Time Out Please

[Ug]

Woah woah woah folks. I've been rather busy for the last few weeks and haven't really been visiting the forum as much as would be ideal, so i haven't been able to follow so much as I should.

Having just taken a glance at this "Suggestions & Feedback" forum I'm disheartened, not only are people complaining about politics but i've got an inbox full of stuff. When this forum started out I was proud- that this forum helped, that this forum didn't reduce itself to the politics and the *****ing. But to now look at it makes me sad, whilst it has grown dramatically in size (a double edged sword as some may say) it appears the spirit may have declined in some quarters.

Over the coming week I'm going to look into the details of why people are falling out round here and what should be done about it. (Probably an update of the forum guidelines, and subsequent enforcement of them.) My recent absence probably makes me pretty neutral in such matters as of the moment. I would like people to take some time out from petty disputes and if anyone has any problems to contact me personally.

This forum should focus on helping one another and particularly helping to move new people into the wonderful world of Fedora. We need to organise ourselves to offer effective help to those who need it, as of the moment there are too many threads without decent responses if any. Which isn't good enough.

There is a large knowledge base here- we just need to learn to tap it better. Maybe we need some way of recognising and rewarding those who help in a better way? (Any ideas welcome - please post subsequently).

All i'm asking for at the moment is some peace, and a return to the core values upon which this forum was founded.

[bob]

Yes, it's been an exciting couple of weeks. In reality, the disputes centered around only a few issues and a few members but the disputes could have been handled in private messages rather than public postings.

I believe that the positive feedback has worked well for the most part, however many members don't understand that the 'blue' feedbacks are not negative, nor neutral, just positive feedbacks from newer members who haven't posted enough to create 'green' feedbacks, which generate points. I must ask if the negative feedback can be reconsidered. I believe that it was designed to illustrate that a bad idea could cause system problems, however it generates the same effect as a slap in the face, and has really angered some members.

To help unanswered threads avoid being lost in the shuffle, would there be a way to have threads with no responses automatically move to the front of the list after 24 hours? I think that seeing 8 or 10 unanswered threads when you log in would cause most members to review them and think of ways to resolve the problems. As it is, we might work on a few problems when we get a chance to log in, but if we have to leave for an hour or two, the rest of the threads disappear from the 'New Posts' and we have to hunt for the ones we intended to get to but ran out of time.

I certainly believe that the core values are still evident in the Forum and that we are not off the beaten path. Most of the private messages I receive are offers to help, not complaints.

[jtang613]

You raise some excellent points and I agree with pretty much everything you've said. I frequent this forum a great deal and make an honest effort to help where I can. I've been witness to some of the threads in question - and am sad to say haven't always been immune to their trappings. I recently found myself being drawn into a rather ugly thread when I realized that certain topics have the potential to really harm the forum dynamics. It was then that I decided for myself not to participate in threads that are clearly flame-bait. Don't feed the trolls, and they'll starve - as it were.

As for the 'reputation' functionality - It's nice to see one's reputation go up, but I personally don't think it's worth all the trouble it causes. I would not miss the 'reputation' if it were disabled.

I too look forward to a return to FedoraForums' core ideals. Helping others, providing useful information and serving as the defacto-standard of what a Linux forum *should* be.

Peace,
Jason

[radu5er]

...
This forum should focus on helping one another and particularly helping to move new people into the wonderful world of Fedora. We need to organise ourselves to offer effective help to those who need it, as of the moment there are too many threads without decent responses if any. Which isn't good enough.

There is a large knowledge base here- we just need to learn to tap it better. Maybe we need some way of recognising and rewarding those who help in a better way? (Any ideas welcome - please post subsequently).



Is there a way for a link to be placed on the home page to questions that have received no replies or maybe some other minimum number? It would be helpful I think for those 'seasoned members' who can then drop in for a quick look at what's happening on the forum to not have to peruse all of the questions to find the ones without replies.

Also, I think it should be within the perogatives / duties of the managers to delete or archive old threads that really have little or no useful information in them. The reason I suggest something like this is that it might make searching for information easier. Sometimes when I do a search, there are literally hundreds of responses. I realise that this would be a judgement call and we may never know which small piece of info will be the one that gives us a clue as to the fix for our problem, however if we could somehow 'separate the wheat from the chaff' it might make things easier especially for new members.

And also remember, while disagreements happen in every family, the main goals of this forum are mostly well met and we should all try and respect each others views and level of expertiese. As I said, you never know when even a small bit of insight may be just the thing that helps someone uncover a solution for themselves.

[jcstille]

Thank you UG for your neutral mellow words. It is very nice to see someone not involved in the situation be able to approach it objectively. I also think that we all identify your seniority here and your general presence. I do feel the same as you. I think this is a great community, have enjoyed my time as an administrator here, and plan to continue being around here for a while (yes ya'll are stuck with me). About the unanswered questions, it would be nice to have a forum where no one can post to, but redirects are sent to it if there are no responses to a thread. Like an unanswered questions forum. Then we could look in that forum to give support for all unanswered questions. It would still be timely though. Once a response is made, the redirect goes away and it is just in it's original forum. Although that is quite a vbulletin hack there.

[sej7278]

I think flaming etc. is a natural progression for these forum-type things, I've seen it on usenet, IRC, community websites, and now forums.

I really don't think there's anything you can do, unfortunately it seems to be human nature.....

Hopefully it won't get to the point where you have to "hire" a team of moderators to lock the offending threads, and cancel people's accounts, or turn the forum into a mailing list, as I've seen before too.

[james_in_denver]

My $.02 cents worth????

Limit new users to opening a max of 2-3 threads/day. (seems there were a few Fedora Core "bashers" on the board about a week ago. Perhaps the moderators could have closed the threads a little sooner since there were about 7-8 duplicate FC4 bashing threads opened on the same day.

Do away with everything in advanced editor except for "bold", "Italics", "[quote]", and smilies....

That would help keep the yelling down and protect some fragile (or not so fragile) egos if ya know what I mean.

[imdeemvp]

I think we should have a beginner's or new to linux area for newbies. The first thread in that part of the forum should point them out to the fedora FAQ's and to seek their answer their first before posting a question.

It should be a place to start in their linux adventure because some of the questions are asked over and over again. I believe the FAQ's cover much of the essential topics in an every day pc operation by users. Every newbie should start their or redirected there by default.

[tashirosgt]

(I'm unfamiliar with the political threads - must have skipped them.) As to imdeemvp's suggestion, its good to have FAQ's but it is also helpful to answer the usual questions (yes, over and over again). It's helpful to the answerers! It reinforces the knowledge and if you give a sloppy answer it is helpful to have some other person tweak your directions. The people that ask will eventually show up as people that can inform and they could use the practice.


As to inducting new users, emphasize that the forum has a search feature. Remind users that if they want to keep track of threads they posted-to that they should use advanced search and put in their own name. Emphasize the importance of an apt title for a post. This is more important now that there are so many postings.

[foolish]

I've been a partisan in some of the discussion that's been going on, so I'm not the neutral and certanly not the voice of reason that Ug is, but I will say this:

This forum is a great resource, it really is. But please do remember this: It is not a public space. This forum is owned and controlled by the administrators and Ewdi in particular. Posting in this forum is indeed a priveledge, not a right. Users will obey the rules, or they will be gone. Anyone who's ever managed something like this will understand why you have to be strict about this.

Now, the administrators and managers of this forum have done some mistakes. In my opinion, we've not been clear enough on just what our rules are. This has to change. We haven't been clear enough on guidelines for the moderators either. This will too have to change.

All this being said, most of the people using this forum, the moderators especially, are wonderful, dedicated people who try their best to help the community. We're open for suggestions and discussion as long as they are friendly and reasonable.

[ewdi]

keep focus guys, no politics

MOVE ON

[dickinsd]

To help unanswered threads avoid being lost in the shuffle, would there be a way to have threads with no responses automatically move to the front of the list after 24 hours? I think that seeing 8 or 10 unanswered threads when you log in would cause most members to review them and think of ways to resolve the problems. As it is, we might work on a few problems when we get a chance to log in, but if we have to leave for an hour or two, the rest of the threads disappear from the 'New Posts' and we have to hunt for the ones we intended to get to but ran out of time.
I would like to add to this suggestion, or maybe suggest an alternative method.

I use another forum called daniweb, as a none member or when your logged out you can see the forum index, find answers etc, and they have a link for todays posts, which is similar to the link for new posts on fedoraforum.org

When you login you have an extra link for Unanswered threads I think that this link is the same as doing a search for threads that have 0 replies, but its a quicker way of doing it, and you don't need to tell fedoraforum virgins how to do it.
I am not sure if this is a hack/module for vB as I have noticed that performing a search on FedoraForum for threads that have 0 replies gives you a search ID number. - therefore I don't think you could add a simple link as the search ID may expire?? (just guessing here people)

Anyway, I do think a link for unanswered threads might be a good addition to the forum.

Dave

[pigpen]

...
Do away with everything in advanced editor except for "bold", "Italics", "\[quote\]", and smilies....

That would help keep the yelling down and protect some fragile (or not so fragile) egos if ya know what I mean.I absolutely support this suggestion! Enlarging fonts is not useful for explaining or emphasizing things, anyways.
Also, I support the idea of limiting the number of posts per day (at least for beginners).

[engwnbie]

There is nothing wrong with this forum as it is, you can find solutions to most of your issues here if you are willing to look. I am the first one to stick up for some on else if they are being attacked. But as the moderator and admin’s have said "move on". This is a place for help and there are many different cultures so some answers come across harsh even though that they might or might not be how it was put in the first place. Again let it go and help others if you can. Remember this help is provided on a voluntary basis and donated resources (eg. web space and hosting), and I for one don't want to loose a pretty good thing. So I will publicly thank the mod and admin’s because with out them this would not be possible so again let it go and move on.

[Trendkill]

as a newbie to this forum i have found it nothing but helpful, and havent been flamed or looked down apon for anything (yet..:D)

so in other words, from experience in other forums, kill the politics, and just do what this forum is made for, helping each other in a community where the only support comes from our online friends!!! :)

so far so good imo.

[fc_jeff]

I'm a fairly new user here, but FWIW ...

I've posted a couple different questions, one of them twice in different threads, that have gone unanswered. This is the first time a question of mine has gone unsanswered in any Linux Distro forum (BTW - I answer questions and provide How-to's and tutorials, including already here at FedoraForum, so I'm not just a "taker").

The questions were:
1. How do you minimize memory usage with Fedora Core?
2. What is an easy way to install Xfce from the FC2 CDs (Xfce was left out of Anaconda and the Add/Remove applicatons)?

With the first question, the only answer I got was from Crackers, who asked why do I care? When I told him (to avoid going into swap and keep speed up - I have 228meg on the machine I have FC2 installed on), he/she replied with "just get more memory". Then I said I've maximized the memory capability of that particular machine, and that other distros used less memory on that machine (running comparable programs/services). I never got an actual answer from anyone to my original question. I've since figured out some server settings, turning off unused services, minimizing applet usage, etc, in order acheive satisfactory performance.

With the second question, I asked it twice. Once as it's own thread, and once in another existing thread. Both times it went completely unaswered. Since then I've done some Googling, and read some FC2 reviews, and came across a simple way to install Xfce from the FC2 CDs by copying all of the libs and binaries to a directory and running rpm on all of the rpms in the directory. It worked like a charm. So I posted this solution in the FedoraForum "How-To's" so that others that have the same question can have it answered easily.

I've also helped someone here on FedoraForum compile a C program.

Thus, so far, I've helped others, but have yet be helped by others here at FedoraForum. I'm not whining about it, nor am I bragging about having already helped others. It's just that my early impression of FedoraForum is that there is not a great deal of eagerness or motivation to really help. Like I said, the only response to my questions was someone arguing the validity of one of my questions, which was no help whatsoever.

Now, I'm not trying to knock FedoraForum. It seems like a friendly place with a lot of very knowledgable people. It's also well organized and looks great. I really like FedoraForum and my compliments go out to the maintainers, admins, and moderators. But it seems that motivation to help in some cases is somewhat limited. In the other forums that I've actively participated in, including MandrakeUsers, MepisLovers, and Ubuntu Forums, I've always had my questions answered in one form or another, and usually within an hour or two of posting.

And I would think that the reputation system would motivate people to help. Perhaps because FedoraForum is so active and large, people just aren't seeing all of the questions. Thus, I like the idea of having an area at the main page that lists unaswered questions of the last week or so. Maybe that will put them front and center, and make people check in and perhaps be compelled to answer.

Just my 2 cents, and I hope I have not offended anyone. :)

[Ug]

It looks like it should be possible for an "Unanswered Posts" link to be displayed prominently somewhere, and we'll see if we can implement it in the next few days. At present it is possible to view unanswered posts but it is a little complex and requires you to use the advanced search:

Change "Find Threads With" from "At least 0 Replies" to "At most 0 Replies"
Then alter the time period for the search with the "Find Posts from" section, say a week is probably a good setting. (Although ideally i would want 3 days?)
Then select Fedora Support and Fedora Development from the "Search in Forums" dialogue.
As for feedback, i'm proposing to remove negative feedback. And to also change the colour of the blue feedback icon to green to prevent people from getting confused over whether or not they got positive feedback.

I'm going to subsequently look into altering the Guidelines and implementing rules. More soon.

[roolegion]

There are times when you have to bite your tongue and just ignore the rants and raves of the fellow forum members. If politics start coming in, then you may not want to help that person because they are a Republican/Democrat/Liberal/Communist/Nazi/Martian/etc ...

It is Open Source - open for all, in my opinion. Much like science - to wit, I am a member of that guild too.

[Ug]

We've disabled feedback in the end, to prevent some of the confusion and aminosity which can surround it.

[imdeemvp]

We've disabled feedback in the end, to prevent some of the confusion and aminosity which can surround it.
That has been the most and best decesion you ever made to improve this forum's performance.
In behalf of many and including myself. Thank you.

[ieuuk]

hey people... ive been away and caught up with school and things for the past couple of weeks and have completely missed what has been happening. Could someone just breifly tell me what this is all about please seeing as im very confused (its not hard to confuse me... i know)

thanks alot guys and this is still a brilliant forum

[GospelOfLinux]

I believe that the best solution is to have the public do a bit of self policing. If a flamer shows his face 1) don't respond, and 2) call it what it is and recomend that people move elsewhere. I have found myself baited into a flame war once or twice and have regretted it every time. We can put policies in place until we are blue in the face, but if I, the user, do not control myself, then those policies mean little.

However, limiting beginner posts is not a good idea in my opinion. Beginners often have multiple problems and need a great deal of help. If they can't get that help, they may just get frustrated and move on. That is not what the forum is about.

And of course, keep the focus on Fedora, not the emacs vs. vi vs. gnome vs. kde vs. God vs. evolution vs. politics vs. nose hair coloring techiniques vs. cli vs. gui vs. Ginger vs. Mary Ann.

All that said, I have found these forums to be very helpful, curtious, and focused on the subject matter (Fedora). It is one of the reasons I have not done my normal distro migration for quite some time.

[ieuuk]

I believe that the best solution is to have the public do a bit of self policing. If a flamer shows his face 1) don't respond, and 2) call it what it is and recomend that people move elsewhere. I have found myself baited into a flame war once or twice and have regretted it every time. We can put policies in place until we are blue in the face, but if I, the user, do not control myself, then those policies mean little.

However, limiting beginner posts is not a good idea in my opinion. Beginners often have multiple problems and need a great deal of help. If they can't get that help, they may just get frustrated and move on. That is not what the forum is about.

And of course, keep the focus on Fedora, not the emacs vs. vi vs. gnome vs. kde vs. God vs. evolution vs. politics vs. nose hair coloring techiniques vs. cli vs. gui vs. Ginger vs. Mary Ann.

All that said, I have found these forums to be very helpful, curtious, and focused on the subject matter (Fedora). It is one of the reasons I have not done my normal distro migration for quite some time.

thats very well said and im now understanding what is going on more now and i strongly agree with what you have just said there. I have basically taught myself linux with the help of my for dummies book, the internet, forums, and irc and i have learned it all though what i have been told and putting it in to a practice. I frequently have more than one problem at a time because im a full time student at school - the time that i have to play with fedora and fix problems etc is very limited so the tend to all get swept up together until i get the time to start solving them if you see what i mean. Then having a limit on the amount of posting that i would be able to do would be very frustrating and would also cause me more problems than i am trying to solve because i would have to flitter between forums because i can only talk about so many problems at a time.

thats my sort of view on the matter... sorry it went on a bit.

[Psquared]

I've been gone from here for awhile too. However, I have been on other forums for other distros so I can compare.

1) This forum has the most helpful and truly knowledgeable members anywhere. Most posts are answered even if it is to say they don't know the answer. Usually alternative sources are suggested.

2) I have found most people to be decent and hardworking people who want to try to help.

3) The posting rules are not as strictly enforced here as on other boards. That is good and bad as you can imagine.

4) Reputation seems to be important to most people here and that is a good thing.

5) There will always be those who seek to be disruptive. Unfortunately, that is the nature of the internet.

6) As a former new member I know what it is like to come on here for the first time. Patience is a virtue as most either ask one question and never come back or feel gratitude, as I did, for the help they received and come back to help others.

[james_in_denver]

Reputation (good OR bad) is usually the only feedback that members get from their posts.

Doing away with reputation is not such a good idea IMHO.... without it people don't know which of their solutions really helped someone, and which posts they may have overlooked something.

And in the end, after spending some amount of time helping someone fix a problem, it's nice to find out that your help actually sovled a problem for someone.. (Will work for a pittance of a wage and respect).

A good rep tells posters that they helped someone, and that the help was appreciated. Properly utilized, reputation helps ALL members feel as if their help and suggestions are valued. It gives them more of a sense of "belonging" to a "community" than just having a user-id and a login.

Do away with reputation, and you do away with a major part of that "peer-review"/"acceptance".

And as far as the post in question, i think there were some over-reactions on BOTH sides. However, one thing that I know for a fact, text posted in regular 12 point black carries the same technical meaning and weight as text posted in 24 pt bold red, and yes, I can read both of them just fine, but I found the SHOUTING to be both childish and annoying.

In my opinion, doing away with reputation is a mistake. And NOBODY should be able to mod a member down 10 or more points based on a single thread. Just becuase it was an admin that used the obnoxious text in question, does not also give them a right to add injury to insult by modding down the other user by that many points.

that's my $.02 worth, take it or leave it......

[stry_cat]

In my experience with other forums and reputation, the system does not work unles you know who voted and how they voted. Too often the only person to provide a positive vote to the correct solution is the person who had the problem and then several iditos come along and provides negative votes to make the solution get a bad repuataion. No one has any idea who though it was bad or why b/c the voting can't be tracked. For any repuation system to work you have to be able to easily see who voted up or down and have them give a reason. Then the moderators have to police the voting to make sure people are putting in valid reasons.

Also reputation/karma/orwhateveryacallit makes people overlly concerned with it. If you think we've got flame wars now wait until someone gets downvoted for asking a simple question.

The whole thing ends up being a lot of work for everyone especially the moderators. In the end I think we're better off not having any kind of reputation/karma system.

[james_in_denver]

Hmm,

reputation/karma seems to work fairly well at

http://www.slashdot.org/

[dickinsd]

We've disabled feedback in the end, to prevent some of the confusion and aminosity which can surround it.
I think it is pretty amazing one little feature of one great site can cause so much trouble.

I have no idea what post people keep referring to with the big red writing in so I can't comment on that.

As for the reputation/feedback - I liked it, I thought it was a good idea, I think it could have been improved if people could read other peoples feedback - kind of like ebay. I think that would have improved the whole feedback idea, but it wouldn't have helped the site at all.

I do think that new people to the site are going to miss out a little, its ok when you have been around for a while as you get to know who supplies the real quality answers, but a new person is going to have no more faith in an answer by someone like Crackers or Void Main than they will in an answer that I provide.

I know the list of members that can be relied upon for quality answers us huge, and there are more and more every day, those where just 2 names that sprung to mind.

I don't suppose the reputation offered anything to the site, but it was a nice feature and it does help when your trying to identify the people that really know what they are on about.

It can be good to be judged by your peers, this can only help to improve your knowledge and the quality of answers you give in the future.
The biggest problem seems to come from people that do not like recieving negative feedback.

Yes it is a little sad to have your work judged poorly, but you can not improve if you don't know where you are going wrong, perhaps some people misused the feedback system?

If it bothered individuals that much, then if I remember correctly you could disable your own feedback???

I suppose there are good points and bad points to taking the reputation system away.
Unfortunately it seems that right now there is a bigger advantage to take the reputation system away than there is to keep it.

Moving on; I do think the admins need to do something on the Control Panel page now as it looks so empty without the Reputation stuff. :p

Just my opinion.

Dave

[stry_cat]

Hmm,

reputation/karma seems to work fairly well at

http://www.slashdot.org/
Actually slashdot is a perfect example of why karma is a bad idea. It is full of karma whores. If you post something that the people with mod points don't agree with you get sent to -1 oblivion. No one knows who voted or how they voted. On the rare ocasion when I get mod points there, I end up having to vote to undo someone else's idiot vote. All too often you see the mod parent up or mod parent down post b/c the post contains incorrect info and the mods just happened to agree politically with the poster. Better would be an ignore user feature.

[james_in_denver]

Hmm,

I haven't seen more than a few "mod-downs" in the past when I was a moderator there. Oh sure, there is the odd troll or two, (don't feed the trolls). But overall, it seems to work well there.

I guess I have 2 issues with the feedback being removed (and yes, it appeared to be "less than ideal" before).

Firstly, guests and new members have absolutely no idea now who's suggestions and recommendations have been "reputation" worthy, it's a little insurance for the web-site visitors that the person giving advice knows (at least mostly) what they are talking about (if there was a "working" reputation system in place).

Secondly, call me a karma whore, but I do like feedback, knowing that I helped someone solve a problem, and getting their recognition, or that of my peers, gives me a warm fuzzy. And reputation is really the only "feedback" that people answering questions get. Ask any engineering student, and they will tell you that quantitative feedback or measurable performance are critical for measuring the "health" of a system.

Besides, karma/reputation/whatever is fun, without it, it just seems like more work to me.

[ianmac]

The reputation system is unnecessary and prone to abuse. We don't need the extra work or the headaches.

Just my $.02

[james_in_denver]

The reputation system is unnecessary and prone to abuse

Wow, that's a pretty dark commentary on the guests and members of FedoraForum.......

I haven't personally seen any "abuse" and have heard of only a single instance secondhand.

I prefer to think that we are all (or at least the vast majority), relatively mature, considerate, and helpful???

That's been my experience here at last.

[Ug]

So if not reputation- how about an administrator appointed rank? One that designates trusted sources as such.

i.e. replace "Registered User" with something more appropriate for example "Guru".

[imdeemvp]

So if not reputation- how about an administrator appointed rank? One that designates trusted sources as such.

i.e. replace "Registered User" with something more appropriate for example "Guru".
Some forum such lq, linuxforum, and other use similiar method of ranking and that's not a bad idea. In some of the other forums I participate (from time to time)I have never seen a thread related to reputation as this one has. It's probably cyberjkle's thread the one that makes the most sense.

[Mat]

why is this even all necesarry?!

I mean does anybody here has the feeling he's getting fake answers (something's like "'rm -rf /' will fix your problem")? I personally don't see the need for ranks or reputations at all... let alone the postcount shows you who is interested in this forum and who's not... look there if you want to see who's devoted to this place... if someone really cares...

besides, all those thinking about "promotions" and stuff really betrays all the 'i-like-to-help-atmosphere' some of us are talking about...


Mat

ps: really don't want to offend anybody, but all those 'add to my rep' sigs started to get on my nerves and I really was 'glad' when I noticed the reputation system was gone

[ianmac]

Why do we even need a "reputation" system at all? I recently brought up a point to one of my Linux admin buddies (he's been a Linux system admin for a large company for years) and he said "hey, that's good, I never thought of that", and I have never had a system admin job and have been using Linux for only two years. I thought of something that a Linux guru never had.. does that make me more knowledgeable than him? I'd like to think we're all equal and a reputation system takes that "equality" away.

"A man is intelligent if he knows how to find out what he does not know". - Georg Zimmel, German Physicist

[crackers]

Not necessarily - there are several forums where something similar is in place. In some, questions are given a "point value" by the original poster and the points are awarded by the poster to the most helpful answer. There was a twofold intent in the system here: to provide an "award" to people who help and to give a new poster some kind of vague indicator that somebody just might know what they're talking about. The latter position was kind of a fall-back when a question gets several conflicting answers. I'd like to think it worked at least reasonably well. (And the Moderators had it in their sigs because the system wasn't exactly obvious in how it worked.)

Of course, all of the awards systems have the same problem the rep system here had: they can be abused or points of contention. Like any good computer system, the weakest link is always the human element... ;)

[vishnumrao]

I have had a wonderful experience at this forum. I have found members are very friendly and helpful.

I feel that some of the threads did not get any replies at all and they eventually get lost in the deluge of new posts. A move to ensure the threads that do not get any replies to be brought to the top once again would certainly be appreciated, especially by the newbies like me who are entirely dependent on this forum.

I also feel that the community managers should create a newbies forum where newbies could post their queries and they must also ensure that the queries are answered. This will help build trust in the forum and also help in ensuring the newbie stays with linux. A common trait among people is that they try out linux. but when they run into problems and find no help on it, they get frustrated and quit linux.

I have felt frustrated many times but have resisted the urge to go back to windows and some very helpful people like fedorajim have helped me out a lot. So the hope that someone will help, keeps me using linux.

Cheers,
Vishnu Murahari Rao.