Discussion

Some suggestions about the website concerning subdomain and groups

August 28, 2012 - 21:17 pm
2 comment(s)

Hello all,

I want to comment on some things concerning the website that I noticed:

 

  1. Subdomain "www":
    To reach the website of ProjectLibre, I need to surf to "www.projectlibre.org", i.e. including the subdomain "www". In the case that I only enter the domain "projectlibre.org", instead of reaching the project's website, I get redirected to godaddy.com. This should be fixed to avoid a lot of users not finding the site correctly.
  2. User Groups:
    There is one main group called "Global User Group", which is subdevided in "Project Libre Server" and 6 Community groups, according to their geographic location. IMHO this is not a very good segmentation, since it makes an unnecessary division (=weakening!) of the community without providing any benefit (other than having some statistic about how many members come from a specific continent, which you can very easily see at your webserver's logfiles, too). This fragmentation represents an obstacle to communication, especially in this stage of the project, where there are only a handful of community members. Why should e.g. the member in the African group not read my english message in e.g. the American group? There is no benefit in that.
    Proposal:
    I propose to segment the groups into e.g. applications (e.g. "Project Libre" and "Project Libre Server"), into problems (e.g. "installation", "configuration", etc.) or languages (e.g. "English", "Spanish"), etc. As for the languages, I would only start this further segmenation as soon as the userbase has really grown to a certain crytical mass, because otherwise it weakens again our combined strenght of speaking the same language (i.e. the "internatinal language" which is English).
  3. Facebook:
    My "NoScript" plugin notices, that you have integrated facebook into the website. These "features" are not recognized to be "a good thing" by many people, since they are means to user surveillance and highly crytical concerning privacy. A Free Software project is always also a political and social statement, and most advocates of Free Software are advocates of Freedom as a general state of mind. Thus, installing surveillance tools and privacy-enemies such as Facebook onto the website should be recognized as very bad style by quite a lot of potential community members, including me. It kind of stinks:-)

Just my 5 cents,
thinkerix

2 Comments

August 28, 2012 - 23:51 pm

Thank you for the suggestions! 

1) We do need to fix the subdomain and are looking at that today.  Nice catch!!!

2) I like what you are thinking here..... we expect over 6,000,000 users of ProjectLibre. It is an open question how many would join the community.  If it were large the geographic communities would be a major benefit. However, the size is so small now that your idea makes sense. This will be an open item.

3) Good point, we are obviously open source folks and used an open source Drupal module.  It seemed like a convenient addition for the community.  However, had not thought of that aspect.  We are heads down getting the release out this week. It looks good but this will ge an agenda item, your perspective is very helpful!

Once again, really appreciate the feedback.  We are looking to make a big difference in the open source an project management space!

O'B

In reply to by OB

August 30, 2012 - 10:43 am

We are in the midst of getting the release ready for tomorrow but your comments on Facebook have really caused a lot of good discussion.  I confess to being a FB geek and on there daily.  I am in the minority and wnat to make sure we have the right decision on that login.  I am going to post a poll and hopefully we can get good community consensus.  We will follow the consensus!!!  Thank you again, it was very helpful!!!!