GTK+ Forums

I've been talking to people and the idea of a forum like this has mixed reviews. Do we need a forum website with such a clutter of categories, as I have setup here, or is it too much? I'd be very much interested in hearing your opinions on this website, specifically, if it has too many categories and should just be "GTK programming" and not divided into languages and platforms etc. Do you think it's redundant or counter productive to the efforts of gnomesupport.org forums or the gtk-list mailing list?

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Micah Carrick - Forum Administrator
http://www.micahcarrick.com

I would say that a lot of categories is good, but that it looks better organized by creating sub-categories.

For example, have a Gtk+ forum, and then another forum for Gtk in other languages & then subcategories of PHP, Gtkmm, Perl, etc.

Also, it's just an aesthetic thing, but I really like when forums have a bunch of themes installed so that we can choose our own look, but that's just me. Multi-language support would be nice for other people as well.

I am really happy that these forums exist now though! :D

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Andrew Krause

Foundations of GTK+ Development: Buy now for only $31.49!

I appreciate having categories - there are going to be a few which don't interest me, and where I couldn't be of any help. So I don't waste time wading thru those.
On the other hand, if there are categories where no messages get posted for a long time, it makes the forum look inactive. I think those could be hidden and accessed via some kind of menu arrangement.

Regards,
Irv

Agreed. Since this site is so new, I'll leave it as is for a while. It's not even indexed by google or anything as of now. Once some activity starts picking up I'll start hacking the categories a bit.

Thanks for the feedback.

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Micah Carrick - Forum Administrator
http://www.micahcarrick.com

Sure we do.
When I first started with GTK I was searching like crazy for a forum like this...

This forum will be more than welcome to new and experienced developers.

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Nil Gradisnik
http://sysinfo.r8.org

I have also been looking for a forum like this for ever THANK GOD we finally have one.

Set it up how ever you fell would be the best.

I am a forum guy for nearly 10 years :) I don't like mailing lists this much. A good installed and maintained forum is more useful compared to mailing lists.

Some forum admins make a huge mistake by creating lots of forums/subforums when they just launch the forum site. If there are not much active users and a lot of forums then the users have difficulty "catching" the atmospher of the community and sometimes forum becomes even more and more inactive as time goes by. But this forum has just the right number of categories, I think. Even "General GTK+ Discussion" and "GTK+ Programming" may be merged for beginning. If someday the forum become more active with nearly 50 posts a day then we can begin creating new categories/subcategories. Such as creating new categories for each language binding.

I may suggest that changing the theme maybe, because lots of forums have this default theme for PhpBB and it became somewhat boring :) Something plain, elegant and reflects the GTK soul :)

For a really succesful PhpBB community you can look at OpenOffice.org Forums: http://www.oooforum.org it is simply how a forum site should be.

And also YES, a project as big as GTK should definetely have a forum. Recently, there were discussions on GNUstep mailing list about opening an official forum page and they counted this forum among the examples while they are explaining why such a project should have forums. They also come to a conclusion that the project should provide actually an "official forum", which is very very right.

GREAT FORUM!

I have found this to be a very valuable asset in my Gtk development. Response times to questions are usually amazing.

One suggestion is to provide sub-categories for each of the different widgets. Perhaps the same grouping could be accomplished by a Search (which is what I usually resort to.)

Kirk