The Future of the Power Toys Forums

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Many of you power toy users out there have already visited our power toy forums. 
We created this forum to discuss current and future power toys.  This forum has supported both the needs of our community and our internal processes very well.

However, CodePlex itself has discussion boards, aka forums, associated per project.  I’ve struggled for some time with what to do with our forums versus those on CodePlex.  After having attended OSCON, i’m convinced that we need to migrate to CodePlex discussion boards.

Reasons for Migrating to the CodePlex discussion boards

  1. Categorization of comments – having just MSBee-related comments in MSBee project, etc.
  2. More diverse content - The MSDN Forum boards are optimized for "How Do I" related Q&A. What I want to see moving forward is having any internal discussions posted on our disucssion boards (i.e. triage notes, core-developer monthy sync-ups, dates for potential chats, etc.) This goes back to the first bullet point that if i don’t have the discussion forums grouped by project, it will become increasingly difficult to find related project content.
  3. One less registration system, One less website - i’ve always felt weird having to redirect people from Codeplex to the MSDN forums.  I believe most, if not all, power toys people, have an account on MSDN Forums.  But it goes back to having the discussion boards more closely tied to each project, and having to enter a new site, with a new username / identity, seems to take away from building a community around the project.

And now the trade-offs

  1. Moving away from the consistent, one-stop shop nature of the MSDN Forums.  As i said earlier, most power toy people, if not all, are using the MSDN forums.  Now i’m asking them to learn/use yet another web forum…
  2. We lose the internal tracking ability that the MSDN Forums provide us.  We get internal notifications about Q&A status.  However, i’m hoping CodePlex will give us more specific RSS feeds on that we can subscribe to regarding forum Q&A updates.

For future tools, we’ll post our questions in the forum for the corresponding technology.  For example, if i were going to write a tool called "Sara’s Super-Snazzy C# Snippet Sampler," (argh, what is this writing technique called in English courses?)  i will post my questions / opinion polls in the C# IDE / editor forums.

Just another step closer to bringing you a better power toy community…