I might be wrong here, but I think the gist of the discussion was that coming up with something bigger than just a documentation Wiki was the way forward. I am new to boost, I had no idea there was a Wiki. A site with documentation as well as blogs and news on C++ and Boost would pull more traffic than a Wiki alone, in doing so it would hopefully become established, this would in turn drive the expansion of the Wiki, leading to a general trend towards the resource being indispensible for C++ developers. Ideally, you want the situation where C++ student of one year, A, upon being asked by C++ student of 1 month, B, where he can find std::cout documentation on line, will instantly point to one place, as he would with PHP etc. I'll admit, as soon as I saw the word "skeptic", the enormity of the task dawned on me, maybe it is more than a little pie in the sky, then again, it would be great if successful. The anoying part of this is surely that all the tools to build a great community site are always there, its just the theming and pooling of the technologies that is tough. Gaz
-----Original Message----- From: Jeff Garland [mailto:jeff@crystalclearsoftware.com] Sent: 04 May 2005 09:10 To: boost-users@lists.boost.org Subject: Re: [Boost-users] The Boost Community
I'll just respond in general to the thread. It's great to see some enthusiasm from the boost user community. I'm afraid to say, however, that I'm a bit of a skeptic. Having started the Boost Wiki in 2001 after a burst of similar discussion and the initial creation of the Boost-user mailing list, I consider the wiki to be basically a failed experiment. That's not to say that the Boost_User Wiki hasn't been very useful to many people (especially Boost developers). But I'd say that there has never been sustained "user" support to help grow the Wiki and make it more useful for Boost users. The initial vision was that users would contribute 'tutorial' and other useful information. It's been sparse at best.
So my thought is that before we go and grow another technological solution and diluting our resources even more, we need to really think about what the 'users' want to achieve and why the current site doesn't meet those needs. Why don't more "users" contribute to the current Wiki? What is it that users really want to contribute to Boost? Why not build on some of the good things on the current wiki (like the 'effective xyz' pages? Why not band together and help work on the current Wiki? If it's additions to docs there are certainly many ways that can be done currently and is done all the time by a variety of users. It's alot of work to do it well I believe -- more than I can do. And if we want to augment with other technologies we can -- I'm fully open to expanding the hosting I already provide.
As for the wiki spam problem, I believe it to be a non-issue at this point. The problem really started to take off in mid-2004, but a series of measures have been implemented to reduce and resolve the problem. Yes, spam still appears from time to time, but it is quickly and completely reversed. The spammers that get thru initially get blocked out because the new content filter stops them from posting links to spammer sites after an admin update. The more organized and dangerous spammers seem to have moved on to easier targets. And at this point, any open content system is going to have to face this problem -- so be prepared.
Jeff
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