views:

31

answers:

2

I open-sourced a tool I created to scratch an itch. From the downloads for the installer on the project page I can see I'm not the only one interested. About 5 people seem to have upgraded from the previous version. But I know next to nothing about them.

Do I need a news group? A mailing list? Or how would you start to build a (little) community?

+1  A: 

If you have webhosting, the simplest to set up is an online forum or bulletin board (e.g. phpBB, vBulletin.) I used to an open-source tool for Nagios and shamelessly used their mailing lists for support, and people started e-mailing me directly using my e-mail address from my posts.

I see you're hosting on Google - Google Groups does newsgroups, so maybe set one of those up for your tool?

Andy Shellam
;) didn't you know Jeff Atwoods mission statement is to kill phpBB?
Daren Thomas
I hope he achieves it! It's a decent application but it does get exploited way too much and way too quickly.
Andy Shellam
+3  A: 

It mainly depend what kind of interaction you want with them.

With such a few people the mailing list or a news group looks the most appropriate.

A forum with such a small number of people is generally not very active. (From other people it may looks like an inactive project).

Phong
Thank you. These are good points.
Daren Thomas