i would also (however you already said you dont plan on doing it) like a sales kinda forum.

just a place for people to ask for tips on stores/websites in their area/country. to look for linux pre-loaded PCs or other Unix-compatible hardware.

besides that small comment.. i cant think of anything else that i have found missing, at least for this very moment.

all else i can say is _Thanks_ for the free service to you and the mods.

roelofs, you can also access it in each thread, under "Thread Tools".

--jeremy

If you're looking to be notified of new posts to threads where you have posted,
update your Messaging & Notification options in your LQ UserCP. This option:
Sorta like Burger King or whomever used to say, "Have it your way!"

I don't know, perhaps it is just me, but I find that LQ is a great resource with little or no flaws.

However, a couple of niggles:
1. search is quite slow (is it a software or infrastructural issue?)
2. the hardware database, which I use quite a bit when I build systems for friend and family, is a little sparse. I'd like to see an initiative from root to spur people to post their systems. Few people do it...

By #2 do you mean the Linux HCL? I searched just now and found none for Q4U. Perhaps that was just a bug in the search feature.

You caught me out mate... I just wanted to say that I was the first to be guilty of this laziness, then I thought, "better go and fix this now"... will be fixed soon...

Good on yah!

And your are right, we should post all our hardware.

I am now helping maintain our HCL, and have found it
might be difficult for some new to this type of thing.

When you make your post, be sure that you do not put
subjective material, or your experience with the particular
hardware in the Description field. According to root, "the
description should only contain factual information that
would be considered a product description. The subjective
part should be contained within the review, not the description."

My own hardware is sorely lacking, also. Let's hold each other
to getting it in there soon.

And also, there are quite a few post which are still in the
Approval Queue waiting to be added. They'll start showing up
quicker in the near future.

Thanks for your help in populating the Linux HCL at LQ! I
believe it's going to be an even more awesome resource in the
future than it is now.

Jeremy, Chinaman, thank you for the hints about subscribing to threads. My only (last?) question is about the nature of the notifications themselves:

This sort of defeats the purpose for me. Is there another secret option to change that behavior? (I did look through all of the items in the "UserCP" Options this time and didn't see anything obvious. Then again, I never would have guessed that "UserCP" is where options/preferences live...)

Thanks.

You will only get one notification per thread, until you visit the forum. The shear number of emails we'd send out if it were configured to send for every post would be immense (and probably annoying to members).

--jeremy

I wondered if that was the issue... I'll just point out that (1) making it configurable (i.e., allowing regulars to preserve the current behavior) would solve the latter problem, and (2) the lack of such a capability is a barrier for experienced users who don't have time to poll the site interactively. If you have enough people answering questions already, that's fine, of course. But most help forums, mailing lists, etc., tend to have more questions than answers, so in general I would expect that any feature that encourages the production of answers would be a welcome one.

Cheers...

I think also it might be neat if the start page to LQ was personal. What I mean is when you log in on the main page you could see the topics you are active in and would be able to jump there and post a response if someone else posted. Then instead of having responses sent via email, you could choose no to that and see them when you log into LQ. Maybe some kind of personal start page for LQ?

I have recently edited my options so that I automatically subscribe to threads I post in, but without e-mail notification. Then all I have to do is click on the link "Subscribed Threads" in "My LQ" section on the right when I log in and it will open a page with a sorted list of the threads I have posted in. But I agree that making it part of the main page when you log in might be even better, if there's room for it and if it is not too demanding on resources of course. ;-)

anti_microsoft, http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/usercp.php and
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...bscription.php may be what you are looking for.

roelofs, can you explain more how you'd use that to answer questions? The email only contains a brief snippet and you can only subscribe to existing threads. The forum digest functionality (weekly or daily email) and 0 reply functionality (daily email, 0 reply search and RSS feed) seem like they would be much more useful in this regard.

--jeremy

I guess this thread would be a case in point. ;-)

Speaking only for myself, I rarely have time to browse web sites of any sort, and what little time I do have available is devoted solely to keeping up with lwn.net (or trying to, rather). In particular, I don't match what appears to be your standard LQ profile in that I don't go out of my way to find trouble (i.e., monitor digest/0-reply).

However, if I have, for whatever reason, subscribed to a thread and get an e-mail notifying me of one or more responses, I'll sometimes make the time to go check what's going on and possibly write a quick response or clarification or whatever. More e-mails indicate a higher level of activity and probable interest for me (as well as for others, clearly); in addition, receiving more than one message at different times of the day greatly enhances the probability that I'll happen to read one at an opportune moment. The current LQ scheme, on the other hand, means that the one and only message has to be timed just right, and the odds for that are currently about 1 in 4. If it misses, I tend to forget about it, and it may be a couple of weeks or months before I think to come back and catch up on my own. (This thread is a case in point--it's been more than a week, and it would have been longer if the browser tab I was about to use for something else wasn't still displaying this page.)

In short, it's the difference between polling and interrupts. The former doesn't work so well when things get busy.

And maybe it's just me--although observations of the FOSS-related groups I hang out in would suggest otherwise. Anyway, I hope this answers your question. I'll try to remember to check back in another week. ;-)

I have a few HCL suggestions/questions that have probably been suggested and summarily rejected in the past, but here goes...

1. Is there some way we can get Chinaman's response from this thread or something similar as a sticky in the HCL area? Before I submitted, I went looking for directions, style manual, etc. for the HCL and couldn't find anything until I came across Chinaman's response. It clarified things for me, but I didn't find it until after I had posted and was trying to figure out why my product wasn't showing up.

2. Following from #1, can we make the products pending approval available in the search? The one I posted doesn't show up when I search, so I am presuming that until it's approved, it will remain unavailable. This could result in duplicate entries and more work for the HCL mods. Probably shouldn't allow reviews to be posted against items pending approval so things don't get out of control.

3. Should the OP have a price, product rating, and recommendation field like the reviewers? This may not be extremely important, but having it adds an additional data point. (Hey, go easy, I did my grad work in statistics.)

Well, those are my feeble-minded suggestions to make the world a better and safer place.