ANNOUNCING XPe FORUM DISCUSSION SITE!
After several weeks working with our MSDN team, I am very pleased to announce that the Forum discussion site of XPe is live now at https://forums.microsoft.com/EmbeddedWindows ! Go sign in with your passport account info there and see how cool it is!
What Are Forums?
They are a web-based analog of NNTP newsgroups.
Why Not Just Use Newsgroups?
- Newsgroups are being abandoned: 8% decline in usage each year ; 20% decline in “top participants” last year
- Newsgroups have 30-day persistence time limit while Forums don’t: We are losing tons of generated knowledge every month
- Forums support additional message attributes: Question/Answer Tagging ; Post Rating; Comment/Question Attributes
- Passport authentication allows for role management and reduction of spam
- Web-based forums are easier to integrate with client-based help systems
- Presentation of forums is heavily customizable
- Search is much easier
- Statistics on top contributors can be publicly available and published on the homepage
- Moderation tools are much more accessible; moderator rights can be granted more freely
Can you elaborate on why you think forums are much more extensible and user friendly compared to the newsgroups?
For example, search. You can search the Newsgroups using Google Groups. We've done it probably thousands of times as we are helping people internally and externally. One major downside to searching the NGs this way is that you pretty much have to read all the threads until you find the answer, sometimes when you find what you think is the answer, it turns out that answer was wrong. In the forums, we'll be able to mark the thread as 'question answered' which should greatly decrease the time "grepping" through the noise and also increase your level of confidence in the answer.
Then there's the low hanging fruit benefits like locking threads if a flame-war breaks out, removing spam, assigning questions to a participant from the product team to answer, etc...
Will the public newsgroup on XPe be retired?
No, the public newsgroup on XPe is not being retired. The forum is just an alternative to it for now. However, we highly encourage our customers to use forums more going forward. We expect a year or two from now the forum site will replace the newsgroup to become the central site for the community discussion.
Currently Andy, Lynda and myself are the forum moderators. We certainly welcome more moderators later.
OK, enjoy the ride!