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20051130 Wednesday November 30, 2005

Free Forums from Nabble.com Nabble seems like a pretty cool site:

Our forums are truly public, democratic and absolutely free. Nabble's advanced community filtering gives you only the best content without the need for moderation. Find forums that interest you or easily start your own in minutes.

I first found out about Nabble a few days ago when I started seeing messages on the AppFuse mailing with a from address of "sent by Nabble.com". I did some searching and found they have a set of AppFuse Forums. The cool thing about these forums is they're not only a set of mailing list archives, but they also allow you post to the mailing list. Nabble forums are similar to Jive Forums (like OpenSymphony has) - they keep the forums and the mailing lists in synch, which is pretty cool IMO.

I spoke (via e-mail) with Will Lin - one of the co-starters of the Nabble project. Here are a few things he had to say about Nabble:

The goal of Nabble is to do the discussion right, just like Google did the search right. There are many problems with the current forms of discussions in mailing lists, message boards, user groups etc. Most importantly, (1) the search, most forum search are broken, a lot of people use Google's site:archive.domain.com to search discussion archive - what a hack, because Google does not index all the messages especially the recent ones.

In the mailing list case, developers get mad because users post dumb questions repeatedly, but the users don't have a good way to search past discussions ... (2) moderation, most discussions rely on one or two strong moderator to resolve spam and flame wars, with Nabble, all the members can work togeter to rate up (promote) top contributors, and rate down (drive out) spam and trouble makers; (3) cataloging - similar topic discussions should be able to be combined for browsing and search.

One of the coolest features of Nabble is you can create your own forum, and skin it however you like. I've done this for AppFuse, and created an easy to remember alias at http://appfuse.org/forums. You can also check out the easily-searchable Roller Archives, as well as many other OS project's mailing list archives. Posted in Java at Nov 30 2005, 10:20:07 PM MST 5 Comments