[Compcomm] Forum Decision

[Jeffrey Laramie]

I can hear you all groaning at the thought of starting this discussion up 
again. Trust me, I'm not looking forward to it either, but it's an issue that 
needs to be resolved and time is not on our side here.

At this point I don't see any benefit in rehashing any of the previous 
discussion. It's been almost 3 weeks since we stopped discussing the forum 
and sadly a lot has changed.

Since the discussion ended, the activity on the Compiz forum has dropped by 
more than one half. At this point there are only 2-3 active threads and the 
rest of the posts are from newbies looking for support. The Beryl forum has 
been locked up completely. The "new" forum has had lots of people join, but 
few of them are from Compiz. I don't have exact stats on usage, but 
subjectively I'd say it's less than half the volume of the old Beryl forum.

We are fortunate that the code merging is going well, because our actions, and 
to a certain extent our inaction, have caused a great deal of harm to our 
user and enthusiast communities which use these forums. I'm not about to 
start pointing fingers and laying blame because there is plenty of blame to 
go around and many of us share in it.

The original agreement to reunite envisioned merging the forums from each 
community.  While we have demonstrated that this is technically possible, I 
no longer see any point in it. Except for a couple threads on the compiz 
forum, there are no active threads to merge and it simply isn't worth the 
effort any longer.

While I'm strongly against the way the new forum was created, I think it's 
design incorporates the best features of both the Compiz and Beryl forums and 
it uses phpbb3 which many people seem to prefer. I worked on it a bit last 
night and added a few categories so that it is better able to support the 
compiz-core package. I think all of us are willing to make further 
adjustments if there are areas where this layout needs improvement. For those 
of you who haven't seen it, you can find it here: 
http://www.opencompositing.org

I'd like to propose that we select this forum as the "official" Composite 
Community forum.

Jeff