First of all, I want to congratulate to KDE Forum Administrator for the new forum interface.
I hava a question related to KDE Brainstorm:

1. Some days ago I try to posting NEW IDEA in KDE Brainstorm and the message "You cannot post in this forum." was appear.
Why?

2. I try to reply in my topic about Implement "My Computer" thing in KDE. But I cannot do it because there is a message that stating that my topic was locked. Why?

3. When will an idea at KDE Brainstorm be considered as "In Development" or "Won't Fix"

Thanks,
RyanBram

My bad. 1 & 2 are fixed. Let us know if you still can't post.

About 3, it is usually when a developer starts working / rejects it.

Thanks for responding my question.

I have one question again and suggestion about tagging system.

When I try to post new topic, I cannot find any way to tag it. The only solution that I found is by editing my topic's tag after I finished submiting my topic.
I think the tagging system must be allowed by default as we write new topic and there must be a list of tag that already used by other users.
Because the necessity of tag for making topics to be easily indexed or archived, so my suggestion is, when a user want to start new topic then he must give at least one tag for his thread otherwise he will find a message like "You didn't give tag to your post. Please give it at least one tag."

Regards.

How about you create an idea at Brainstorm and see how it goes? Once you post it, I can validate it and make it open for voting.

I already did it. Thanks.

BTW, I think your KDE Brainstorming FAQs seems little bit outdated especially in screenshot.

But actually I prefer the old vote badge instead of the new vote indicator. Because in the old system I could see the number of vote and I could vote an idea without entering the actual topic, even I could give neutral vote for an idea that I voted accidentally .

Regards,

before i start.. i really like the new UI for the forum but when it comes to the brainstorm section it is somehow unusable for me now.. at my first visit with the new UI i thought the brainstorm section is in some sort of maintenance mode since i couldn't find my "dashboard" with the "new ideas" button..

therefore more brainstorm questions:
#how do i find those ideas i haven't already voted on?
#how do i browse through ideas now - reading the headline is just not sufficent..

i'm here from the first moment the brainstorm section was born but if it's converted to a normal forum now i think i'll pass on voting in the future.. it seems to complicated at this moment... thanks and sorry.

When I wrote the old Brainstorm, I didn't realize that having an independent system running over a board software could move towards a security issue. The old system had a copy of all the core files that our board software has, so any changes to the core software had to be closely monitored and synced. That being said, KDE Community Forum is, in the end, a forum. Brainstorm is something we provided as an additional feature in the past, but given its architecture, it had to be deprecated and re-written in a way so that it doesn't pose any security concerns in the future.

Although, since I do find your points legit, I have implemented a "topic preview" feature in all forums. This will be live today evening (GMT). It basically gives you a preview link, hovering on it for about a second or clicking it should quickly give a preview of the first post in that topic. For brainstorm, it will also show voting controls.

About the other one, we can't do anything about that currently. But perhaps later, I'll add an option that would say "View new ideas" to search for the ideas you have voted upon.

wow.. thanks!
sounds great.. looking forward to it!

I'm probably speaking a bit out of my place... but shouldn't the Brainstorm deserve a different site on its own, complementing the bug tracker ?

manasij7479 wrote:I'm probably speaking a bit out of my place... but shouldn't the Brainstorm deserve a different site on its own, complementing the bug tracker ?

We considered this, but there were several reasons why the forum was used:

- We already had an active user base, another system would mean yet another site users would have to register at and use.
- More importantly, the forum had an active team that could take care of approving ideas etc. (Unfortunately we currently lack manpower because most of us are busy with other stuff.) This was crucial for the early success of Brainstorm.
- The forum (with modifications) provided the features we wanted for Brainstorm and the admins were used to working with it.

That's what I remember off the top of my head.

Hans wrote:

manasij7479 wrote:I'm probably speaking a bit out of my place... but shouldn't the Brainstorm deserve a different site on its own, complementing the bug tracker ?

We considered this, but there were several reasons why the forum was used:

- We already had an active user base, another system would mean yet another site users would have to register at and use.
- More importantly, the forum had an active team that could take care of approving ideas etc. (Unfortunately we currently lack manpower because most of us are busy with other stuff.) This was crucial for the early success of Brainstorm.

Then merge the whole system to be controlled by a single database.
Different front ends could exist, (forum, wiki, brainstorm, bug tracker, news page, version control, documentation...etc), but the admin teams from different parts could be merged, redistributing the workload.
The users would also find it very convenient.

manasij7479 wrote:Then merge the whole system to be controlled by a single database.
Different front ends could exist, (forum, wiki, brainstorm, bug tracker, news page, version control, documentation...etc), but the admin teams from different parts could be merged, redistributing the workload.
The users would also find it very convenient.

That is practically impossible. We use different CMSs on different sites, some written in ruby, some in php, some in perl, each one of them has a different database structure. Either way, it's not about having a unified database, it's about having staff who can take care of it. Authentication is not an issue anyway as we use a unified login (LDAP) on most sites.

sayakb wrote:That is practically impossible. We use different CMSs on different sites, some written in ruby, some in php, some in perl, each one of them has a different database structure.

That was actually my point !
Rewiring them to use the same infrastructure will actually reduce the total resource required in the long run.
(Who knows, if you actually get around to writing or assembling such a system, it probably will become the 'standard' for Open Source projects.)

Either way, it's not about having a unified database, it's about having staff who can take care of it.

Of course, but as everything is running fine now, I guess that enough or barely enough are there now.
Having them in the same place will only serve to even out the administrative work... and parts won't be neglected if someone takes a long vacation.

All major web application we have (Wordpress, phpBB, MediaWiki, drupal) have dedicated (and huge) communities who invest a lot of time and effort in developing secure and stable software. Even if we have enough manpower, I don't quite see a point in re-writing all of them.

From administration POV, there's no advantage in having our own custom software. On the contrary, it actually makes it worse - admins/webmasters not only have to manage their websites but also code day and night to fix issues they come across.

Please send a mail to kde-www@kde.org if you wish to discuss this further. This thread is now closed.