Am Donnerstag, den 05.05.2011, 11:01 +0200 schrieb Rob Davis rob@davis-family.info:
On 05/05/11 10:38, Henning Pingel wrote:
Hello,
[This email has been sitting in my drafts folder for a few weeks. Today I had the courage to send it.]
I was wondering if it would make sense to offer a place for VDR users using the sky_uk/freesat/S28.2E/freeview platforms to communicate with each other. The intention is that people can discuss their special needs like freesat EPG, red button stuff, channel lists, channel logos and all other things and test new inventions (like the red button extension) together.
Being a frequent user of freesat channels myself and being a member of the developers behind the yaVDR distribution (www.yavdr.org), I would like to offer to you to open up an English language community forum on our yaVDR board located at forum.yavdr.com http://forum.yavdr.com. This board is currently mostly used by our development team for internal discussions, so there is not much to see there for external visitors yet.
Please don't get me wrong: I don't want to drag away developer discussions from this mailing list, it's more a forum where developers and users who share the same topics (freesat/freeview/SKY_UK) can communicate and solve problems related to VDR together. And knowledge could be made more accessible for new VDR users.
Maybe this could also be a good starting point for building up an English language VDR user community forum - starting off with UK/Ireland users. I always thought an English language community was missing next to the German language VDR portal (www.vdr-portal.de http://www.vdr-portal.de).
If some of you guys here are interested in such a place, please give me a short reply. It only takes me a couple of minutes to set up a new area on the forum. Or is there already a forum in place?
If that is the case, can you add a US / ATSC / PVRInput section too. I get the feeling there are only three people using VDR in the US.. :-) Although it could be good to share..
Rob, thanks for your suggestion.
I share your view that it would be perfect to have a big English language forum for international VDR users with regional sections for user groups with the same problems. Until today I'm still very unsure if I want to volunteer in offering such a big forum because it consumes quite a lot of time in maintaing it (moderation, deleting spam messages, updating board software, making backups, throw out malicious hackers, hosting + making sure it's available and fast). But you can be sure that we have discussed the idea of an international forum several times within the yaVDR team and always came to the conclusion not to open up a big forum.
I was looking for a way to offer an English language forum and at the same time keep the maintenance workload for me relatively low so that I'm able to still help out with developing new yaVDR features.
I'm still of the opinion that a real full-blown English language forum for VDR is too much responsibility and too time-consuming for me next to maintaining the yaVDR website and yaVDR documentation. But because of my personal interest for the UK channels and the amount of new ideas and patches around a UK "flavoured" VDR here on this mailing list, I made this offer.
Alternatively, I would ale be very happy if somebody else would volunteer and open up a full-blown international English language VDR forum. Then the yaVDR team could also slip into that forum with a yaVDR section.
That's my current point of view and that makes me hesitate to open up a VDR forum that is not limited in any way (by topics or region). I hope you understand my point. Basically, as soon as I'm convinced that there are other people seriously interested in supporting an international English language forum I might reconsider my point of view.
There are other thoughts regarding the goal of a forum that I will put into the answers to the other people who replied.
Regards, Henning