LQ Community

Originally Posted by microsoft/linux oh, ok. Just curious. Definitly go ahead with the Social Networking thing though. Oh, and by the way, this is kind of similar to MySpace, if this answers anyone's questions.

But with a less annoying background and no emo whining

Granted, however not everyone w/ a MySpace does "emo whining". *hint hint* Have you ever seen me "emo whine"? But seriously, kudos to jeremy, this is pretty cool.

This is a simple way to build a community atmosphere within LQ. It's always nice to be recognized by other members here. I hope more people use the buddy feature...

Hey, we're geeks. We don't do this Friend thing as it all takes too much maintenance. :-)) When will we have time to learn all our new gadgets? Next you'll assume we have lives and GF's!

Thus we need Social Net"creation" tools rather than Net"working" tools. More datamining rather than data mapping.

Something along the lines of taking all the posts of each user, extracting keywords and finding other users with most similar interests and then linking them.

Finding users with similar interests/distros/etc. should be coming soon

--jeremy

I just edited my profile. I put more information into the biography section. Then I looked at a post that I had already made. The information didn't show up. That indicates to me that the profile information in each post is static. I would like to see this information provided through a live link to your current profile information. That way if you make a change in your profile it would show up in all of your previous posts.

This would be good for security nuts like myself. I would like to be able to remove information that I have decided that I should not have entered into the profile in the first place, or to make updates that more accurately reflect the information that I want to present to the LQ community. If profile information in posts is static then a post with too much information in the profile cannot be "fixed". Security nuts like myself are inclined to leave the profile blank rather than to take a chance on entering too much information only to later regret having entered that information. In a case like that any posts with the overly informative profile would become a source of neurotic worry and regret. A live link to the current profile would also be good if you happen to misspell something in your profile. One fix in your profile would fix all of the posts made with the misspelling.

Lastly, a live link to each member's profile in each post would take up less disk space on your server than copying static profile information into each post.

BTW, thanks for creating LQ and for the already implemented recent format changes. I had visited LQ several times over the years but I never felt like I could find my way around. I don't know exactly what format changes you made recently but I can tell you that I am able to navigate the web site easily. Whatever you did made a big difference in usability to me.

The postbit information isn't static, but we don't show all fields (even if they're filled in) and do cache some things.

--jeremy

You can now click on a distribution in any member profile and find all other members that are using that distro. Note that for this to work properly, you need to use a comma (',') as your separator. You may want to update your profile appropriately.

--jeremy

The searching is working fine jeremy, but as soon as I try to navigate the list I get this:

LinuxQuestions.org Message Sorry! The administrator has disabled the list of members.

To duplicate:
- Bring up a profile (I used yours)
- I clicked "Slackware"
- Click any of the letters among the row, and it should yield the error.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...27#post2090427

--jeremy

Ah, I see. Thanks again jeremy

Okay, it's time for a voice from "the other camp."

I personally don't like the new changes at LQ. And I didn't like the last major changes, either. Maybe it's because I'm not into the latest fads. But I'll tell you, this change has cut my post count way down. It's just too inconvenient a format, compared to the old one IMO.

For instance, with the old format, I could have LQ's home page as my browser's home page, and right on the left was the Threads With 0 Replies. Plain and simple, and if I thought I could help, I clicked on a link. Now that is gone from the LQ home page, and if I try and set 0 Reply Threads as my home page, it displays but after making a post and refreshing the page, it now shows the thread I posted to with 1 reply still in the group with 0 Relpies. To get only 0 Reply Threads I must click on that link again. Probably a bug I should report. Too much info in the new 0 Reply Thread links ... I just wanted to see the title of the threads.

When I wanted to search, it was simple. Now it's so complicated I can't even find some threads...of mine! For instance, another member emailed me that he wanted to discuss my "lengthy post dated 7-17-04 on ASUS motherboards at LinuxQuestions.org." Since I'm not familiar with the thread, I used the Search function. And there was no way I could come up with that thread (tried different "ASUS" strings). I used the Advanced Search thoroughly. I asked for all of my posts from Any Date in Descending Order, and that only gave me the last 600; ending at 03-03-05. When I asked for them all in Ascending Order, it ended at 07-19-04. I even went to my Member Profile and selected "Find all posts by Chinaman", but that stopped at 07-26-05. So I couldn't find that post. But ... I put "Chinaman ASUS motherboards LinuxQuestions" in Google <Linux> and got the thread immediately as the first hit. Here in LQ the same string returned "Sorry - no matches. Please try some different terms."

Additionally, this FOAF and Social Network puts me off. And if I understand it correctly, it's making some of my personal choices available to people without my permission. When I click on FOAF in my Member Profile, I get a page of what looks like HTML to me, but is all but unreadable. My browser says, "This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below." What does that mean? I've never seen that with any web page before.

What is this Social Network stuff? Mine says, "Friends (0) ... 0% Mutual / Is Linked To (3) / Is Linked From (13)" What does that mean? I never set any Social anything, and don't want the world to know who I've selected for Buddies or PM or whatever.

As you can see, it's all got me confused. But no matter, whatever the majority wants will probably rule. Just like to speak for old dog's like me, who don't learn all the new tricks easily. Maybe no more of us will read this thread and post, but I can tell you I'm not the only one disgruntled about the new and confusing "features."

And the VB Code thing. When you Quote a thread, there's too much italics, making it hard to read. I've yet to find out how to change that.

Something about the new format I do like. It resolves the pages a lot quicker, and if you start posting in Quick Reply you can hit Go Advanced without losing what you had typed. I like to preview my posts, because I make errors.

Jeremy, I'm grateful for LQ, and will continue to do what I can to help. Just want to state my opinion along with the other fellers.

Thanks for the feedback - getting opinions is always good, sometimes especially so if they aren't in the positive. You've covered a lot of ground in your post, so let me address a couple issues and we can go from there. If you want to start a more in depth conversation, I'd suggest a separate thread to keep the dialog together. For 0 replies, it sounds like the RSS feed would be much more along the lines of what you want. Fast, easy and you can pull it into whatever app you want. The only downside I can see is that the feed is cached, but that shouldn't be *too* much of a problem. FOAF is meant to be XML, not something you browse to. It's main purpose is to make sure that the data that is yours is exportable in a standardized format. We hope you always stay at LQ, but we want you to stay because we work to be the best, not because we have some of your bits locked up (if that makes any sense). As for the social networking, the data was always there, but now it's actually useful. Lastly, we do realize that the search is not ideal (and it definitely takes some getting used to). We made some major improvements about 2 weeks ago (completely ditching natural language and going only with boolean) and plan to work to improve it from there. Thanks for the patience on that.

--jeremy

I still don't understand "FOAF is meant to be XML, not something you browse to. It's main purpose is to make sure that the data that is yours is exportable in a standardized format." I don't know why, either. What is XML? And if it's supposed to be exportable, then we users need to know how to export it. I guess the problem is I don't know what is XML.

I don't understand the Social Network data, either. And where is always was, because I never saw anybody linked to me before, or a lack of friends.

And I don't know what you mean by bits locked up. What are bits? If anything, data is now less accesible to me, not more accessible. There is no member's list anymore, and I can't find threads that used to be easy to find.

I'm sorry, Jeremy, but the problem is probably that learning this bunch of new stuff is not what I want to learn. There are only so many hours in a day, and other priorities prempt that. I'm still trying to learn the basics of Linux.

I just want a forum with questions. It's getting to the point where I need to use Wikipedia or Google or something just to look up the terms you've used ... I don't know them.
RSS feed
feed is cached
FOAF
XML
exportable in a standardized format
bits
social networking
natural language (I assume that means 'plain English'?)
boolean

I'm not going anywhere, just not as useful as I'd like to be here anymore.

Edit: I've now read about RSS Feed, FOAF and Social network service at Wikipedia. I still don't understand XML and how to read it (I need human readable), and I am totally against FOAF and Social networking in any form. Just my opinion. My social information is nobody's business unless I choose to post it. When someone else posts it without my permission, that is invasion of privacy.

I'd agree that technology can be confusing and many new terms may as well be a foreign language (and in reality, tech is probably a pseudo language of sorts). XML, or Extensible Markup Language, is basically just a way to tag data. If you notice how we are rolling out the new features though, it's in a manner that you don't *need* to use them. They very purposely don't get in the way or make you learn them. Don't need/want FOAF info (and the reality is that most people probably will not)? You can safely and simply just ignore the whole thing. Now, RSS is something I'd suggest everyone take the time to learn. While it's an old technology at this point, the wave is coming and it's inevitable. Luckily, both FF 1.x and IE 7.x have it integrated, so there is no need to even learn a new app - most people can just use their browser. FF calls is Live Bookmarks, it's that orange box in the lower right corner. I have no idea what IE calls it. As for the members list, did you find it useful in a way you can't reproduce now? Browsing 220,000 members sorted alpha seems like a futile effort and as it is now you can easily find members by name (in fact, start typing a username in the advanced search and you will see a nice list popup with all possible choices).

--jeremy