Dang reply-to-all....
Sorry about the double post you will be getting Dirk-
Re: Christian's Einfeldt Post-
It a very good post about the
politics and the changing ground surrounding the open source movement,
on occasion. My personal belief is that a seperate, but helping,
movement is best, much in the way that development on open source
libraries by different people helps multiple projects, I am a believer
that the same can be applied to getting information disseminated. That
is why earlier I had mentioned wanting to see tie ins to individual
project forums hosted on their own site. It prevents a duplication of
the same questions on multiple different sites by allowing the one
material to be seen by many.
Re: Google's representation of mailing lists and forums searches-
Ok what happens when I type in something that has been answered on,
even this mailing list, into Google? I get one maybe two replies back
on a search page to be honest, unless I am specifying this list in
particular where I think in that case I get more. I get a link that
says, show similar pages. In all honesty, I don't think I am alone in
that if the summary of those two replies, or even the posts themselves
more often than not, don't show information useful to what I am looking
for, I keep looking through google search results.
To be honest more often than not, if I am googling something, I
get more useful information from forums and to some extent wikis in
Google's search results. Sure they may be great places to post up
pictures of cats and cheesburgers, but they are also still decent
places to get assistance as can be proven by Ubuntu Forums for
example. I moderate one site that has a section on LInux in general(As
well as their A/V editing sections and Apple sections). I post on
another site that is specific to audio and has a linux section. I know
others here do as well because I run into some of them on those sites.
In both of those forums I have helped personally, lots of people get
started in Linux, and have seen many more. They can certainly be used
for troubleshooting and many people would prefer that than dealing with
mailing lists, and especially mailing lists where their email is made
public on most every post they make for mining algorithms to send tons
of spam. I get several hundred spam messages a day to this email that
I use for public postings right now, I can certianly understand that
feeling. I also have decent filtering via gmail, and had Thunderbird
doing it before that. I can't guarantee everyone does that. So yes I
think there is something to be said still for forums in the
troubleshooting process.
In as far as needing to sign up to search, that is something that
depends on the site. Even so, so long as the site is publicly
viewable, Google(And other search engines) will likely still index it,
and thus it will turn up in search results there. When people are
looking for a specific answer to a question, chances are they are going
to google first, and thus get introduced to the forum like that. Also
often times i have seen several people that after finding repeated
answers in one spot, then join the forum to ask a question they
couldn't find an answer to. Again I suggest joining a mailing list to
them and they don't respond to favorably to it. To each their own,
choice is at least as much a strength as it is a weakness in the open
source world.
Seablade