As FlexWiki is growing since its release by Microsoft to the open source community, many people are using it in production and discovering ways to manipulate it and also are finding bugs. The FlexWiki community has been very generous in sharing their ideas with everyone, particularly the people who are hosting this on their own computer. No one makes a profit off of making FlexWiki better nor hosting the software - in fact it costs them time and money.

With that said, I want to express that beggars can't be choosers, so I first want to thank the main developers, those who are taking the time to share their ideas and manage the system on SourceForge and on this server.

The purpose of this topic is to dicuss ways to improve communication. SourceForge is an excellent site that helps opensource software to develop by creating a depository of data for the project, including an RFE, bug catcher, and a message board. All of these are beneficial to the project. But, the weakness that I have is with the message board where we discuss ideas. SourceForge is notorious for being slow and clumsy despite its efficiency at bringing the opensource community around a project. The FlexWiki message board is slow, inefficient at keeping a thought-process, and difficult for people to post messages, thus curtailing communication.

The developers have created an excellent wiki with the development of WikiTalk. And .NET is powerful but also has the potential for more bugs because it's more powerful than other code and requires a little bit more careful coding than other codes, I believe. Handling the strengths and weaknesses of this application requires efficient communication. A message board that can easily track messages and topics, and has a simple gateway for people to post messages will increase the commitment of the community and also the number of people contributing ideas and content.

A New Hope: A new message board

I propose to the powers that be, that is the admins of the SourceForge project, and the owner of this server, to advocate and host a new message board. There are several message boards that are open source and free to use. There are already several open .NET message boards but they are not entirely bug-free. Because FlexWiki is on a Microsoft platform, I propose using a well-known and well-used Classic ASP forum. It is mature and hassle-free: Snitz Forum

The challenge to this is running a MSSQL Server costs money and as FlexWiki becomes more popular, storing data will become more expensive. But, any project will require financial commitments among the developers. Snitz can run, though, on an Access database for a while until the community outgrows it, and then if that stage is reached, it can easily be upgraded to a MSSQL Server. That stage is usually around 300MB according to many Snitz users.

Eventually, though, someone is going to have to bite the bullet and purchase space. Perhaps Microsoft will donate space. The FlexWiki community is clever enough to find a solution.

Please discuss your ideas, the strengths and weaknesses, or even dismissing my idea - no hard feelings. I'll continue to use FlexWiki and the SourceForge messageboard even if this idea is shot down. -- AstralisLux

Comments

Anyone? -- AstralisLux