[fpc-devel] Forum Integration

[Daniël Mantione]

Op Thu, 6 Jul 2006, schreef Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho:

> I would like to propose merging the forums as the next initiative to
> bring Free Pascal and Lazarus closer.
> 
> Some questions on Lazarus forum acctually belong to free pascal, and I
> think that this would make both forums better. Perhaps we can find a
> way to copy the current free pascal messages to lazarus forum, or
> create a new forum and copy the messages of both to it.
> 
> The current Lazarus forum has some issues, like:
> 
> * lot´s of people can´t register (has this being solved yet?). We need
> to solve this in order to force people to register before posting,
> because there have being too many spam attacks.
> 
> * Bad organization of the topics. You will notice that forums such as
> Misc or General have a lot more posts then the others. This shows that
> the topics are badly organized.
> 
> But still I think it´s better then Free Pascal forum. It´s just too
> hard to find the latest posts (not only the 5 latest, but the latest
> on every section) on free pascal forum.

Merging the forums is technically one of the most difficult things, and it 
is also hard to satisfy everyone. For example, I am very glad the FPC 
forums do not support avatars and signatures, as in many forums there is a
race is who has the biggest avatar and signature.

I think it the situation is however not a matter of forum packages, but of 
web systems: phpNuke versus OpenACS. Of these OpenACS is certainly the 
stronger one, advantages include much more opportunities for layout 
customizations, Slashdot-proof performance, nice URLs, an advanced search 
engine, a powerfull translation mananager. Add to that the insecureness of
phpNuke and it becomes really unattractive.

I understand your complaint is that the messages are not sorted in time. 
While messages are shown, after the "new" period is over they are indeed 
moved to their category (allthough still sorted chronologically). IMHO 
this is actually one of the strongest points of these forums, it is much 
easier to find old content that interrests you.

Daniël