Hello,
After this post:
Re : Re : Re : Re : Discourse by Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc. from pdurbin, I thought I would open a new topic, as it seems tchat rooms are unrelated to the Discourse program.
Here, at LinuxVillage, using SMF, as with some other forums, we could have a chan associated: at the bottom or at the top of the forum. I just think it is way less practicle than an independant tchat room on IRC, with your own IRC client chosen among many because you like it better when it has this or that feature... (I use a gui client : Xchat, and copy my configs over to any machine I use, no sound to inform for a new message, but a highlight, which I could never get with a chan on a forum).
To pdurbin : you log chans and use the links to get back to discussions when you were away a while : this is very good you don't miss a piece. I might miss some pieces sometimes. Well I don't have logs on the web, because I just would not know how to do that. If you can help for this matter there are two chans I am running for which I would like them being logged : #linuxvillage and #old-world. The first one is for getting together, tchatting, help, and #old-world more for specific courses when someone needs a quiet place, or for discussions about projects which take a long time to be setup. (As OBUbuntu remix for which someone started to work on a unique build script).
Generally chans are used for fast conversation related to a limited or unlimited amount of topics, depending on the rules of the chan... and the topics are all mixed, while some tchat rooms have a dozen people talking at same time or many more, and while doing that often forget to name the person who they address to, so it fast becomes confusing.
When it is about asking for help, this can be incredibly slow and time greedy sometimes : the question needs to bring information, so writing a few lines is not a problem, however after one hour or so when no one (in the crowd or in the silence, some chans have lots of people who are actually not in front of their monitor), press up key to reput your question...
IRC is mainly for joining people in a fast way, have short conversations with people when they are on the chan and available. Same with twitter except that it might be even more difficult there to keep a community around (I might mistake on this one, but I did have this feeling).
Forums : answers are slower to get, divided in topics relevant to what the people want to communicate about, the types and number of categories is not frozen, we can add more if the people of the forum feel there is a need for that. We are from many different countries here: Belgium, Quebec, France, USA, United Kingdom, a member is from Germany, one from Greece, one from Australia : we could never be up at the same time for discussions over IRC, but we are a group of people here who have been communicating through forums since several years, and creating projects together since all this time as well.
Same as konaexpress, I don't like mailing lists too much, but I follow a pair of lists, and have the mails from them filtered to go in it's own folder in my mail client. Once I have been on a list for which I pulled my hair during days, could never filter it, always someone was adding new destinations and that messed it all up (a Debian list, don't ask me which one, there was one at the beginning then came it many more unexpectedly... ) so I unsubscribed...
The first time I wanted to make my way through archives of a mailing list I was wondering how people could find anything they had read before : at least on forums we have a search engine ! I am not talking about the fast search which is not very efficient, but the one which is located in the navigation menu at the top :
http://linuxvillage.net/index.php?action=searchI would not either know how to get back on topics on logs on the web : I have my own logs in the directory of my IRC client and I "grep" inside when looking for something.
I don't prefer IRC over forums, and I don't even go on the chans each day : just at evenings once to several times a week, whereas I come to the forum at least once a day, and often I come back check for new messages several times.
Else about asking help, or about starting discussions where we wish to have several participants, forums are what is needed, over IRC, so it is a bit like mail for it does not require people to be here all the time, but it is more easy to follow and take hold of the conversation, because of the permanency of the posts and threads.
About contributions and forums, some threads can indeed be very long... and continue through months, and sometimes years for some of them. Anyhow whenever someone will do a research, if the search engine of the forum is a good one, it will be easy to find an information at any stage of the thread.
From my point of view IRC and forums are complementary:
Sometimes I would post a question on a forum, with lots of details related to hardware, steps taken to solve, the results... then if no answer comes fast enough for my wish, tried eventually to ask on chans : I just had to point to my topic on the forum, a simple link and it was all done. I could even point to it to several different chans if I thought other people were likely to be able to help.
PS: forums also seem to me the best place to share videos, such as this one :
Stallman (en français), vidéo de la conférence du 19 mars 2013
