On Nov 9, 2009, at 5:34 AM, Viktor Szakáts wrote:
Thanks Chen.
So to sum up technical problems, the only one which I believe is
reasoned
is the speed of our sf.net forum compared to others.
I think that slow performance alone isn't a reason to chose other
forums,
unless there is someone who's willing to maintain a similar one with
similar
features but better performance. We have no such offer ATM.
Aside from technical aspects (and that's what I really meant as a base
for discussion), the main point is active community with answers (as
Chen rightly said), which means volunteer participants.
Our forum has ~50 registered users, hmgforum has about ~100. The
message
count is much higher, but the size of the community isn't so big.
Just thoughts. For sure if nobody is willing to pass the knowledge
he got
for free here, we will have a hard time building any sort of active
Harbour
support community, and that's something ALL users should be aware of.
I see many ppl. coming by and asking for free docs (prefereably in his
own language), free support, free this and free that, but what
nobody seems
to realize is that free stuff comes only from contributions. It's
not there by
magic. In a healthy community which wants to stay afloat on the
longer run,
it's actually required that everyone who TAKES also GIVES something.
Everyone should decide what is that he can give to the community,
being
it 5 bucks, being it a little background research, support answers,
patches,
writing docs or code, small or large it doesn't really matter, but
until we
have ~10 ppl participating actively and a couple committing all the
code, chances
are very high that we're seeking impossible goal when trying to
build f.e.
an active support forum. Simple reason is that ~10 ppl cannot do all
these
tasks.
Please think about this, and try to find a way you can help, after
all, you
got an excellent, stable, robust, feature-rich and industrial level
product *for
free*, which can help to even create profit (cash), save time (which
is also
money). In such case it's not devil to ask to return some of these
benefits
to the product itself to keep it alive and well on the long run. I'm
sure it's
everyone's interest to not let the project just vanish.
Viktor,
I'll start from now on, to check the Harbour phpBB Harbour forum to
give support.
Why not to use the MediaWiki facility that SF offers ?, Probably it
will be a very good way to centralize the documentation/support
efforts, also to store there (a copy) the documentation work that
April is currently doing and start to contributing there to enhancing/
updating it.
best regards,
Teo
_______________________________________________
Harbour mailing list
Harbour@harbour-project.org
http://lists.harbour-project.org/mailman/listinfo/harbour
