Ben Bucksch wrote: > > I wonder, if moving the site to beonex.org/communicator would attract > more developers.
Well, I can't say for sure (because my own time is probably too limited anyway to be able to help in any substantial way) but beonex.org would have made a better impression on *me* than .com. The following is my theory of the best way to make a better impression on potential contributors. It's just a suggestion, of course. >From my perspective, presenting Beonex as a company indicates in some vague way that Beonex and Me are two different things. It also signifies that the person responsible for Beonex achieving its goals is, well, Beonex. Not all of that is to do with the .com domain, but the overall presentation of the site (last time I looked) suggests the same thing: we'd like you to be our customer, as opposed to we'd like you to be *part* of us. Mozilla.org is the opposite, and that has its downsides too: an end-user who found themselves at mozilla.org would be a bit lost if they wanted anything other than downloads. I think there's room for both beonex.com and beonex.org. Present beonex.org as the homepage when making release announcements, calls for volunteers, etc on mozilla newsgroups and the like. People on those groups are more likely to be developers than end-users. Mention both pages if you announce on freshmeat, because both classes of people might frequent that. If you talk to any mainstream press, mention the .com site. Structure beonex.org something like Mozilla.org, with the main links being to download (source and binary) tarballs, mailing lists, cvs access, etc. Maybe mirror the patchmaker homepage - see if you can make it even easier to use patchmaker with beonex than with mozilla[1]. Of course, have a prominent link to beonex.com near the top of beonex.org to indicate where users should go. Then remove the developer information from beonex.com and put just the user's documentation, mailing lists, binary-only tarballs and packages, screenshots, etc on beonex.com. One of the things that makes a big difference to *me* in whether I become involved in a project is the quality of the mailing lists and especially of the archives. If I can keep up with the mailing list by checking the web archive for a while, I can make a better judgement of the activity level of the project and decide whether my help is worth it. Since subscribing to a mailing list adds to the already substantial amount of stuff that I get by email, I'd rather make sure it's worth my while before I do that. It took me a long time to find the beonex developer mailing lists in the site (and now I've lost them and can't find them again, even with the help of the sitemap), and I still haven't found the archives. The mail-archive.com version of the users archive is nice - a mail-archive link for the developer lists prominently from the proposed beonex.org page would give me a much more positive impression about the "community-orientedness" of beonex. I hope that in the absence of actual *help*, these suggestions are still of some worth to you. I appreciate what Beonex does and I'd like to see it succeed. Stuart. [1] One way to do this would be to offer patchmaker-ready binary tarballs. These would come with the chrome directory pre-unjarred (with the jar files removed entirely) and patchmaker sitting in the same place as the beonex binary, all ready to go. -- Stuart Ballard, Programmer FASTNET - Internet Solutions 215.283.2300, ext. 126 www.fast.net
