[Haskell-cafe] Writing forum software in Haskell

[Brian Smith]

On 9/24/06, David House <dmhouse at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi all.
>
> The recent thread on email vs. forums inspired a bit of interest to
> get some forum software on haskell.org. Were we to go ahead with this,
> I think it'd be great to have this software written in Haskell itself.


If you were to write all-new software, then I suggest:

* Haskell.org single-sign-on: One username/password combination that is
valid across all Haskell.org services (wiki, forums, mailing lists, CVS,
etc.)

* A forum-like interface to the existing mailing lists: Instead of building
full-blown forum, why not create a web interface that nicely organizes the
archives of the existing mailing lists into a forum-like interface. Then,
add a mechanism for sending messages to those mailing lists through a
forum-like posting interface (using username/password), which would result
in a message being sent to the mailing lists.

A lot of existing Haskell users are content with the mailing lists, I
believe. Forums are not going to add a lot of value to the existing users.
So, unless there is some gateway between the existing mailing lists and the
forums, you should expect that most experienced Haskellers would likely
ignore the forums altogether. That would make the forums less than useful,
if questions were being asked in the forums that can only be answered by
people that are exclusively using the mailing lists.

Regards,
Brian
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