Hi Pete,
Alright, here we go. Sorry, you'll realize soon that I can write longer e-mails than you although or maybe because English is not my native language... ;-) Note that all comments below (listed in completely random order) express my purely personal view (including my own impressions from previous discussions on various topics in the FPC core team) rather than any kind of official position of the FPC team. Note also that I have no privileged access to any of the servers used by FPC.
For start - I understand your points regarding number of clicks, easy to reach download pages, and impressions our site may bring to newcomers and I agree at least some of your comments and recommendations. From this point of view I personally appreciate your interest in improving the situation and offer to help with that directly.
Having stated that, I believe that it's useful to clarify some reasons for the current situation - not as excuses for this or that existing issue (and especially not to try excusing dead links or improperly working search function), but rather to provide background information on certain priorities which were considered when building this site (some of them may be equally valid as before, some of them may be seen as lower priority nowadays):
- Up to now, the whole site runs on a private machine without server- grade guaranteed connectivity, etc. Providing simple means of mirroring the main pages (including files offered for download), etc., has always been a high priority. This mostly means static pages for the main part without any PHP, database back-ends, etc., because these all require special configuration on the mirroring servers. Obviously, this applies to the main pages (and content for download) only, not to the bug tracker, wiki, forum, etc.
- As of now, the content of the static pages is managed on our SVN server in the form of simplified HTML pages (the full pages are regenerated in case changes in SVN on daily bases, or the refresh may be enforced manually). This translation copes with things like changes of download URLs for mirrors, etc. While not very user- friendly for traditional content editors, this approach is fairly easy for programmers dealing with SVN regularly anyway (read: the FPC core team) who are not interested in spending a lot of time in configuring special web content management systems, learning how to work with them and how to protect them from attackers, etc.
- As a nice side effect of the current approach focusing static pages and simple content, it's worth mentioning that the pages load extremely quickly regardless of connection speed and used device (small size, static, no complex constructs).
- It's worth reiterating that FPC is a volunteer based activity. Dependency on a single person able to perform certain administration tasks is an issue. This is actually visible on the community fora (supported by a special software which is understood by just one person from the core team who hasn't been even so active with FPC recently) which occassionally suffer from downtimes, some smaller issues which have never been fixed, etc. The simpler the tools are and the lower effort necessary for managing them the better.
- The site has been created mostly as support resource for existing users. You're completely right that attracting new users is important and we should support this goal better. Nevertheless, most accesses would probably always come from people who are not completely new to FPC. This means that links to 'more advanced' resources like viewvc shouldn't be seen as something inappropriate (in spite of the fact that such stuff may be 'scary' for newcomers). Actually, viewvc provides much better visibility on "what's going on" and how much the project is really alive than any kind of forum, because it shows the real progress and changes of the codebase rather than just questions and answers. Admittedly, this certainly wouldn't be obvious to newcomers without providing them with some background first.
- Mailing lists, NNTP groups and Web fora all have their advantages and disadvantages. Choices are influenced by combination of personal taste, working habits, frequency of posts, resilience (remember that we have no enterprise-grade servers with high availability), options and alternatives for SPAM protection, etc.
- The FPC core team values its independence. There are no advertisements, neither from the FPC team nor from any external provider of hosting services, etc.
- It's worth mentioning that even the dependency on SourceForge which provides us with means for much wider and more efficient distribution of load generated by release downloads is a bit problematic because it increases efforts necessary for the release processes (due to more complex procedures for publishing of files) and it also imposes certain restrictions to us.
- Providing single click download for approximately 20 different distribution packages (even considering just the latest official version) may not be an easy task, especially not for static pages. Doing so while also considering increased server loads after releases (which requires distribution of the download traffic to mirrors) is even more difficult. Single distribution package of everything (all hardware architecture, operating systems, etc.) makes no sense.
- The community fora support internationalization (both for the site and its controls and also for the content). Some of our users value this option apparently.
- Dead links are obviously the easiest thing to solve. You can easily start immediately by reporting them through our bug tracker.
- If the FPC bug tracker doesn't work properly with Chrome - well, bad luck, but Mantis bug tracker is a fairly common and reasonably advanced bug tracking solution, so if there are issues with a certain browser (or its particular version), it may be better to report such issues directly to the Mantis developers using
http://www.mantisbt.org and/or to developers of that browser.
- Using a Wiki page may be useful to prepare a more complete concept regarding how things could or should work in the future. Directly creating an independent alternative version of the site (as mentioned in one of the previous posts) may be an option too, but obviously with a higher risk of burnt efforts.
Note that all of the above is meant to help you not to miss possibly important aspects while thinking about the new concept. There's no need to argue this or that bit (you don't need to convince me about anything) - but I'm obviously willing to (try to) clarify anything possibly unclear.
Tomas