JQuery moved from Google Groups to Zoho Forum | Hacker News Reader

JQuery moved from Google Groups to Zoho Forum

forum.jquery.com

41 pointsscorpion03225 comments

At Zoho, we are thrilled to have jQuery hosted on Zoho Discussions. We use jQuery extensively, so it is particularly sweet for our developers. We plan to offer forums free for all open source projects.

We have been strong users of forums software internally for a while. In fact, our company culture is strongly shaped by our use of community tools, and in return that has shaped our product roadmap. As the experience in our 1000+ person company shows, collaboration within a business can learn a lot from collaboration that happens in open source communities.

Just checked it out...Mmmm, clicky. Very mouse intensive to navigate. Also very stuffy on 1024x600 (Netbook).

Zoho is a 1000+ company? Wow. I thought you were prob around the 200-300 level.

If I may ask, what server technologies do you people use at Zoho?

The fact each and every page loads only the relevant section is imo, a great feature and a feature that using django templates, I can achieve fairly easily.

I had similar problems with the Redis google group but I must admin that the fix was as simple as turning on the moderate-on-first-post feature. A few kind guys from a different timezone are helping in moderating the list so even messages posted at night by new users will get posted in a decent amount of time.

That said, indeed, Google Groups has some spam problem indeed, but it appears to be workable using this trick.

That wasn't enough for us. Most of the moderators/administrators are being spoofed and having spam sent as them. http://ejohn.org/blog/google-groups-is-dead/

Yep probably being the JQuery group an order of magnitude bigger and older it's a totally different matter, and I guess this means that even the Redis group at some time may need to switch to something else.

EDIT: I just received the first of such spoofed spam messages. So indeed this is going to be useless :(

http://librelist.com/

Use it, love it.

I get that from time to time on the Hecl google group, but so far it's not too bad. I wonder what prevents them from fixing it.

John,

I am really curious as to why you did not choose StackOverflow. StackOverflow is extremely well suited for programming related questions.

I agree - it's really a great tool for questions and there already exists a vibrant jQuery community there. Unfortunately Q&A isn't the only form of communication that the jQuery community has: We also have bug reports and development discussions. We seriously considered going with Stack Overflow (or even with a Stack Exchange) but in the end we would still have to set up a separate site for having general discussions - and that would fracture the community even further. We looked for a tool that would unify both discussion and Q&A under a single site and of the ones that we found Zoho Discussions was the best. It'll take a little bit of work to get to the normal level of polish that one typically associates with the jQuery project but it's "just" user interface concerns and not a fundamental difference in the software's structure.

To continue the chain, did you consider using Librelist? Zed seems to be mad at Groups for similar (but not identical, his reasons were short whereas yours were long and detailed) reasons. Do you feel forums tend to be better than mailing lists for these kinds of discussions? I've been considering the question lately, as I used to be a _huge_ fan of forums, but have moved away from them as of late.

This kind of sparks with that whole "developer email client" thing I was talking about in another thread. Forums are in HTML and HTML is about formatting for reading. As most know, code has different reading standards than legible text, making forums a really poor choice for code talk.

I really wish there were a new standard of markup for code highlighting through email.

Librelist has no user interface to speak of - at least with Google Groups it was possible for some users to post from the web. A critical reason for our move was being able to make it easier for people to ask questions and get answers - thus a simple and easy-to-use web interface is critical to that.

Ah, gotcha. I never used Google Groups' web interface, so I forgot it existed.

There were quite a few complaints in the forum about Zoho Forum (although it seems a lot better than using Google Groups IMHO).

What would you use for forums for a technical discussion about an open source platform, if you didn't use Google Groups or Zoho Forum?

Thankfully most of the complaints are already resolved or are in the process of being resolved. A BIG reason why we ended up choosing Zoho discussions was their willingness to work with the team and accomodate our concerns. They even did all the hard work of importing all the old google groups posts and the old jqueryhelp.com forum. So yeah, it's a bit quirky at the moment but I fully expect the issues to get ironed out either before launch or in the next couple weeks.

I'm a big fan of Vanilla forums: completely open-source, they were in Techstars last year along with me, and overall it's the nicest system I've used. The only drawback is that it's focused on web use rather than email, though there is some mail functionality.

http://vanillaforums.org/

Vanilla is great, but really not what you want for a tech forum IMHO, because it's very web-based indeed, and encourages use of HTML and images, a thing that I like a lot for random forums but not for tech ones.

I applaud this move. Google groups is a royal PITA and it's great to see large lists to migrate away from it.

Google should be ashamed of this product.

Google has improved Google Groups; it's now integrated into Google for Domains. Groups now work like email accounts with shared permissions and mailing list tools with the old Google Usenet web interface.

As of last month: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/join-this-group-googl...

(not affiliated with Google, but wanted to set the record straight)

From the link: "Today, we're happy to announce the launch of Google Groups to Google Apps Premier and Education Edition users". What does this mean for non-premier, non-edu-edition users?

For the jQuery Google Groups we didn't see much improvement. There was a slight reduction I the amount of spam but we're still getting spoofed, which really hurts. I can't wait to be off groups and on to the new forum fulltime.

Thanks for the info. I'm working on a Ruby on Rails tutorial book (http://www.railstutorial.org/), and some readers have started agitating for a forum. Having used Google Groups for my previous book, I was really reluctant to go down that hellish road again. I took a cursory look at Zoho, but didn't drill down very far. Knowing that jQuery is blazing a trail there makes me much likelier to give it a try myself.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com