2009-10-03, 02:42 AM
Well my experience came from trying to get a small community of foreigners on the same page for playing a Japanese MMORPG. Chat is good for that sort of thing, but not so good for a technical forum like this, because we're all trying to learn stuff.
If people were going to collaborate on a SOM project, just because the way SOM works, I think a CVS would be a must. The host I'm going to lease has this (Subversion) and we can use it for that amongst other things. A CVS typically encourages people to leave log messages on top of the normal record of who is checking out what files. Typically only text files are safe to merge, so for SOM you'd probably want only one person working on a file at a time (or group of files as is often the case with SOM)
It would be good I suppose to divorce design discussions from the forums, and such discussions are typically not of long term value. I set my own IRC server up once to see what it was like. I think I'm really not a fan of IRC in general. But I can't think of a single alternative off the top of my head. The old service we were using for IRC is probably still on the computer I work with SOM with. I might turn you onto that website when I get a chance. The IRC protocol to me has always seemed very clumsy/impractical... like anything I guess that is that old. It's like mailing lists in my list of crap I avoid like the plague.
I really think bulletin boards are the best of all forms of communication. Email I think is inherently insecure. Just subscribe to a BBS's RSS feed if you want to make it more real-time. This board has an RSS. If you're using Firefox, it will be an orange icon in the address bar of the site you're on.
If people were going to collaborate on a SOM project, just because the way SOM works, I think a CVS would be a must. The host I'm going to lease has this (Subversion) and we can use it for that amongst other things. A CVS typically encourages people to leave log messages on top of the normal record of who is checking out what files. Typically only text files are safe to merge, so for SOM you'd probably want only one person working on a file at a time (or group of files as is often the case with SOM)
It would be good I suppose to divorce design discussions from the forums, and such discussions are typically not of long term value. I set my own IRC server up once to see what it was like. I think I'm really not a fan of IRC in general. But I can't think of a single alternative off the top of my head. The old service we were using for IRC is probably still on the computer I work with SOM with. I might turn you onto that website when I get a chance. The IRC protocol to me has always seemed very clumsy/impractical... like anything I guess that is that old. It's like mailing lists in my list of crap I avoid like the plague.
I really think bulletin boards are the best of all forms of communication. Email I think is inherently insecure. Just subscribe to a BBS's RSS feed if you want to make it more real-time. This board has an RSS. If you're using Firefox, it will be an orange icon in the address bar of the site you're on.