This page is not yet intended to be useful (Apr 2008). It is meant to prototype and develop the most effective forum for a CASA user community, i.e.
useful scripts - user and developer contributed (marked as such)
user feedback, especially suggestions that are at the level of opinion and not in JIRA tickets yet
known problems / bugs and workarounds
publically digestible version of development targets, so people know what we're working towards on roughly what timescale
critical questions include
how much of this is already on the CASA web page maintained by Steve - beta release notes covers dev targets, some known problems. It's not clear to me that NAUGHT is intended for an external user resource, or just for ourselves.
how does this overlap with cookbook and FAQ? FAQ could grow organically from discussion forum. there probably needs to be an "official" cookbook separate from a user web forum, but there could be interaction, especially if there were an html version of the cookbook. if there's a way to make cookbook maintenance less work for Steve then we should do that.
how does this overlap with helpdesk? Do we want people to look here for solutions, then ask the helpdesk? do we want people to ask the helpdesk and get referred to solutions that the USS knows are here? software development forums like sourceforge usually have a discussion forum that experts read and if a thread goes unanswered by the user community the expert steps in.
RR: What does the upload form need to get from the submitter besides the script?
Author (with optionally obfuscated email address or URL)
Tags (keywords if you prefer). I think it's the best way to avoid pigeonholing a script into a single category. Full text searches are liable to return irrelevant scripts. Newbies (and lazy people...) often use other scripts as templates, and attribute the template in the comments.
Some sort of comment, somehow.
License? Or should the site require everything to be GPLed?
Dependencies? (at least partly automatable)
what have others done:?
IRAF used to be monolithic, NOAO-maintained, but has gone to more modern, pretty slick user forum; read about the new support forum.
FAQ is rudimentary, probably limited by Peter's time
no official helpdesk; they do bug reporting through bugzilla (like open JIRA), and have users and developers mailing lists
Cloudy has a discussion group that Gary reads and replies to regularly - works well for that smaller project; I've posted questions and received fast replies.
AIPS has an old-school email helpdesk, unarchived and Eric-maintained, but does have mailing lists; it's not clear they are really forum, rather than a convenient way to make announcements.