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

jeresig 17y ago
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.
- steveklabnik 17y ago
  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.
  - ThinkWriteMute 17y ago
    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.
  - jeresig 17y ago
    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.
    - steveklabnik 17y ago
      Ah, gotcha. I never used Google Groups' web interface, so I forgot it existed.

jeresig 17y ago

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.

steveklabnik 17y ago
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.
- ThinkWriteMute 17y ago
  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.
- jeresig 17y ago
  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.
  - steveklabnik 17y ago
    Ah, gotcha. I never used Google Groups' web interface, so I forgot it existed.