RR Forums

[David Bovill]

Hi Dan - the difference between Forums, blogs and wiki"s was
significant - but really they are increasingly merging. Wikipedia for
instance has a discuss feature for each wiki page (article) - which is
basically a Forum attached to the page, other tools offer similar.

Permissions allow fine grained control of which sections are open and
which are under editorial control - so there is no real difference
there between wiki and Forum.

There is only one real difference and that is the way time is treated
- both the list and a Forum deal with time as the way the
contributions are indexed - with a wiki the key indexing concept is
the term defined in the title of the page.

This means with a well "designed" wiki - you do not have to read
through a historical list and merge all the posts to find your answer.
It is a collaborative document. A Forum is a segmented email list on
the web and offers minor advantages over - mainly to those old
fashioned folks that like to minimise email traffic (rather than
search and filter).

You get most of that by using:

   http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.comp.ide.revolution.user

If the aim is to enhance the current documentation with community
contributions - then a time based metaphor is not going to achieve
that (that is without some serious hacking - ie a forum thread for
each Transcript term... which basically ends up as a wiki with
associated time based discussion thread in any case).

My interest is in documentation associated with a repository of shared
code - such as a library. For this you need more than a wiki - you
need a wiki linked to the code - and both integrated into the RunRev
IDE.