It's a little bit chicken-and-egg ... I'll decide once I see who's already there :)
I would guess that a new, more general, forum needs more than some fraction ( x < 1 ) of arc forum users in order to be engaging or useful ... are there other communities you will also attract some seed population from?
Do you want to give an example of the kinds of topics you have in mind?
hmmm.... idealistically I had hoped that doing this might grow the arc community, provide more things for the same community to engage in.
are there other communities you will also attract some seed population from
I think so, if I re-tool the forum well enough that conceptual domains are not all over the place, that could happen.
Do you want to give an example of the kinds of topics you have in mind?
yup.
* Right now I proxy from apache to my arc server. I was
reading about the Nginx webserver and wanted to know if
anyone had proxied from Nginx to Arc and could 'dicuss'
the worth-it/not-worth-it setup&configs of it. Nginx docs
are bad and most blogs only discuss integration with
mainstream technologies. Really this is a side topic not
truly arc related.
* I was reading about 'coffee script' and want to know
if anyone has used it. I was thinking of writing a
arc->coffe-script tool, but I would like to post
questions on it first.
I think that running Nginx as a frontend to Arc is relevant since there may be issues related specifically with the interaction between the two. Of course there might not be, but how would you know until you got into it? For example I'm running Perlbal as a frontend to Arc, and it gets messed up when Arc send a response without carriage returns in the headers but has a carriage returns in the beginning of the body. That's something that it's unlikely that anyone else is going to run into.
And if you're thinking of a Arc -> coffee-script tool, who knows, there might be some things that even if coffee-script is cool in general, might be unusual or problematic in the context of Arc.
I suppose "talk about anything as long as you include an obligatory Arc reference" might be going too far :-) but I suspect the line is further out than you've drawn it ^_^
I'd go farther - it doesn't even have to include an obligatory arc reference. The number of users here is small enough that the usual rules are less important. Especially if it's occasional (the front page is still mostly arc) and from someone we recognize, I think the handful of people here prob won't mind (or they'll respond to this if they do ;)
I'm finding out that creating a new destination site is crazy hard to do. The internet is mature; all of us have our habits, and it takes a lot to change. Just go where your audience is. If they don't like what you say they'll let you know, and you can then iterate.
hmmm. Good point. I suppose if no one replies to my 'other' items here, then a side forum probably would not work anyhow. And if I don't get replies to most of them - I'll probably get the hint (at least one would hope)... :)
At this point, I think that more posts is probably a good thing, even if they're only slightly related to arc.
A lot of people like me probably don't check all that often because there isn't much going on. If we can increase the number of comments/submissions to a slightly higher level, it will probably encourage more return visits, and better community interaction. Sure, the quality should be kept high and this is the arc forum. But by all means, submit "other" posts, if only so that there's a reason to check more frequently. That would give the arc community a greater appearance of life, and allow the posts and questions that "really matter" to get more attention as well.
