Forum OpenACS Development: Response to Need better sign-posting in openacs.org

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Posted by Kapil Thangavelu on
i totally agree with you. i've already made suggestions for a weekly
status report both on this bboard and privately that have fallen on
deaf ears. i'd be happy to volunteer for the work as well.

as for development via bboards, i never understood why aD and
openacs seem so hung over on using them other than toot their own
horn so to speak. every other open source development project in
existence uses a mailing list. bboards seem to reach a critical mass
when they're not useful for tracking a product's development. the
big problem with bboards is that its too easy to lose track of a new
message in an older thread, they have little sense of chronological
view, they scale poorly in terms of finding relevant information in
a busy forum, and its hard to realize that an older thread might
still be maintaing an active discussion. a good mailing list
(list.org), with a good search and archive interface goes a long way
to solving these issues (btw, i think the archive and search
interface for pg kinda bites). bboard style development tends to
favor those who are subscribed via email and who check it daily (in
fact email subscriptions are the only thing that even makes bboard
development at all viable or useful, see the point). its a
dentriment to a new developer who is trying to catch up on
developments of interest. hopefully a move to mailing list will also
cut down on all the person to person email that goes on and subverts
the open source development process.