With the upcoming release of Tasks 2.0 and a steady stream of people buying Tasks Pro™, I’m trying to decide how best to handle beta, support and feature discussions.
The options I’m currently looking at:
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Yahoo Groups
Pros: I already have these in place with people signed up and using them. The e-mail notifications are nice as is the ability for people to subscribe to ’special notices only’ and just get release announcements. Searchable archives are better than nothing.
Cons: You have to have a Yahoo account to sign up, the archives are not categorized by ‘bugs’, ‘feature requests’, etc.
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Forums (I’m looking at PunBB right now)
Pros: Many people are familiar and comfortable with them. The discussions become a public knowledge base and are gategorized and searchable. The ability to run polls with associated discussion is pretty nice.
Cons: Even with e-mail notifications, people have to go to the forums, the discussions don’t come to them.
If I decided to go with the forums, should I have one big forum with high level categories for each product? Or should I have separate forums? At this point it would be one on taskspro.com and one on alexking.org.
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Discussion Mailing Lists
Pros: Great for beta discussion with an active groups. The conversation comes to the participants.
Cons: Even with public archives, these suffer from the same problems as the Yahoo Groups. Doesn’t work that well for support.
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Announcement Mailing Lists
I plan to create a mailing list for product release announcements for each product. These are really handy, I just need to set them up.
So what do you guys think? Are there some points I’ve missed that I should be thinking about? Are there other options that I’ve overlooked?
Popularity: 6% [?]
Scott Sanders adds this Comment:
Forums, even though I prefer mailing lists. You get the searchability, and more people will probably use them. My preference for mailing lists is probably because I handle more mail than most people.
And why not phpBB?
April 1st, 2004 at 11:43 pm
Tim adds this Comment:
The advantage of yahoo groups is that it is free, and they do a reasonable job of search.
The disadvantage is all the ads, the clutter you have to wade through. The various php BB’s are much faster to search for an answer on.
I think that it is a scale question. As your products get more popular, as think they will, there will be a lot more posts daily, and fewer people who want to get the posts every day by email — at that point I think moving over to a BB solution (make sure you find one with really good, really fast search) makes sense. Then you can save email for announce only type stuff - new releases, etc.
My 2 cents, hope it is helpful.
April 1st, 2004 at 11:45 pm
Alex adds this Comment:
I’ll probably check out phpBB too, but PunBB seems a lot lighter and faster.
April 1st, 2004 at 11:50 pm
Jason Thurber adds this Comment:
I’d agree with Scott on forums. Conceptually I like mailing lists better, but I do a much better job of keeping up with the forums I read than staying active on my mailing lists.
April 2nd, 2004 at 12:11 am
Craig adds this Comment:
Forums
i like online searchable discussions.
simple to keep organized.
archives are simple to follow.
April 2nd, 2004 at 12:41 am
Ben adds this Comment:
For Beta discussions I think mailing lists are better, for support you can’t beat searchable forums. PhpBB is quite full-on - I quite like the one on the Wordpress site, miniBB though I ‘ve never installed it anywhere.
If you go for mailing lists, I would avoid Yahoo groups and just use a simple list server though.
April 2nd, 2004 at 1:06 am
Alex adds this Comment:
If I go with mailing lists for betas (I’ll probably add announcement lists regardless) should I require people to sign up for the list to participate in the beta?
I have an internal beta announcement list but I make the betas available to all customers so some of them have started using them on their own and don’t get announcments I send out. I think forums would be handy for them. Also, I think reading through forums is easier than reading through message archives for new people that join the betas.
That said, I really like Brent’s NetNewsWire beta mailing list though, I think it works well.
April 2nd, 2004 at 1:16 am
Joe adds this Comment:
I am a part of the yahoo group. I dont post to it as it is more of a pain to use than say a forum. I am in favor of you setting up a forum that has the ability to feed RSS for the posts like the WP forums do. This could eliminate the issue of the users having to come to the forums for discussion. Just my two cents.
April 2nd, 2004 at 1:45 am
Christian adds this Comment:
Hi!
What about Mailgust?
It’s not perfect (and I’m not sure whether it produces valid XHTML), but it combines a BB with a mailing lists…
April 2nd, 2004 at 3:58 am
Geof adds this Comment:
Alex:
I’m a large fan of fora, and I run a rather large phpBB install. Unless a community develops around Tasks, it’s not going to be an issue for you to run something like phpBB. Fora also allow interested power users to step up and help you do lots of tech support. People need to be needed!
April 2nd, 2004 at 6:33 am
Jesse J adds this Comment:
Forum all the way. It’s much easier to use. Some forum programs will include the messages in the notification e-mails as well.
April 2nd, 2004 at 6:38 am
kevin adds this Comment:
You don’t need a Yahoo account to use Yahoo Groups. Just send and email to the correct sign-on address and your good. Just an FYI.
April 2nd, 2004 at 6:58 am
Chris H adds this Comment:
I agree with the previous votes for forums.. mailing lists are kind of a pain and I get too much mail as is… Forums allow people to participate when they want to..
April 2nd, 2004 at 8:13 am
gkk adds this Comment:
Alex: To answer one of your secondary questions, I would prefer having one forum for all of your software, with sub-categories for tasks, tasks pro, etc. It would be useful, for instance, to see what the tasks pro people are doing with tasks pro even though I am using tasks. it would likely generate some upgrading or cross-selling for you, too.
April 2nd, 2004 at 8:45 am
sandro adds this Comment:
i’d have to vote for a phpBB solution as well. not only can people serve themselves (which i am always for), nor would we get tons of email, but you’d get an ever growing knowledgebase archive of problems and solutions that new users could _hopefully_ search prior to asking you about… not to mention a BB solution could allow duly appointed users (if you choose that route) to take on some of adminitrative duties so that you could spend more time working on your killer apps
April 2nd, 2004 at 9:29 am
Michael Baas adds this Comment:
Force people into using RSS
mb
April 2nd, 2004 at 9:46 am
Geof adds this Comment:
Well, I’ll argue for Web fora for another reason: you want an accessible solution for your users. Tasks is Web-based—it makes sense then that the support function should be Web-based.
While I love email and I love RSS, I have tools that manage those formats well. Most folks don’t. The common tool that people will have to manage content is the Web browswer.
April 2nd, 2004 at 10:50 am
Ric adds this Comment:
Forums for support with categories etc. Agree that combining 1.x, 2.0 and pro support would be nicer.
Mailing list for announcements would be good - say i find no problems and therfore never need to go to the forum :), how do i know a new version is out…
April 2nd, 2004 at 11:09 am
GFMorris.com: It's all a blur. adds this Trackback:
Fora or Mailing Lists?
Alex asks a good question: should Internet-based software technical support and features discussion be offered via Web-based fora or mailing lists?
My answers to him were:
First:
I’m a large fan of fora, and I run a rather large phpBB install. Unless a community develop…
April 2nd, 2004 at 11:38 am
Jonathan Greene adds this Comment:
I definitely like the board option as well. I like being able to self-serve, search and subscribe as you can with phpBB. I like the RSS option within the WordPress boards as well… not sure if you can do that in phpBB…
Sounds like we mostly like boards…
I’d keep a list or rss feed though for announcements.
April 2nd, 2004 at 12:15 pm
Greg adds this Comment:
Forums get my vote. You could do something like they’ve done at DoubleBit (I’m not affiliated) http://doublebit.com/forums/
They’ve setup forums for their different products as the top level. If all the products are in the same forum it makes it easier to search through all of them… there will be some/many issues that will affect both Tasks and TasksPro users alike.
April 2nd, 2004 at 12:24 pm
Stuart Tannehill adds this Comment:
Go with a forum, Alex. The Yahoo groups system is a pain to deal with and frankly, I don’t want any more email than I require.
PHPBB vs. PunBB… go with Pun. It is lighter and (much) faster than PHPBB and simpler to manage. Heck, I am going to give it a try… and I usually use PHPBB.
April 2nd, 2004 at 12:37 pm
Chris K. adds this Comment:
What about newgroups/maillist? You can have a mailing list server, then have it post to the news server as well (mailman does this I belive).
April 2nd, 2004 at 1:06 pm
alexking.org: Blog adds this Trackback:
Ok, Forums AND Mailing Lists
My previous post has gotten a lot of good comments and responses. I’ve also gotten a dozen replies from an e-mail I sent out to my current beta testers asking for their thoughts, and I’ve had several discussions over IM during the day. More throu…
April 2nd, 2004 at 9:26 pm
Jennifer adds this Comment:
I vote for anything RSS-enabled so i can just subscribe to the feed to keep up with what’s going on. I just started using BlogLines.com and they can turn an email list into an RSS feed for you, so I would prefer the email list if the forum sw you choose cannot do RSS. Luckily yahoo groups can be turned into RSS feeds, but only if you do not require people to “join” before they are allowed to read posts.
April 3rd, 2004 at 6:47 pm
Alex adds this Comment:
Don’t worry, I’m a huge fan of RSS. There will definitely be RSS feeds for any of the solutions - even if I have to write it myself.
April 3rd, 2004 at 7:03 pm
alexking.org: Blog adds this Trackback:
Forums!
We’ve got forums:
http://alexking.org/forums/
The forums are running on the excellent PunBB package. I made a couple of mods (and still plan to do some tweaking to the built in RSS feeds for the forums to include more information), but the…
April 6th, 2004 at 12:42 am