On Thu, Feb 06, 2014 at 11:39:16AM -0800, un_spoken@... wrote:

> Hello,
>
> original topic was started here:https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/firebird-support/conversations/topics/123771 and I wanted to share with you my point of view on this matter. Of course if anyone ever will read this message since the "decrassing passion" syndrome has hit this newsgroup as well, not so much activity here.
>
> So here are my reasons (totaly subjective of course):
>
> 1. Sharing a knowledge, experiences or just talking via newsgroups sucks. It is so bad that I even do not know where to begin. It should be changed 10 years ago to some decent forum engine. This newsgroup thing is very counterintuitive, how we can attract new useres to use Firebird if we use an outdated technology for communication? You know what is doing a person who wants to make contact with SQL for the first time? Most of them probably browse Internet for information, some of them probably even stumbled upon this newsgroups and they turn they back to something other, more appealing, easier to communicate.
>
> Just out of curiosity I've wrote (for the first time in my life) in google "MySql forum" and the first thing was an address forums.mysql.com with a normal forum. Forum that is a part of the official mysql site and we are sitting here on yahoo. Why not on a forums.firebirdsql.org? I've no idea...
>
> This newsgroup engine is so bad that even Helen is not able to move a topic to other subgroup!
>
> 2. You want me to vote on some linux site? I went there and since it required a registration process I gave up. I do not have time for this. I've voted on sourceforge and will vote there again gladly but not on some site that requires a tedious process of registrating.
>
> 3. As others mentioned, 3+ years since previous major release is way too long. It is so long that it could even kill an application these days. Embardacero shorthened their release cycle, Microsoft shorthened their release cycle (VS 2005, VS 2008, VS 2012, VS 2013!) You see a pattern here? I would be gladly using FB 2.7 now, or 2.9 with few new features instead of waiting forever (yes,3 years seems like forever) for new Firebird.
>
> 4. Life, just life, we are getting older, we have less time. Since two weeks I am trying to find a time to write on firebird-devel about some concerns that I have regarding UDFs and I am not able to do this.
>
> So this is my passionate point of view, hope you do not get me wrong:)
>
> Best regards.

1. there are some alternatives for sharing , i use now stackoverflow
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/firebird but there are others
like gmane interface http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.comp.db.firebird.user

There is an unofficial forum
http://forums.devshed.com/firebird-sql-development-61/
I have proposed many time a forum but seems there is no time , I now
kind of like the stackoverflow interface , and for the future we can try
an askbot interface here is one example for what it looks like for
libreoffice
http://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/9871/impact-of-java-security-problems-on-lo/

yahoo groups new interface looks realy awfull but we are stuck with it
for the moment

2. sorry for asking on registering on this linux small site and thank
you for the vote

3. I agree that a major release should be delivered faster and yes you
can contribute by testing it

4. we can try to optimize to do more work in less time :)