LQ Suggestions & FeedbackDo you have a suggestion for this site or an idea that will make the site better? This forum is for you.
PLEASE READ THIS FORUM - Information and status updates will also be posted here.
Notices
Welcome to LinuxQuestions.org, a friendly and active Linux Community.
You are currently viewing LQ as a guest. By joining our community you will have the ability to post topics, receive our newsletter, use the advanced search, subscribe to threads and access many other special features. Registration is quick, simple and absolutely free. Join our community today!
Note that registered members see fewer ads, and ContentLink is completely disabled once you log in.
If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact us. If you need to reset your password, click here.
Having a problem logging in? Please visit this page to clear all LQ-related cookies.
Get a virtual cloud desktop with the Linux distro that you want in less than five minutes with Shells! With over 10 pre-installed distros to choose from, the worry-free installation life is here! Whether you are a digital nomad or just looking for flexibility, Shells can put your Linux machine on the device that you want to use.
Exclusive for LQ members, get up to 45% off per month. Click here for more info.
Why? The more forums you have the more confusion. We could create a plethora of sub forums and it's only going to cause more confusion of where you should post, make it harder to navigate for some users, etc. Simplicity works best.
W/ all due respect, balance is needed; & too few sub-fora can be as bad as too many. Consider the extreme: What if there were only 10 categories allowed, it would be much simpler to put threads in the right categories; but how much more difficult would it be find things in those simplified categories.
What I wonder is if there is a mathematics of filing. One w/ real algorithms that quantify how many categories & sub-categories are ideal for a given information space, & especially that can definitively indicate when a given subject should be moved into its own sub-category, i.e. forum.
Jeremy is fairly conservative about creating new fora, which is way better than being too liberal. But, again w/ all due respect, my mathematician's gut says that in some cases LQ is too conservative. I can give an example, but I can offer no hard proof that my ideas are right. Nor do I have any way figure out what the right guidelines would be for when to split a topic off.
Samba is my example/pet peeve. I suspect that roughly 10% of the threads in the "Linux - Networking" forum are about Samba. Unfortunately, I cannot figure out any easy & reliable way to measure what that %-age really is. In any case I would subscribe to a Samba forum, but for me there is too much "chaff" to warrant subscribing to the "Linux - Networking" forum. This means I see very few questions Samba & of course I can't respond to what I don't see. Now, I don't know so much about Samba that this affects the quality of LQ, but what if I were an expert? Consider an extreme & unlikely case: what if Andrew Tridgell were an LQ-er & would subscribe only to a Samba forum, but not one on Networking in general? I know, I know, very unlikely, but think about making it easy for a busy expert to share his/her knowledge.
Jeremy has thought about this! There are very few threads that are specifically about multimedia creation, most are really Linux-Software. BUT!! Tagging allows you to post in one forum but let everyone know that it may not be specific to that forum. So tagging a thread with "multimedia creation" or whatever allows for specifics.
Tag This Post No tags yet, please tag this post - what is this?
That link takes you to a very short explanation of tagging. Basically, it's to add extra info to your post title/location. So you could put a thread in Software called "Creating 3D Movies in Linux" and then tag it "Blender". You could also use it when you think your post belongs in two forums, so a post could go in Ubuntu and be tagged "wireless card, broadcom, bw-cutter".
Use the tags in a similar way that you would use tags on a blog (for the bloggers out there).
Xavier, the basic use is clear, and I tag my blog (mainly for my own use), but it's unclear to me how they add anything outside of searching (which is not the strong point of the forum package in any case)
Jeremy is fairly conservative about creating new fora, which is way better than being too liberal. But, again w/ all due respect, my mathematician's gut says that in some cases LQ is too conservative. I can give an example, but I can offer no hard proof that my ideas are right. Nor do I have any way figure out what the right guidelines would be for when to split a topic off.
I think Jeremy is on the right track on keeping the number of sub-forums very low and I'll use my pet project, wireless, as the example. We do have a Wireless subforum, but every single day there are questions about wireless in Newbie, Software, Hardware, Laptop and Handhelds, Networking and probably in almost every one of the Distribution subforums. I would even wager that the Wireless subforum has a minority of the questions about wireless that happen here every day.
I like the idea of tags, but I think that there needs to be a bit more effort in how to make them useful. It might be interesting to allow people to make their own "forums" by subscribing to a tag, or set of tags. Sort of like the Zero Reply Threads idea, only user customizable. The biggest problem I can think of with this approach would be that it might make a hash out of the existing organization by making it even more confusing to decide where to post things.
and so on (these are the links in order that they appeared). None would help anyone trying to set up a dual boot system. I also recall (but could be wrong), that if I choose to search something less common, I get multiple references to the same thread.
Rgds
BM
Edit - in response to Xavier's question
Last edited by billymayday; 07-26-2008 at 08:49 AM.
LinuxQuestions.org is looking for people interested in writing
Editorials, Articles, Reviews, and more. If you'd like to contribute
content, let us know.