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 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 <cla_carbone@tiscali.it> 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

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William Woodall
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