[Openal] A note to Nabble users, and forum issues

[Chris Robinson]

Since I'm still seeing messages pop up on Nabble asking for help that aren't 
in the lists messages, I wanted to throw out an explicit heads-up about it.

********
If you're posting to the openal or openal-devel lists through the nabble.com 
web interface, your messages aren't getting to people who don't read via 
nabble.com. If you're using nabble, I'd recommend instead going to

http://opensource.creative.com/mailman/listinfo/openal
or
http://opensource.creative.com/mailman/listinfo/openal-devel

signing up, then posting here through email. You can even check the archives 
through those links to see if your messages have gotten through or not. We're 
not ignoring you guys, we just can't hear you. :)
********

I think it's a bit troublesome for Creative to provide links to the nabble 
interface for these lists, when sending messages through it silently fails. 
IIRC, Dan said it's because of the email address nabble posts come from aren't 
registered for the lists are are thusly dropped.. is there any possibility of 
allowing the messages through?

On a similar note, I'm (still) seeing an alarming number of "empty" messages 
getting posted to Creative's OpenAL forums. I'm pretty sure it's due to people 
habitually hitting reply, going to the bottom of the message (or staying at 
the top :P) and adding their reply.. outside of the <div></div>s so the 
message is lost. I'm sure I'm not the only one who thinks that must be 
incredibly frustrating to people wanting help, especially if you're not 
familiar with HTML mark-up (though it's still a bit frustrating to those of us 
that are, too..). Worse when you realize it could be causing people to drop 
OpenAL and go with alternatives..

I'd seriously ask if Creative is at all open to the idea of dropping the 
forums and going back to these mailing lists, which everyone seems to prefer 
anyway. Most of the public help I've seen given is through these mailing lists 
and in IRC (<plug>#openal on Freenode</plug>).

If Creative wants a "web forum", then how about setting up a simple web 
interface that sends (non-HTML) messages to these mailing lists, like nabble? 
I'd imagine that's easier to get running than a "mailing list" that sends 
to/receives from a forum, and be functionally the same.


I'm sorry to get all critical, but I hope you guys can understand my concerns, 
at least. If people have trouble asking for/getting help, it can't be good to 
the future up-take of OpenAL.

- Chris