Why Habari don't have a official forum?

[Sarathlal N]

Why there is no any official forum for Habari project?

I already read a forum thread about this scenario at habarians.com.

I think it is an urgent matter. Every one says that we are satisfied in Google group! But I think it is not a good idea.

In Google group, can we control our data? Atleast, can we backup our discussions? How we can arrange our discussions?

Already habari is more mature than to use a Google group or stack overflow tag. I believe that now Habari project is more efficient than any other blogging platform (even than new baby "Ghost"). But still we have limited user base, plugins & themes. If we have power to replace all other " blah blah blah", why we want to be shy?

The habari Wiki is great, but still we need a forum. As a normal user, I like to ask question in forum and get replies on forum.

Can any one check new WP (3.8)? It is bloated than 3.7. Also too many programmers & developers start to migrate from WP to static site generators for there own blog. I believe that we want to effectively use this scenes.

[Chris Meller]

As you said, we've had numerous discussions about this before. Even when we had a forum there simply wasn't enough usage to justify the added maintenance requirements. There was usually only a single person even remotely paying attention to it, so questions went unanswered for long periods. That's not the kind of user experience we want to provide.

For those that want a completely web-based "forum" type experience, Google Groups offers a decent web interface. For those who prefer to use email (most of us, at least as far as developers go, I believe), it's seamless on that front as well. It's the best of both worlds with no overhead for us (we've got enough of that already).

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[Sarathlal N]

From your words, I want to believe that we don't have good user / developer base to maintain a forum . If so what is the problem behind it?

There is no any performance and security issues with habari. Also the user interface is excellent and perfect for blogging. But still we say that we don't have users / developers to maintain a forum! What is wrong with it.......?

I don't need a forum, But I like to see all things related with Habari in a centralized space. We have plugins & theme collections, Wiki pages & demo site in http://habariproject.org. But for my doubts & suggestions, I want to depend with Google groups & stack overflow tag.

Can these Google groups can deliver any additional benefits for our project.

[Owen Winkler]

As has been stated, we have tried twice in the past to provide an official Habari forum separate from Google Groups. This has failed for at least these two major reasons:

1) The forum is poorly attended in spite of its well-advertised existence. There were only a handful of users that actually used the forum.  All of the information needed to run Habari is centrally located in the wiki, documentation, or the existing mailing list (Google Groups). There is no remaining reason for users to seek out a forum. 

2) The users that are knowledgeable about Habari don't use the forum. For users who used the forum to request information, they rarely received it because the people that knew the answers did not ever visit the forums to read their requests.

With the lack of use, there was no reason to devote official Habari resources (both server and human) to maintaining a separate forum.

That said, we will likely continue to provide only the official resources we already provide until they are both *proven* to be inadequate and able to be willingly supported by our existing community.

Currently, Google Groups has features that cater to our operations while providing a similar enough experience for those that crave a "forum", and is sufficient for our needs. 

Owen

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[Sarathlal N]

Hi Oven,
Thanks for your reply,
I just started Habari & I don't know its past. If we have such a
experience with official forum, may be you are right.

But I think, some of us want to take efforts same like
http://habarians.com. At there, Mr. Les Henderson alone create post &
threads on his forum about Habari. I think it is the perfect marketing
method for a forum.

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[Chris Meller]

According to the stats on Habarians, 802 out of 873 posts have been made by the same user (the administrator, Les) and 43 of the remaining were made by a moderator. So that leaves 28 posts by other people.

If each of those remaining 28 posts were a question, that is 30.17 responses to each question, 91% of which came from one person.

I only did that math as an example... The overwhelming majority of the content there is by a single person, which makes it much more of a blog than a forum.

[Sarathlal N]

I agree with your opinions.

May be in feature, we can make a good user base & at that time, I will
ask this same question again. :-)

[Chris Meller]

In the meantime, I'd encourage you to create your own blog and fill it with as much Habari-related info as you can, or contribute to Habarians. There's no reason everything has to be "official".

[Michael Bishop]

In addition, feel free to submit any articles or content for habariproject.org, and/or contribute to the wiki. New content for the wiki with a summary for hp.o linking back to the wiki would be great!

[Les Henderson]

Many hands make light work.

It has been a full year now since I started the forum and while it has not garnered a multitude of users, neither has the official Habari user base expanded in leaps and bounds. No matter, as I find the mental exercise of converting jabber-speak to noob-nouns stimulating.

As has long been recognized, the main user base of Habari are both gifted and self-sufficient. I'm happy to have seen even a couple dozen of them sign up and note their appreciation.

That no large group of novice users has sought help is no more reflective of the forum than the dearth of requests posted on the official Google Groups. Sadly, lack of promotion often means even the best ideas go unnoticed.

Still, I'm really glad to see that many previously dormant supporters and contributors have a renewed interest in at least arguing on IRC about what to do to keep things on track. Kudos to all that put their hopes and aspirations into keyboard action.

I just wish that these people would at least attempt to find answers on the forum rather than rehashing topics on IRC or doing an unfocused Grep.

Copied or not, it's still easier and quicker to find stuff in a readable informative format.  I don't care if you sign up and contribute. Just give it a try. Or not. No matter. But even for a blog, that's a heck of a lot of Habari-related posts, none of which are spam, so you might just find something you didn't already know..

Just a note. Even though things are in flux, this link from the Wiki / Navigation / Community Portal resolves wrong. http://www.habariproject.org/en/

On Mon, Jan 13, 2014 at 12:15 PM, Chris Meller <ch...@doesnthaveone.com> wrote:

[Chris Meller]

On Mon, Jan 13, 2014 at 6:44 PM, Les Henderson <les.hend...@gmail.com> wrote:

Just a note. Even though things are in flux, this link from the Wiki / Navigation / Community Portal resolves wrong. http://www.habariproject.org/en/

We don't use the www prefix most places so I'd forgotten to add that vhost back yesterday when I was fixing things. It's all working again, thanks for the heads up!

[Bryce Campbell]

Isn't the WWW prefix supposed to be just a server alias in the virtual host these days?

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[Chris Meller]

We actually redirect everything back to the non-www version, so the same content isn't being served up under two different URLs, so it's actually defined in its own vhost... just a very very short one.

[Bryce Campbell]

Oh, I see. On my server, I only have one virtual host for each web app and each one has a server alias with a www prefix. The only place where the www prefixed addresses and regular addresses are separated out is in DNS.

[Chris Meller]

It's more of a best practice than a requirement. In general you don't want a search engine seeing the exact same content at different URLs. That applies mainly to things like WP URLs where the same post could be at ?p=123 and /2013/12/21/foo, but also to www.foo.com/foo and foo.com/foo. So it's best to redirect any other possible ways someone may reach that post to the definitive URL, rather than serving it up all the possibilities.