[Biojava-l] BioJava discussion board

[Thomas Down]

Hi...

This is something of a new departure for BioJava, but a couple
of us on the BioJava IRC channel (#biojava on irc.openprojects.
net) were wondering if there would be interest in some kind
of discussion board for biojava developers.

Web boards have been fairly successful discussion media in
a lot of areas.  Their particular strength, as far as I can
see it, is for cases where there's a fairly extended discussion
on one particular topic, and where people might want to refer
back to this in the future.  Mailing lists don't always handle
this particularly well, especially for people who don't have
threaded mail readers.  A typical example might be a request for
enhancement to a program, where developers might reply with
several different solutions, then discuss their relative merits.

To see how this works, I've set up and experimental BioJava
board at:

      http://firechild.dyndns.org/

(This is running on my home machine -- it should be available most
of the time, but I can't promise 100% uptime).  It's nothing
formal at the moment, but if you're interested, please drop by
and have a play.

It's running on mod_virgule, the system behind http://www.advocato.org/
and http://www.ghostscript.com/.  This is fairly clean and simple,
and was pleasingly easy to install.  It works on a `certification'
system -- anyone can create an account, but you must be certified by
someone before you're allowed to post aricles (you can post diary
entries without certification, though).  I'll be certifying anyone
I see who I recognize from this mailing list.


Hope people find this useful,

       Thomas.