OracleAppsBlog
A day in the life of an Oracle Applications Consultant

Oracle Applications forum coming to this blog soon

I read with excitement the other day that ExpressionEngine v1.3 is due to be released quite soon. One of the new modules they will be introducing provides the ability to run a forum. I’ve been toying with the idea of running a forum on this site as I’ve suspected for quite some time that they might introduce this module.

Certainly there are already a number of other forums out there right now which I discussed in a post entitled Oracle Applications and E-Business Suite Forum Listing. The key to a forum being successful would be to differentiate it from the others that are out there as well as build an audience that would use it.

The first way I would do this is keep the forum aligned with the content on this site i.e. it would be focused on Oracle Applications.

Secondly, I believe the forum would immediately be different to the others out there as the software running it is feature rich and would provide users with a lot of options. To get an idea of what I’m talking about go and visit the pmachine forums which are now being run using EE1.3. The forum has a lot of features which I think the readers of this blog would appreciate. For example, you can run a poll on a post that you’ve created as well as upload file attachments.

Lastly, the forum would enable members and readers of the blog to initiate conversations rather than relying on blog authors to do this.

I would be grateful to receive comments and feedback from readers on my decision to run a forum on this site. In addition to this, any ideas you have for the forum would be much appreciated.

Posted by Richard Byrom on 06/23 at 07:21 PM
  1. Richard,

    Having previously run an Oracle Applications forum myself in the past (The OraApps-L mailing list which existed before the OAUGnet lists) I have to say that the primary problem with most forums is the signal to noise ratio.

    Most forum software treat each posting on an equal footing, whereby the detailled issues which may affect a few people get as much visibility as the issues which may be of interest to a broader user base.

    I have, for a long time, believed that what the Oracle Applications community needs is a self moderated forum such as slashdot (http://www.slashdot.org).

    In such a forum, postings are moderated by the readers themselves, and given rankings, allowing others users to view only the postings which have been shown to be interesting to a wide variety of people.

    Also, this mechanism allows people who frequently post articles that are highly rewarded to gain ‘karma’. This then ensures that any new postings from them are automatically given a better ranking to start with.

    All this enables a better seperation of signal from noise.

    I do not know if Expression Engine offers this kind of functionnality, but I know that the slashdot software is freely available on the web.

    Well, that was my 0,02 $.

    Posted by François gendron  on  06/23  at  10:03 PM
  2. I agree François - the pmachine forums software seems to be quite robust and feature rich from what I’ve seen. I’m quite sure it will enable me to perform the functions you’ve suggested. The other good thing is that they listen to their customers so any features that are requested are very soon incorporated or built by EE coders as plugins.

    Posted by Richard Byrom  on  06/23  at  11:22 PM

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