What you say makes sense, but... Would not also other customers join in at some time, other than the Maemo owners? Meego will be the most advanced hand held devices on the market - would not a rather large section of this market be drawn to the new/changed forum? Like the majority on talk.maemo.org isn't 770 owners any more, the majority at talk.meego.org would not be Maemo owners.

Anyway, I agree with you on this being only a section of the target demographic, I just disagree on the idea that large communities works less well than small ones. I'm thinking Ubuntu must be one of the larger on the net. No one expects a single happy blob to keep track of all of the disgruntled N800 and N900 and N900.2 owners and their compaints... The only thing you'd really be doing is giving all the sub communities - that will exist nomatter what solution is chosen - a sense of belonging to a larger community at the same time.

You should be hogging as many users as possible and make them feel some pride in the umbrella they're under. Instead you want to divide and be conquered.

I still recommend renaming General (something indicating broad technology and related business talk-- Business and Technical?) as well as making Community first in that list. So...

• Community (augmenting mailing list)
• Development
• Business and Technical

General purpose update for anyone loosely following the thread... a MeeGo community website meeting took place via IRC on the 24th Feb. Details can be found here and a full log here. The meeting covered numerous topics, one of which was the new MeeGo community forums. It was decided that a new vBulletin forum should be set up, based on qgil's ideas shown in post #163 quoted below, and incorporating single sign on with the other services on the site (the practicalities of how this will be done are being worked on). So referring back to the first post, pretty much option number two

I'm sure most folks reading this are already aware of all this having seen many familiar names in the logs, and also I'm sure someone who was actually present at the meeting will come an elaborate if required, because I wasn't even there But just thought I'd put this up because its a wee pet hate of mine when I'm following a thread which gets resolved somewhere else and I'm left in the dark!


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Volt- I think you're right when you suggest the MeeGo forum will attract a wider selection of users, however its probably a bit early to tell just yet. We'll have to see who shows up, and which direction the forums go in when MeeGo devices start to reach the market. There's potentially something of a paradox in that only end users who become useful contributors are likely to be welcomed with open arms, yet at the same time, any end user may become a contributor. Going back to user consultation during the development process though, seeking input from the online community is a necessary-but-not-sufficient method in any case because some of the target demographic will not be represented here or at talk.meego. But I'm waffling, and essentially you're quite right when you say the community will be a valuable resource which mustn't be neglected. And I absolutely couldn't and wouldn't argue against that

With regards to my concerns about a huge forum with many different potential tangents, I still think it is a tricky thing to get right but I have come around to the idea that its far from impossible, and having followed MeeGo on the mailing list and IRC logs I think my worries will hopefully be unfounded, because it looks like theres a good team of people there (or here!?) who can make it work. And what initially seemed to me like a very daunting prospect has been simplified enormously by qgils proposed dynamic approach where the organisation of the forum will be somewhat dictated by requirements as they arise and change. This makes a lot more sense than predefining a whole lot of stuff now, which is what I thought was going to happen (there's my pessimism and naivety coming in to play!)

In any case I hope you do find your way onto the new forum... maemo is evolving, so I can see the relevance of tmo and why you think it should stay here, but do consider its evolving into something else, something new and a probably quite a bit different. And on those grounds, to me at least, a fresh start seems like a positive move forward.

And if we're really lucky, sans mailing lists eventually. I'm totally with you on that one, I find them a right pain. But shh, the old school is probably watching!

Thanks for the summary happyblob!

So yes, Reggie got the action of setting up a vBulletin in the MeeGo server with SSO in place and with the minimal setup described above. From there we will grow.

The maemo.org round of this MeeGo forum discussion is basically completed. Please go to the meego-community list (or the MeeGo forum when it exists) to discuss further.

Also please start a new thread if you want to discuss further the future of talk.maemo.org.

BIG THANK YOU to anybody active in this very useful discussion!

I didn't take part in the discussion, just thought I would go along with what was decided as usual. I'm happy that something reasonable came out of it after all :-)

A few more updates.

I did get to email mshaver yesterday asking access for a forum server. The reply I got was they want to make sure that Drupal (MeeGo.com's CMS) and vBulletin would work well together first. He also said that the Technical Steering Group (TSG) needs "to review and bless any implementation" that needs to be created.

It looks like the SSO is the big blocker here. Hopefully Intel has the resources to help code something to bridge Drupal, vBulletin, and other upcoming systems.

I'll post updates when I get them.

/me wonders idly why they weren't represented at the web coordination meeting.

I'd really like to discuss the CMS issue before we start implementing a bunch of stuff on top of Drupal. . . .

I agree.

The current meego.com approach of trying to make all the different web tools use Drupal's user database isn't really feasible in the long run. Because of it people have had issues getting editing access to the wiki.

We did quite a lot of work finding an appropriate set of tools for both single sign-on and user profile federation between systems for Maemo's SSO project. Why not use the results from there?

Playing devil's advocate for a moment, it's not like maemo.org has always been a trouble-free experience either.

To an outsider it looks like a lot of NIH from both camps. I don't know if the right solution is Drupal, Midgard or (most likely) something completely different but I do wish you'd get together in IRC or somewhere and talk it out. Arguing about it here doesn't accomplish anything.

(Still in D-A mode) The fact that those results are several months old and we still haven't got working SSO (I'm not even sure about the current status, is http://wiki.maemo.org/Task:Single_sign-on/Status up to date?) may indicate that they are unworkable or overly complex to setup and maintain.