Does an open source project need a news group? [closed]

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Closed 7 years ago.

开发者_如何学JAVA Improve this question

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?

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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).

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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?