I sent this to the ML in response to the message from Graham - subject "web forum" And wouldn't you know it, it hasn't arrived yet. So what follows is what I had to say: ---------------------------------------------------- Here is my two cents worth, for what that is worth: I feel that it is not a good thing for the rebol online community to have multiple portals. The rebol community is such a small community that have more than one "meeting place" just diffuses us further. For my situation, altme has not worked for me for years, because my linux platform has not supported altme, and furthermore, I've not found altme a good medium for code exchange, although I guess it functions as a "chat room" and many 'rebolers may like it for that reason. There has been considerable discussion in the last few months, both on and off of this ML about my offer of hosting the Mailing List on my server, which I lease from cniweb. The problem has been: 1)Carl has wanted to keep contiguous message IDs 2)The leasor of my server has told me that he would need to charge for his time to meet Carl's expecations *unless* he be given time to research the issue at his leisure and leisure has been in short supply for him lately. And of course, the current listserv has had frequent outages over the years.... My medium of choice is actually an online forum. It is very good for code exchange, one can edit one's own posts. Categorization is available, etc. I think we should consider making Graham's site the "meeting place" for the rebol community. Consider this message to be one vote in favor. Hopefully I'm not making more work for Graham. Regards.
Hi Tim A lot of people would prefer to keep REBOL in the light instead of using darknets ... which have their places. I'm hoping that the anti-spam features of vbulletin make this much easier to work with than SMF ... which I think Reboltalk used, and was just too much to maintain.
agree with you Tim, I am asking for the same thing, i.e a web forum/browser based forum. (see the other thread on this site.)
Does anyone know if there is a way to mirror a forum with a mailing list? Might be the best of both worlds. thanks tim
I would vote for one place, although I don't care which. My own infrequent use of the mailing list has been to get answers about how to do things in REBOL, and I have found it VERY helpful. I think that longest time I have had to wait might have been a day, but usually it is about half an hour. This is amazing. In another area, I have been waiting a WEEK for an answer to a question posed to a place with which we have a paid support contract. Whatever method is used for this, must, in my opinion, provide for an easy way to ask a question and get an answer. Slightly off topic, but related, is REBOL's new consulting service. If I were looking for a tool to use for some important production project at work, I would pick something for which I could get quick help if needed. Without that feature, from somewhere, the tool is not a serious production tool, but more like a toy. I'm not sure I would like to pay $100 per incident to answer a question that is the result of insufficient documentation. Therefore, it seems to me that an active mailing list, or forum, is critical to the success of REBOL.
I think the RT consulting service is to solve programming problems and not to fill in the blanks. Having one place only is a recipe for disaster IMHO .. .better we don't keep all our eggs in one basket.
Graham, So far this forum seems to be doing well. I support any web based forum for REBOL - just wish it was hosted at a domain containing the word "rebol".
As a complete rookie (started to play with REBOL three hours ago) I was surprised that it was so hard to find communities on the web about the language. I understand now that it's because of that ALTME world where REBOL people hang out. I haven't used it and I'm not sure if there is a linux client but it sounds cumbersome. Also, if it works like a darknet, I understand why REBOL is so anynomous on the web - it won't generate that much buzz automatically if there are no forums or discussions to index. Is that actually good?
