The following discussion occurred on the mailing list on this topic (http://www.esrf.fr/mail_archives/tango/archive/msg07316.html)

Dear Philippe + Fred,

I understand that the forum is not what everyone is used to. However we think it is very useful for technical discussions and as a kind of database of questions etc. Forums are very common in other open source projects e.g. Linux kernel, or as a place to look for answers e.g. stackoverflow.com

You can subscribe to a forum topic to follow its discussions via email. We have put in a feature request to improve the email sent to contain the topic in the subject and the contents of the post in the body. This will make it easier to follow discussions without leaving your mailer. We cannot offer email as an input mechanism for posting on the forum. This is out of the scope the current tool we are using.

When to use the forum ? Mainly for technical discussions. The email should be used for announcements and questions which are not technical.

We are will create more forums as you request them. We propose to create one dedicated to device classes as next.

Thanks for your input and I hope to see you on the forum or at least that you can follow the forum. We are working on improving it to e.g. read access when not logged in.

Kind regards

Andy

On 16/02/2015 14:10, Philippe Gauron wrote:
> Hi,
> I agree that forum and mailing list are two different workflow, we could also choose subjects that would be sent to mailing list and the ones that needs to be sent to forum.
>
> In fact, in my experience, forum are useful to store archives and search for some tips, and mailing list are useful to have a fast answer as you just said.
> I think both could be useful if we find the good way to use them…
>
> –
> - Philippe Gauron.
>
> Le 16 févr. 2015 à 11:42, PICCA Frederic-Emmanuel <frederic-emmanuel.picca@synchrotron-soleil.fr> a écrit :
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> Now that there is this forum, we have two different chanel to discuss about Tango.
>> I mean the mailing list AND this forum.
>>
>> from my point of view, a mailing list is a lot easier to work with than a forum.
>> - you get the message straight in you mailbox and just reply to the message. (a few seconds)
>> - the workflow is identical for all other mailing list.
>>
>> - with forum you need to:
>> - click on you bookmarked forum link (hopefuly)
>> - log into the tango web site
>> - find about the new discussion
>> - reply using the browser.
>> (more than a few seconds)
>>
>> if you have another forum, you need to deal with another workflow because the other forum are not managed by the same web interface.
>> so you spend to much time in your browser.
>>
>> I understand that usually interfaces on top of mailing list are not that sexy.
>> Maybe this would be a nice contribution to build this sexy interface on top of the mailling and call it "forum", with the possibility to send via the web interface an email to the mailing list for peoples which doesn not want to subscribe to the mailing list.
>>
>> So my question is
>>
>> - what is the connection between the mailing list and the forum ?
>>
>> and a remark
>>
>> - what about a wiki to structure our tought around tango on the mailing list. (the mailing list is not that appropriate to summarize a whole thread)
>>
>> Cheers
>>
>> Frederic
>>
>> PS: Don't get me wrong, I like a lot the look and feell of the new website. django rocks smile
>>
>