If you are looking for questions and answers about TrueZIP, then the project’s mailing lists always have been and will continue to be a very valuable resource. However, as time goes by many new communication channels have been established within the developer community. One of the more popular communication channels is stackoverflow.com.
stackoverflow.com is a forum for questions and answers related to programming in general. At first sight, a forum which is not limited to a particular software project may seem to be too broad to be interesting. But wait - this is actually a big strength: Because stackoverflow.com is not limited to a community with a special interest only, your questions are read by a much broader audience and chances are good that they get answered by experts on your subject which do not have subscribed to a special-interest mailing list.
So it’s not a big surprise that I have found some questions about TrueZIP on stackoverflow.com which I have answered to
now.
I found these questions simply because they were tagged with the keyword truezip.
This reveals one of the most important features of stackoverflow.com:
Meaningful tags raise the attention paid to a question because users of all kind including experts can use tags to
filter interesting subjects out of the posting noise.
Users can even subscribe to a tag in order to get a push notification via email whenever a new question or answer
regarding the tag has been posted.
Another nice feature is that a tag has a small wiki entry which is used to describe it.
This helps users to discover what a tag is all about just by letting the mouse pointer hover over it.
So I did subscribe to the tag truezip on stackoverflow.com meanwhile.
Now, whenever a user enters a post tagged with truezip I get an email notification and can answer promptly.
Although this communication protocol is similar to a mailing list, the big benefit is that users do not need to
subscribe to it and do not even need to know that it exists.
I think this is a great improvement in establishing and keeping in touch with a community!