New Board

[mystified]

I know you like to play devil's advocate tyme but do you always have to be so negative? How about offering suggestions about how to make the board successful? And besides, you started your own forum and got members from this board to go to yours. You didn't seem to be concerned about splitting up the community then. And this would be a companion site. We'd work together.

[tyme]

I know you like to play devil's advocate tyme but do you always have to be so negative? How about offering suggestions about how to make the board successful?

If I had suggestions I would provide them. Since I don't, I'm bringing up possible issues so that possible solutions/workarounds/whatever can be thought of. I'm not trying to be negative, I'm just trying to be realistic and point out areas where I think you may run into problems.

And besides, you started your own forum and got members from this board to go to yours. You didn't seem to be concerned about splitting up the community then.

You're right, when I tried to start ILC I didn't concern myself with splitting the community. But then I never created ILC with the intent of it being a companion to this site, nor did I care if people from this community came there. At the time I was extremely fed up with some things that were occurring here at MUsB. But I digress...

[mystified]

This new board has capabilities that IPB doesn't. For instance we can imbed videos which is one of the suggestions we had for a board. And we can try and diversify and add features that will make the board appealing. paul's already working on a hack for a new portal for this. I'd really like to see suggestions for forum topics. It doesn't just have to be linux distros. It can be anything.

[Steve Scrimpshire]

I like the concept, but you will probably run into the same problems tyme did. He didn't have regular enough contributors, which you must have at the beginning to attract more people to contribute, which keeps the fuel burning to attract more contributors until it is self-supporting.

 

I attempted to contribute as much as I could to tyme's Geeklog, but I had some personal issues that needed my attention and he/we only had two or three other contributors that also were not that easily available (I miss LZ :sad: ).

[mystified]

I don't know if you remember what a hard time we had getting this board started Steve. There was so much controversy and people were angry and thought we were being disloyal to Tom. It was only after the old board went away that some people came over but some people left for other places. It's always difficult getting something off the ground. All we can do is do our best and hope for the best. :)

[tyme]

I think the point is you should try to do what you can before releasing the site to avoid some of those initial "bumps in the road". One thing is to be sure you have a dedicated base group of individuals who are willing to be involved from the start, to help build it up. That is, don't just expect people to follow where you lead, rather, make sure you have some that are definitely going to follow. I hope that sounds right/makes sense...and doesn't come off as being devils advocate-esque :P

Edited April 22, 2008 by tyme

[yossarian]

I don't know if you remember what a hard time we had getting this board started Steve. There was so much controversy and people were angry and thought we were being disloyal to Tom. It was only after the old board went away that some people came over but some people left for other places. It's always difficult getting something off the ground. All we can do is do our best and hope for the best. :)

 

What a speech! -applause-

 

As I see it, this is one more place for me to annoy you guys and girls. Don't worry, there's enough from me for everybody!

[ilia_kr]

I don't know if you remember what a hard time we had getting this board started Steve. There was so much controversy and people were angry and thought we were being disloyal to Tom. It was only after the old board went away that some people came over but some people left for other places. It's always difficult getting something off the ground. All we can do is do our best and hope for the best. :)

 

You can give away free staff to attract visitors, like free beers..

 

Now seriously: you can have a student portal. There is a lot of software available that students can use (i mean school and higher) but people just don't know about it. Example: free C/C++ compilers, K3dsurf, Kplot, octave, gnuplot and other. I'm still learning how to use all this stuff for my needs, and it would be great if i had someone to chat about this.

[Steve Scrimpshire]

I don't know if you remember what a hard time we had getting this board started Steve. There was so much controversy and people were angry and thought we were being disloyal to Tom. It was only after the old board went away that some people came over but some people left for other places. It's always difficult getting something off the ground. All we can do is do our best and hope for the best.

 

Who was angry? :P

[AussieJohn]

Could one of the reasons for falling numbers be due to the fact that so many admins. and mods. openly advertise here that they don't even use Mandriva ???.

 

Yes I wonder. :unsure: :huh:

 

Cheers. John.

[mystified]

Could one of the reasons for falling numbers be due to the fact that so many admins. and mods. openly advertise here that they don't even use Mandriva ???.

 

Yes I wonder. :unsure: :huh:

 

Cheers. John.

 

We may not use Mandriva anymore but don't you think it says something about us that we still spend so much of our own time and energy supporting it and the users of this board? Do you think it's fun being an admin or a mod? Do you know that the mods have mine and pauls cell phone numbers so they can text us if somethings wrong so we're available 24 hours a day? Did you know that I paid for the renewal of technical support for this board out of my own pocket? If that's not showing support for Mandriva and the community I don't know what is. I'm not complaining because I love giving back to the open source community. But don't accuse me and others of something without looking at the whole picture.

[tyme]

Could one of the reasons for falling numbers be due to the fact that so many admins. and mods. openly advertise here that they don't even use Mandriva ???.

What would you expect them to do? If they choose not to run Mandriva, should we take away their status? Or perhaps we should just tell them they can't mention what distro they're using, or ask questions about it? One of the things that I've always found true at this place is that, for those who choose to run other distributions (sometimes more "hardcore", for lack of a better word), the knowledge they gain only helps in solving problems here on the board.

[theYinYeti]

So, more like tutorials, how-tos and software reviews?

(I suppose this is a question about my previous post)

 

Yes and no :) Tutorials, how-tos and software reviews would indeed be the kind of content I propose, but I prefer to retain the Question/Answers method, instead of contributions/articles.

 

For example:

I have this big file formatted this way, and that other big file formatted that way, and I want to list all lines from the first file that are unique in this file where the 3rd field is equal to the 1st field of a line from the second file.

What shell commands should I use to achieve this result?

or:

I have CSV files with 25000 to 50000 lines each, where the first field is a date+time. What tools are available under Linux for efficiently drawing graphs based on the data from 1 to 3 files at a time? Note that some of the data to draw is not directly the bare data from the files but has to be computed instead.

I already tried OpenOffice but it cannot cope with that much data…

 

I'm sorry if my idea is not clear enough. I'll continue to explain if needed. Anyway, it's just one idea among others.

By the way, I like ilia_kr's suggestion too. Last summer, I setup a laptop with Linux for my son (6yr old, has reduced "agility/motor" skills), and I was very surprised to discover a wealth of great software for children!

 

Yves.

[ianw1974]

Mandriva is in 6th place on distrowatch.org. Whilst I know that their stats might not be the best, it's a good indication that it isn't all that bad for Mandriva.

[Reiver_Fluffi]

<< sums up the tone of this thread!

 

Too much negativity, and not enough support. Call me condescending if you wish, bit I'm disappointed in the attitude some of you have adopted in this discussion.