Forum link in the front page of Rebol.com ?

[Parser]

The rebol community is very tiny. I think what make people and enterprise choose a platform is the size of the community.

So why not put some effort upon it and beginning by promoting an official forum on rebol.com ?  

[CarlRead]

I agree a bigger community would help promote REBOL, but I'm not sure a forum on rebol.com would help.

There's two main places REBOL is discussed - the official mailing-list (see: http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/ml-index.r ) and the REBOL AltME world (linked to from the mailing-list page.)  I don't think adding a forum to rebol.com would cause many of the ML and AltME users to switch to the forum, so I'd guess it wouldn't get much more posts than this forum.

REBOL needs some feature where it's best in its field, that makes people think that if you want to do X, then REBOL's the tool for the job.  Dialecting springs to mind, but the world doesn't seem to have been convinced that it needs dialecting, or at least not yet.

How many REBOL users have created dialects, I wonder?  Can this forum do polls?  If so, maybe that's a good question for one.
 

[Parser]

I don't mean obligatorily a forum on rebol.com but at least a link from rebol.com frontpage to reboltalk.com.

The problem with altme is
- with firewall many people cannot connect
- it's not searchable like internet so NEW people cannot discover the community.

The problem with the mailing list is it seems to have problems I have tried to subscribe many times with different email providers and I never received anything and I gave up. It must happen to other people but they won't tell it to RT since they won't even bother more as newbie.

[Gabriele]

There is a link already, here: http://www.rebol.com/support.html

AltME is searchable with Google, see http://www.rebol.net/altweb/rebol3/ though of course AltME was not designed for this kind of use (forum-like).

REBOLers just don't like web forums, and there's not much we can do about it.

[Brian Wisti]

REBOLers just don't like web forums, and there's not much we can do about it.

Well, the REBOLers out there so far don't care for forums, but it's good to have one for new users who are more accustomed to the forum style of getting information and building community on the Web.

[Thør]

Well, the REBOLers out there so far don't care for forums, but it's good to have one for new users who are more accustomed to the forum style of getting information and building community on the Web.

I agree. Furthermore, although a newbie is fortunate enough to be included in AltME, there's still the problem of synchronizing posts, where the group posts do not update unless he/she happens to be online at the time a new message is posted. So a newbie, specially in another part of the world, may regularly login to AltME, but would be unable to get any messages.

In this case, a web based forum would be best, IMHO.

[Sunanda]

AltME is searchable with Google

That's only partially the case.

The latest 300 messages in "web-public" groups are listed on the web mirror. Older messages are lost. In a fast moving forum, maybe less than a week's messages will be visible.

In addition, many forums on Altme/REBOL3 are not published in this way. So only members of that world will see them.

It is possible to join Altme/REBOL3 of course.  But for the newcomer to REBOL, the process is not obvious, so they may assume it is not intended for them

Once in Altme/REBOL3 a new member has no way of knowing that they are not a member of any of several private groups......Some are private because they are intended for an invited subset of the membership. But others have been made private simply because that is the only way for members to opt out of a public group. Example, a new Altme/REBOL3 member may never lnow there is a discussion forum for OSX because that one is private.

Similarly, a potential convert to REBOL will never know that OSX discussioin is happening as the last 300 messages are not mirrored to the web.

***

It's been that it's not that REBOLers don't like forums, it's more that we are addicted to the "dark net". That's not good for the future of REBOL, but little seems to be being done about it.

Sunanda

[Brian Wisti]

It's been that it's not that REBOLers don't like forums, it's more that we are addicted to the "dark net". That's not good for the future of REBOL, but little seems to be being done about it.
Sunanda

The firewall at my new job blocks AltMe, making me very aware of how insular the community is. To top that off, for some strange reason I wasn't able to post to the mailing list from my GMail account. That makes this forum my only community outlet, just when I'm getting fresh ideas. AltME is a great app, but if you are blocked for any reason then it becomes a read-only headache. I wonder how many people give up on REBOL simply because they can't get to its community resources?

Is this the "dark net" thing you were talking about a couple years ago, Sunanda?

[Sunanda]

Yes, it is.

There are few truly open forums for REBOLers to discuss things. REBOLtalk is one of the few.

Others like the various Altme worlds (I count four or five REBOL-related ones) are excellent, friendly, warm resources. But you got to get in there! And, once in, you don;t have the benefit of Google indexing the content so you can find old stuff easily.