Regarding Q&A: Half a year ago we already discussed moving the ROS Q&A to StackExchange: https://code.ros.org/gf/project/ros/mailman/?action=ListThreads&mailman_id=20&_forum_action=ForumMessageBrowse&thread_id=89236 The identified key advantages of AskBot have been: supporting open-source software, own the data and no tedious and long verification / staging process. Personally, I like the StackExchange Q&As and they often seem to be a serious and professional environment (e.g. moderation, quality of answers etc.). But I do agree with sticking with AskBot due to the reasons mentioned aboved. Nevertheless, I also agree AskBot does need serious improvement, but for doing so ROS users need to get involved on http://askbot.org/en/questions/ and start asking questions and bringing up bugs. One thing I really do miss on the Q&A style forums is a place for discussing problems. It's great to ask specific questions people know answers to, but finding the root cause of a new problem together with others often turns into long lists of comments and/or answers, which do not really solve the problem. For those situations I would prefer a forum. Maybe we can find a way to bring both Q&A and forum together. On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 9:34 PM, Thibault Kruse wrote: > I also prefer answers to forum for the purpose of community driven > support. > > However I am not too happy with the split-up of mailing lists. Searching > Google for "ros mailing list" I get this: > > https://code.ros.org/mailman/listinfo (This seems to be an reduced > version of the next link) > https://code.ros.org/gf/project/ros/mailman/ (Some lists seem to be dead, > other still active, but no overview) > > And then looking for SIGs as well, I get to: > http://www.ros.org/wiki/groovy/Planning > with google groups for most sigs, some of which never had any activity. > > The splitup makes it difficult to track activity and to search all > archives, it also discourages users from following activity at a glance. > A page listing those groups would help fetching the interest of people to > hot topics. > I want to add my thoughts to this: Our current ways of communicating and collaborating inside the ROS community is - in my eyes - far from optimal. Even as someone, who has been using ROS for a while now, it's sometime hard to get to the needed information. I only can guess, how hard it is for someone new to ROS to get up to speed nowadays (Thanksx Claudio for your feedback!). Hence, I would love to see improvements here. Maybe upcoming ROSCON would be a good place to discuss the main problems and start drafting solutions. Regards, Marcus > > I don't know though whether any great solution exists that combines the > convenience of a mailing list with the cohesive properties of a forum. > Googl groups have categories, so e.g. all ROS SIGs could communicate within > the same google group but in different categories, not sure how well that > works via email. Else there are online offerings such as > > http://tech.dir.groups.yahoo.com > https://onlinegroups.net/, > http://doc.tiki.org/Forum+and+Mailing+List+Synchronization (open source) > https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed (opensource) > and probably more. > > The last in the list looks like phpBB, but seems to be quite fast and > written in D (whatever that is): > see the dlang homepage for the forum: http://forum.dlang.org/ > > If there was forums.ros.org that looked like the dlang page interms of > getting an overview of current activity, I think that would be much better > than our current mailman/Google-groups combination. > > cheers, > Thibault > > > On 20.02.2013 10:54, William Woodall wrote: > > This is just my opinion, but I feel that QA systems like askbot and > stackexchange are far superior for this type of community effort than a > forum like phpbb. Case in point, I almost never find the answer to my > programming or system administration problems on a forum anymore, I instead > find them on *.stackexchange.com. > > I don't think it has to do with owning the data as much as the arduous > process of getting a stackexchange instance. The > http://robotics.stackexchange.com/ has been working towards getting > vetted for a long time now, perhaps ROS questions/answers could live there > in the future, but having a dedicated ROS stackexchange is not feasible > IMHO. > > -- > > On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 1:48 AM, Claudio Carbone wrote: > >> On 20/02/13 10:24, Claudio Carbone wrote: >> >> you can have subforums tailored to the specific argument (eg: building >> which would cover build systems and package/stack structures; >> transformations which would cover urdf models, joints, publishers; >> Communications which would cover the ROS API, topics, services, etc...) >> >> >> I just remembered that the phpbb.org support forum (phpbb being one of >> the widest spread free forum platforms) even has sub-sub-<...>-forums for >> each and every plugin/modification where the creator of the plugin/mod can >> answer users questions far from the main busy discussion areas keeping them >> clean. >> >> I can't but think this would be much more useful to the community. >> >> Although I acknowledge that it's ultimately a management decision from WG >> or whoever will guide ROS in the future. >> >> >> Best regards >> -- >> >> *Eng. Claudio Carbone >> Embedded Systems Design* >> >> P.IVA: 11688471009 >> tel: +393809017424 >> email: Send email >> [image: My linkedin profile] >> >> My Portfolio >> [image: My portfolio site] >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> ros-users mailing list >> ros-users@code.ros.org >> https://code.ros.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-users >> >> > > > -- > William Woodall > Willow Garage - Software Engineer > wwoodall@willowgarage.com > > > _______________________________________________ > ros-users mailing listros-users@code.ros.orghttps://code.ros.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-users > > > > _______________________________________________ > ros-users mailing list > ros-users@code.ros.org > https://code.ros.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-users > > -- Marcus Liebhardt Control Engineer Yujin Robot 주소: 대한민국 서울시 금천구 가산동 345-30 남성프라자 #601, 153-023. Address: Door #601, Namsung-Plaza, 345-30 Gasan-dong, Guemcheon-gu, Seoul, 153-023, Republic of Korea Website: http://www.yujinrobot.com Email: marcus.liebhardt@yujinrobot.com Phone: +82-70-46577073