Wow, ask and ye shall receive.

Anyway, since it looks like I'm all alone here at the moment, figured I'd go ahead and start up the suggestions thread. While I am waiting for some vegetables to soak, here is some stuff off the top of my head:

Some category ideas (in my opinion, making too many categories splinters discussion too much and leads to too much scattering of posts... so the fewer the better):

• General NHibernate Discussion - General chatter about the project
• NHibernate Source Discussion - Discussion related to the actual NHibernate source
• NHibernate Mapping - Discuss mapping file related issues and any NHibernate specific quirks/considerations
• HQL - Discuss isses with the HQL query language (this one is debateable, since you can usually point people to Hibernate docs regarding this)
• NHibernate Patterns - Discuss your favorite patterns for implementing designs using NHibernate
• Windows Forms - Discuss the use of NHibernate within Windows Forms applications
• ASP.NET - Discuss the user of NHIbernate within ASP.NET web applications

Well, those are my first ideas. Any thoughts?

Thanks again for getting this set up so quickly. Hopefully it'll take off!

I would cross out the Source Discussion, it should go to the devel mailing list. And the patterns forum too, WinForms and WebForms forums should be enough. Then I'd merge HQL and Maping forum. That leaves:

• Using NHibernate - Questions about day-to-day NHibernate use (mapping, HQL, something not working, etc.)
• Windows Forms - Questions and thoughts on using NHibernate with Windows Forms applications
• ASP.NET - Questions and thoughts on using NHibernate with ASP.NET (Web Forms) applications
• The Project - questions and topics about what direction you would like to see the project go.

How do you like it? Did I cross out too much?

My idea would be making some main forums, and some subdivs on them.
Like:

• Newbies
  
  • hql
  • mapping
  • asp.net
  • winforms

• Developers
  
  • main
  • 2.1 features
  • 3.0 features
  • .net 2.0

• Contributors
  
  • (one for each contribution)

Ok, I renamed this section and created a few forums. Somehow I don't like the descriptions and names I made up though :), so I will probably change them a bit again soon, suggestions are welcome.

I didn't yet create a developers and contrib category. I still think developers can communicate well through the mailing list.

I agree about the developer mailing list being the place for that, etc. Also about Patterns, and about everything else.

Looks great to me.

I would greatly appreciate having those developer sections here rather than in a mailing list. phpbb suits my personality perfectly for keeping a threaded discussion for future reference. I usually have better luck finding things by searching in a phpbb forum than using Gmane.

Fully agree with this.
The Wiki and this forum should be enough to centralize all discussions/documentations about NHibernate.

My suggestion (need some more refactoring) :

NHibernate
- Announcements / News
- Development (features requests, work-in-progress)

Help
- General Support (problems with NHibernate's features)
- Windows Application (problems on how to design a WinApp around NH)
- Web Application (problems on how to design a WebApp around NH)
- Related technologies (Reflection, AOP, Unit Testing, RDBMS, Remoting, etc.)

Others
- Out of Topic (stuff unrelated to NHibernate)
- Tools and Real-World Applications
- Contributions (docs, add-ins, etc.)

For the help section, we shouldn't divide it by features (Mapping, Querying, etc.) because most of the time :
- The problem will cross many of them (or it will evolve...)
- The poster will not understand its problem enough to take the good section

These are excellent suggestions. I had never thought of it that way in regards to the feature division.

My vote is now for your layout. :)

KPixel's idea appeals to me too, so I'll probably refactor the forum along these lines, but not today.

I implemented most of KPixel's suggestions, except:

• Help/Related technologies - I think it's not needed, I didn't see many questions about the technologies on the Sourceforge forum.
• Contributions should go to JIRA directly
• Tools and Real-World Applications moved to The Project/Related Projects

I think this will be all for now, we'll wait and see how it develops and if we find that some more "refactoring" is needed, we'll do it. I'm going to change the link to the forum in Confluence.

Edit: Oh, it's changed already, so we'll have to wait for Michael Third to redirect www.nhibernate.org and put a redirect on nhibernate.sf.net too. I'll do it later, have to study now :)

Update: The link from the main website (nhibernate.sourceforge.net) now leads to this new forum.