independant of the HTML interface.

[trisberg]

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

This is a mod on top of the base phpBB. The problem is that even putting aside the initial work to get them in, the mods are a bit of a maintenance nightmare, especially when the site offers a number of templates, all of which must be modified.

Colin

You're joking right? To turn on an RSS feed you have to edit skins??

Sounds like a bit of a design flaw somewhere - RSS should be totally independant of the HTML interface.

I think the templates need to be modified to add the link to the RSS feed - the feed itself wouldn't depend on the templates. Look at the Chinese Spring forum - http://spring.jactiongroup.net/index.php.

I'd vote for limiting the number of templates to provide an RSS feed.

[Alef Arendsen]

One major disadvantage of a forum is that I can't read stuff while on the train. Currently I don't commute much so that's not a problem but it might be in the future.

The forum has a lot of advantages:
- the information is much better organised (topics, but also the ability to have sticky posts, etcetera).
- there's a better search functionality
- editing of messages is possible
- users are always hesitantto subscribing to a mailinglist, forums are more easily accessible.

[j2ux]

Check out this link, this could be interesting in the future:

http://www.google.com/googlegroups/about.html

Regards,
Lars

[tcollins]

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

Any further info on setting up an RSS feed for this forum?

[2devnull]

This forum is awesome. I like the ability to especially paste and see code in a format that is easy to read. I use these forums for everything like my Zaurus etc. and I am glad to see the Spring team now using one. I agree that supplementing it will RSS or Atom feeds would be good but right now I am just happy using a friendly format. I also like the fact that it sends emails to me when someone responds the a topic I started. Now it would be good if it will allow you to subscribe to topics that send an email if responses are posted to that topic.

[tcollins]

Now it would be good if it will allow you to subscribe to topics that send an email if responses are posted to that topic.

It does allow you to do this. Simply click on the "watch this topic for replies" link at the bottom of a forum topic. I agree this forum is great. RSS would make it even better!