Gentoo Forums : A proposal

iamlarryboy · Posted: Sat Mar 19, 2005 3:24 am Post subject: Gentoo Forums : A proposal

Let me start by saying that the gentoo forums are the best part about gentoo. They have never failed to help me solve any problem. The people are generally friendly even when we disagree in OTW. The Gentoo forums have served as a launchpad for many projects that help the community (The WoW wine guide, KDE CVS binaries, Breakmygentoo.net, the various kernel patch sets). My heartfelt thanks goes out to all those that make this community what it is. However, like any community there are always issues that need to be addressed.

1. OTW is a bit of a battlefield.
2. performance issues (These seem to have been resolved lately)
3. Searching can suck!

My suggestion to improve the situation is to have several side-by-side phpBB installations as follows:

1. The main forums : ie support. This is the primary purpose of these forums and as as such should have the most attention paid to it.

2. Non-English forums. These too are very important forums. However, when I search , a post answering my question in Russian doesn't do me any good. However, everytime I search the server waists resources returning non-English posts. Furthermore, I have too sift through all the results. Non-English forums should be in a separate installation.

3. Non-support forums. These are the forums feedback, gentoo-chat etc forums.

4. OTW. Enough said.

All the forums would of course share a user/login database. Forums.Gentoo.org would have a page linking to the 4 different forums. This might take a bit of working with phpBB's table prefixes but I think it could be done with relatively minimal work. Splitting the forums up should help in several ways. First, the database could be managed with finer granularity. For example, in the support and non-English forums a thread could last indefinetly while in OTW a thread only lasts a week before being deleted. Second, searches would be faster. In OTW search could be disabled. While the database search tables would be smaller for the support forums. Third, it English users wouldn't see non-English posts (unless they wanted too) and vice-versa. Fourth, we can keep OTW while not impacting those who need support.

I think OTW, while kind of hectic, is a fun place to hang out in and chat. I understand that supporting our users need to come first. If OTW is on a separate installation we can let users do/say whatever they want in OTW. If users step out of line in the other sections the admins can ban their ass! Bottom line I don't want to see OTW go as has been suggested. On the other hand I don't want to see it interfere with the primary purpose of the forums.

Is this idea way out there? Comments, criticism welcome.
_________________
Esteem : Essays, Fiction, and News Commentary.

egberts · Posted: Sat Mar 19, 2005 5:50 am Post subject:

Ditch the OTW, its pain, an overhead, and a burden for Gentoo moderators.
_________________
Clusters of Fry's Special, AMD 2200, 2 GB DDR, 220 GB (2008.1/desktop, stage 1, -O3) x8
HP Compaq Fry's SPecial, AMD 2100, 2 GB DDR, 260 GB (2008.0/server, stage 1, -O3)
Ultra Sparc 5, 256MB, 3GB (2006.1/server, stage 1, -O3)

CitizenX · Posted: Sat Mar 19, 2005 6:29 am Post subject:

And let all the OTW people loose in the support forums? At least I know what I'm getting into when I read something from OTW.

iamlarryboy · Posted: Sat Mar 19, 2005 7:33 am Post subject:

Earthwings · Posted: Sat Mar 19, 2005 8:05 am Post subject: Re: Gentoo Forums : A proposal

masseya · Posted: Tue Mar 22, 2005 11:42 pm Post subject:

First of all, thanks for the suggestions.

Personally, the idea of creating separate forums seems to me like it could be avoided entirely if the search engine were better able to handle a support forums environment. phpbb wasn't originally designed to be a forum specifically for technical support. It's a lot more general purpose than that. As a result the structure of the search engine and even the posts themselves makes searching difficult. A number of improvements have been done to make the search engine much, much better than the default. Really though, if we could improve searching speed and accuracy even more, a lot of the reasons you mentioned for implementing multiple forums would be corrected.
_________________
if i never try anything, i never learn anything..
if i never take a risk, i stay where i am..

iamlarryboy · Posted: Wed Mar 23, 2005 9:34 pm Post subject:

Omega21 · Posted: Thu Mar 24, 2005 3:03 am Post subject:

iamlarryboy · Posted: Thu Mar 24, 2005 4:19 am Post subject:

moocha · Watchman Joined: 21 Oct 2003 Posts: 5722

Um, I personally avoid using the forum's phpBB search function except for search_id={unanswered,egosearch}. I use Google. Much more accurate. All you have to do is add

gentsquash · Posted: Tue May 17, 2005 10:18 pm Post subject:

I agree with all of moocha's points (including
the search_id={unanswered,egosearch} part).

If the GentooForums search page had a Google re-direction that
simply adjoined-in the

Drysh · Posted: Fri May 20, 2005 7:22 am Post subject:

Maybe it would be simple to improve the search: There is an option to search only one forum in the search page. Isn't it possible to make a UNION of the results from multiple searches? I mean, search excluding a few forums, selected by the user when searching. Or maybe, including a check box besides the 'Quick Search' to search only the current forum. After all, even if they talk about the X server in the games forum, it won't probably solve my questions regarding how to make it work again after a emerge -u world, and if I'm having problems with the X server, I'll read the Desktop Enviroments forum, not the other ones.