On Jan 31, 2010, at 09:39:07, Alon Bar-Lev wrote: > Well, > I can probably speak on my behalf... > I won't use forums, so no help from me if traffic is diverted into forums. > > Alon.
Understandable, but I don't recall anyone basing the forums solely on your support. There is no reason 'not' to do something simply due to a few users' lack of interest in a particular venue. The fact of the matter is there are forum users, mailing list users, and IRC users. It is foolish to omit one group or another. While it's hard to filter out, the forums last year, the first year of operation, received ~330,000 page views from 13,833 unique IP addresses. This year (not quite one month), it has received ~38,000 page views from 2,796 unique IP addresses. I've eliminated the largest viewers with obscene view counts, as they are likely bots. The forum currently has 436 posts in 140 topics, none of those being spam, as it is a moderated forum. There are 126 users with one post, 56 of which have 2 or more. The openvpn-users mailing list had 3,349 posts in about 800 threads (quick sample). In contract, the first year of operation of the mailing list received 334 posts with a sharp increase near the end of the second year. The forum is currently on pace to at least match that level of traffic, possibly exceed it. I do not feel the forums and mailing list need to be synchronized. They are two different mediums, and should be treated as such. Certain bits of data can be shared, as forum entries have been mentioned on the mailing list and mailing list messages/threads have been mentioned on the forum. Just my 2¢ worth. --- Eric Crist
