zathras said:
I'd be in favor of a board here for general questions, and for the exposure. We can have a googlegroup + news feed for release announcements etc and more in-depth discussion.
imho splitting the information bits up like that is not good practice in online publicity. My personal philosophy: Keep it all in one place to the extent that it doesn't become a burden (which isn't very likely, because the burden usually comes from the other way around).
The vote seems to be going in the board's favor right now. I still favor Groups. I factor in experiences I've had trying to communicate with people who are 'second party members' more so than actual community members. As in, members who sign up with a community that empowers a big concept (jme) but they themselves are by and large only interested in a smaller subset of it (GDE by NetBeans Platform).
During those times when there isn't quite enough time/motivation to keep up with the project these 'second grade members' will just refrain from visiting the forum at all. At the time when a small mention of the project might have provided the necessary reminder/rejuvenator to get back at it, they're just not visiting the forum any longer.
In the case of Groups, you're more likely to stop reading the mails for a while, or decrease the frequency of the incoming mails, than cancel your subscription all together. My point being, it's somewhat of a more reliable 'safetyline' if you want casual contributors to keep coming back whenever they feel like contributing again.
On the point of exposure, I left out mentioning that we can always create a 'Redirect Board', which looks just like a board (so members who don't read the description will just go 'ooh, I wanna go in there!') except it's just an URL.
zathras wrote:
Another question: "Game Design Engine" states clearly what it is, but GDE just disappears in a flood of similar abbreviations... I read "Gnome Desktop Environment" every time I see it... :|
Good point. Erm, I thought it stood for 'Game Development Environment' ;D
However we want to phrase it, it's to everyone's advantage that we start using the complete name more often. This will also boost search engine results. If we get to the point that jmonkeyengine.com pops up on the first page when someone searches for those three words, that's pretty big.
zathras wrote:
(...) A widget (like my.netbeans) that displays a little "Proud member of jME" box in your blog and has a few fields with info...
It's an interesting idea, but who will develop it?
@Custom: I think we'll keep it within the official team blog, since it is an official project developed by a core member and somewhat of a 'flagship product'. It will however have its own category, meaning we could offer an RSS feed for the GDE alone.
About the naming again; we might want to come up with a unique name for this platform, like 'MonkeyBeans'. It should be up to Normen when and where to discuss this particular aspect of the project though, so try hold off on name suggestions until we get the green light ;)
