[webteam] forum

[Bart van Bragt]

On Mar 14, 2008, at 2:18 AM, Robert Martinez wrote:
> I was just brainstorming here: http://wiki.jabber.org/index.php/Forum_Structure_Wiki
>
> What is missing, what is redundant?


 From experience: Don't start with too many forums.

Start with the bare minimum of forums that's required to keep things  
managable and usable.

I'm thinking of something like:

- Client issues
- XMPP Development
- Jabber.org issues
- General chat

Start with this and see how this works out. If, for example, client  
issues attracts a boatload of messages and becomes too big to be  
managable it's trivial to just add another forum to split this forum up.

The big disadvantage of having 20 forums is that 16 of those will be  
empty and they will stay empty because no-one is going to read 20  
almost empty forums with close to no activity. The forum structure is  
not a watertight taxonomy of all possible discussion topics, it should  
be a structure that separates the discussions into manageable and  
related topics. I've seen plenty of community sites die in a large  
part because they started with 30 different forums and 30 users :)

Met vriendelijke groet,

Bart van Bragt