[fpc-devel] Offer to repair and maintain the FPC community website (repeat msg, no HTML)

[Kostas Michalopoulos]

Personally i find the FPC site to be atrocious, especially the landing
page (the only worse one is the Lazarus site). A good site would look
something like the haXe one:

http://haxe.org/

Minus the big image at the center, probably, since this isn't
FreePascal's focus. But the important stuff is to put up front what
the users will be mostly interested into: download, documentation,
news, community. Landing on news isn't worth for most people going on
the front page.

Most people visiting the front page want to learn what FreePascal is
all about and how to get it - ideally start downloading the compiler
(if possible without going via 19028481 intermediate pages, mirrors
and such can be automated so you just click a single link and start
downloading the installer right away) and while the download is in
process they read the next points about the language's features (cross
platform, open source, strong support for OOP, native, etc).

Then is community - FreePascal's current forums are awful and because
of that, dead. I'd suggest to archive them and install a modern board
that follows all the conventions that people have learned from the
hundreds of thousands of other forums out there. Mailing list is good
too, but to be honest they're hard to search and depend too much on
your mail client to be properly configured, etc.

If possible the FreePascal forums should be merged with the Lazarus
forums (but **NOT** in the current dreadful Lazarus site!) since,
honestly, a lot of people look for FreePascal via Lazarus. While
they're technically different projects, from an outsider's point of
view this distinction isn't important, especially considering how many
of Lazarus and FPC developers work on both projects.

Anyway, those are my thoughts and suggestions.

Kostas "Bad Sector" Michalopoulos

On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 10:43 AM, Graeme Geldenhuys
<graeme at geldenhuys.co.uk> wrote:
> On 2012-09-25 20:14, Jeff Duntemann wrote:
>>
>> I don't know how it is elsewhere, but here in the US, more and more ISPs
>> are eliminating Usenet access completely. Do you mean an NNTP server for
>
>
> Yes, Usenet is not the only NNTP servers & newsgroups on the internet. For
> example, I host a couple of newsgroups on my own server for some open source
> projects. Embarcadero hosts lots and lots of newsgroups for Delphi and their
> other products (they did create a Web Forum front-end to those newsgroups
> too, but they are still NNTP newsgroups driving the discussions). Microsoft,
> until recently, also hosted lots of newsgroups for developers. So do many
> other companies and open source projects.
>
> The Free Pascal project already have their own server for hosting HTTP,
> Mantis Bug Tracker, SubVersion etc. so adding a NNTP server (sn, leaf, etc)
> to the mix should be easy. I could even host some groups for them.
>
> My offer stands for other open source projects too. They are welcome to
> contact me, if they are looking for a place to host support newsgroups for
> their projects.
>
>
> Regards,
>   - Graeme -
>
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