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Hi Derek

Every single company that I have ever dealt with has calculated time and resources as money.  It is *very* rare that a shortfall in either can't be resolved with more money.

The question here is one of opportunity cost, and I don't see an increased return for Moodle HQ in not doing it.

"The simple logic is that those who are interested in the subject will read that forum!"

As I implied, my own behaviour doesn't match your logic.

Why does it have to be a single page - Moodle docs are a wiki, the video page could be a starting point with links to lots of other pages with details about specific issues.

Surely organised, maintained documentation pages is better than a forum which may have lots of duplicate posts on similar topics, long discussions with lots of tangents that may, or may not, reach a solution at the end and, in many cases, posts that were once correct, but which have since been superseded by later changes in Moodle.

Obviously, that is assuming that there is organised, maintained documentation, which is not always the case...

A forum works if there is a critical mass of people a) posting on it, b) reading the posts and c) replying to the posts once they've read them. It doesn't matter how critical a feature is, or how good a business case there is for it, if you haven't got enough people doing a), b) and c), then it would be far better for those discussions to take place as a subset of the discussion in a far busier forum.

I'm not going to attempt to make a judgement about whether or not there is a critical mass of people in this case, but it does not follow that the importance of a particular feature should automatically mean that a new, separate forum would be the best way to look after/progress that feature.

I think this is useful input.

In some respect (as Visvanath pointed out) this is talking about the problem of video rather than the issue of "can we have a forum?"

Mary, Andy says: "The key issue is identifying a base configuration which will work irrespective of what else has been installed"  A useful goal.

-Derek

re Docs: Andy have you done anything yet?  And which specific pages?

re forum: And Helen and Mary, have you any conclusion to our reques, or are you still thinking?

@Mary, I did not add my thoughts to the 'core' docs wiki because they were a little more speculative, and could not be authoritative.  I wrote a brief on dev.moodle.org on the topic of forums and Martin told me this was not how they did things.
Re videos and docs: so next attempt was in the docs.moodle.org: https://docs.moodle.org/27/en/Curated_list/Video_clips  in the docs, but not linked into the 'core' part - when you decided they were 'not part of the official documentation' and told me you were not going to migrate them to 2.8 or 2.9 and suggested Google docs, i just gave up on this work.

(Also, Mary, as probably the most famous personal trainer in Moodle in the world (and probably the Galaxy, or at least the known Universe, it is a bit presumptious to talk a ouy parts of the universe I do not know about) I asked you about this here: https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=268909#p1160638 last year in September.  "What do you suggest in your workshops that people do?"  "What workflow do you suggest?"  You say you 'don't know about this stuff" but you can tell us what you teach as a workflow.  If things need geeks to describe, it to too complex.

@All: Also: in some respects we need help from Moodle HQ here.  I've asked several question on why things are as they are in video are and only got no answers and one response.  eg https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-46762 https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-46762

I may be worrying over semantics.  What is an 'important' issue?  MoodleHQ (the wonderful guys there) have lots of pressures.  Is video actually important?  If it is, then pay some attention to it sometimes.  Maybe a few hundred brain cycles a year.  If you guys DON'T regard it as important, then tell us.  I now have several messages from our Rogerian counsellors in the Tracker: "Nice idea, how about you code it yourself?"  What I feel (as a general comment) is silence, and non-reply on what I regard as critical issues.  eg.  Scroll of Death.  Drag and drop.  Enrolment.  Reports.  Forums.  One-one communication.  I often  wonder if we took a vote what the resulkts would be.

If I reflect a little, there is at present no good mechanism to manage these conversations.  In some ways this is why I asked Martin for a return to the old roadmap.  https://moodle.org/mod/forum/view.php?f=32&page=10 55 posts so far, but nothing official.  https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=265939

But I am probably talking to myself.  What I think is 'important' may bear no relevance to anyone else.  I've suggested this may be worth researching actually (back in the days of Tomas)

This has proved a much longer post than I planned.  I apologise for TLDR; 

I don't want to be critical of coders at HQ.  Outside pressures are huge, and I don't want to put down any of the work.

-Derek