What should OpenFree be?

[Outlaw]

subforums are evil, did you miss that meeting just like I tend to miss them when reading the list of available forums. Also if one subforum is updated the top forum shows up as being "with new posts" even if I don't care about that subforum (say distributed computing which updates the playground).. they are evil I tell you, they eat babies and stuff.

However, having one programming forum and no sub forums means someone interested only in perl can wade thru all the noise of everything else

The same reasoning applies to the Linux distro furum with its sub dirs

[Lovechild]

However, having one programming forum and no sub forums means someone interested only in perl can wade thru all the noise of everything else

The same reasoning applies to the Linux distro furum with its sub dirs

The amount of subforums will annoy some users, myself included, to the point of not wanting to check all of them, thus ensuring that that portion of user will never help out people in those subforums.

I cannot stress how horrible an idea I think having a million seperate subforums for the basic same thing is, given:

a) for distros most questions are general and apply equally to all distros
b) for programming, compared to how much traffic can be expected there's no reason to impose this nonsense on users untill we actually have to "wade" through tons of posts to find what we want.

Can we at least agree to get to that point first?

So far I hardly see activity here, we need to rally some members, gather some momentum.

[Outlaw]

The amount of subforums will annoy some users, myself included, to the point of not wanting to check all of them, thus ensuring that that portion of user will never help out people in those subforums.

a) for distros most questions are general and apply equally to all distros

Those types of questions belong in the "general Linux" forum. And by your logic, a distro forum with no sub dirs would render itself redundant. I think that will frustrate people more than multiple sub forums. I could be wrong about assuming what others want, but it would frustrate me.

b) for programming, compared to how much traffic can be expected there's no reason to impose this nonsense on users untill we actually have to "wade" through tons of posts to find what we want.

Expect more traffic. Nothing is more annoying than having to scroll down through a forum for items that interest you, then follow the link for page 2, scroll down, page 3 ad nauseam Granted that is a very busy site, but imagine many of those specialized forums collapsed down to a few.

[Compunuts]

I think sub-forum thing generally works for the better. I usually check only Debian, Ubuntu sub forums and Main distro forum since I don't use none of the rest of them. If it were to combine them, I will have to siff through ALL the posts and stuff. Then I would never check out the rest except the first page.

[Compunuts]

The amount of subforums will annoy some users, myself included, to the point of not wanting to check all of them, thus ensuring that that portion of user will never help out people in those subforums.

Why would I want to check ALL of them?? I've never used Mandy (except for a test run some years ago) as well as Slack. I don't think there is anything I can help by checking them out.

If someone has Slack specific problem, then they are expected to post in Slack forum and be helped by slack users. If they are general type of questions, they should have posted in general forum.

a) for distros most questions are general and apply equally to all distros

Same thing as above.

We should get used to having sub-forums (which wasn't possible with YaBBse IIRC) and change later on can have huge impact since most ppl are afraid of changes.

So far I hardly see activity here, we need to rally some members, gather some momentum.

I think the forum is getting quiet a lot of traffic compare to original LJR. The community from LJR had helped bring a lot of traffic and knowledge to OpenFree community which (IMHO) had a lot more new faces than LJR.

I'm personally glad the merger happened. We can help a lot more new people now than before plus Peter is a great guy so I'm glad that he is the admin.

[peter]

One of the things I'd like to see is allowing moderators to be able to move posts to the appropriate area. We had a well intentioned post recently for a Linux project that was inappropriate for the forum area. The poster seemed to be directly involved with the project too.

It may be good to have people genuinely excited about a product, talking about it in general forum areas, if they have no direct affiliation with the product, then we could have a separate advertising area for people who are directly involved with their project or product.

That way the main forums keep their character and the people who want to legitimately promote themselves can be in a separate sub-community / sub-forum.

What do you think?

[Compunuts]

One of the things I'd like to see is allowing moderators to be able to move posts to the appropriate area.

I thought that was one of the things we talked about, no? I had the impression that mods are able to do that. That seems not the case ATM.

It may be good to have people genuinely excited about a product, talking about it in general forum areas, if they have no direct affiliation with the product,

I have no problem with that even if the poster is directly involved with the project. For example, if Lovechild promote his lovepack (which he no longer maintain IIRC), then I have no problem.

I don't think it's appropiate someone promoting their product (it's .com BTW) even if it's Linux related on the forums. That what the ads bars on this site are for.

we could have a separate advertising area for people who are directly involved with their project or product.

If you are feeling generous, go for it. But then again, why should people pay to advertise (such as google links) on this site if they can get the same for free?

[Lovechild]

Why would I want to check ALL of them?? I've never used Mandy (except for a test run some years ago) as well as Slack. I don't think there is anything I can help by checking them out.

Because we are nice people who want to help, and sometimes a slackware problem, even though slackware sucks a lot, can be fixed by a user of another distro.

[Compunuts]

That's fine by me if you want to check ALL the threads out but ....... having all treads in one forum would do more harm than good.

Many of us have busy lives; I certainly do with a wife, a dog, a house to take care of and a 12 hour work-day job. If I have to check ALL the thread, then I'd have given up at the first page. So if someone posted the question and unfortunately got into second page, it'd never got my attention eventhough it may be of what I could help. By having sub-forums, I can check out only a few forums which I like to check, leave it quickly. When I have more time, I DO check ALL the forums.

[peter]

Based on the discussion I have done the following:

• Kept the sub-forums

• Renamed the category "Technical Forums" to "Technical Forums - Linux"

• Created a "Technical Forums - Windows" Category and moved the "M$ Windows" forum to it.

• Created an "Open Source on Windows" forum in the Windows category.

• Moved "Linux Scripts & Programming" to its own forum with Perl, Python and Shell sub-forums

• Updated the moderator privileges to have full moderation privileges (My oversight, sorry)

• Created a category of users called "Banned" to which undesirable members can be moved by moderators. This group has no privileges whatsoever on the forums.