one way to truely ease your ailment with this situation, gruso, would be to take said in-depth conversations from the forums and move them to mailing lists... THEN you could have a separate list for each emulator/game and individual, better focused threads on the software itself... of course I wouldn't bring this up without suggesting consistant and frequent referencing of the mailing lists back here to the forum, as this is the hub of it all... but the focused threads in the variousl mailing lists would give a better flow of the more detailed information while allowing the forum to stay as is and continue to deliver the "big picture" of the information as well as specific tidbits easily referencable by linking to the web interface side of the mailing lists.
I worked up a simple, yet elaborate flow of information a while back for the Unity Linux team that consisted of 1 forum, a series of mailing lists, 2 IRC channels and a bug tracker which worked together to cover the entire flow of information... the brunt of the info (the most details and the place where most talk went on in general) would be the mailing lists... for hashing things out, essentially... the forum would be where more user questions would be based and devs could discuss between the IRC channel in real-time and the mailing list in semi-real-time and post back answers to the forum with references to the mailing lists to "flesh out" the simple answer given on the forum (keeping the forum pretty clean in this way of short answers and links vs long, drawn-out answers and threads that are pages long) it's easier to sift through a mailing list (even in web interface) for information on a specific topic than a forum because you can narrow searching down more precisely. Same goes for the tracker... issues started there, worked out (mostly) on the mailing lists and IRC (depending on dev availability), progress noted (referenced from mailing lists) in the tracker, bug fix officially closed in the tracker and announced on the Forum as news (when the bug is big enough to be news... usually). IRC is more realtime, and can be copy/pasted to the mailing list for archiving purposes and for referencing discussions... which is why I put both in the same area of the "flow" [Forum <=> Mailing Lists/IRC <=> Bug Tracker]... I think this can be altered to suit most any project or series or projects, but primarily fit to this model works well for the overall flow of information without the main faces (Forum and Tracker) getting overly cluttered. Also, people's inboxes can easily be kept uncluttered by the mailing lists with simple email filters. I have about 6 different mailing lists I am part of for Unity Linux... each has it's own filter to go to a different folder and the left column of my inbox lets me know when I have new messages in any of those folders... my inbox stays neat and I can get to those emails when I feel like it (semi-realtime or take my time). My full model has yet to be used anywhere, so I can't fully validate it as of yet, but feel free to pick it apart.
This is a rough rebuild off the top of my head because my original model is lost somewhere in my email and I have not looked for it in quite some time... so there was a bit more to it revolving around which types of information were best suited to stick primarily to one of the 3 areas (either end or in the middle)... I remember using a River as the basis for the model referencing the source of the river, the river itself and the body of water it flowed into... I just might sit down and rehash this model fully so I can present it better and utilize it for my own projects (when I start some
) Maybe I should patent it first
