This forum is an excellent place for troubleshooting, but it could be better if the knowledge was congregated into something that was indexed-- especially for the more durable parts. I am starting, and invite participation in, a thing called a twiki. IT does not do pure forums well. I do not need money now, would like a knowledge sharing thing only. That I expect to be true for years into the future. If you folks would like to look at this thing in baby form, try this URL: http://www.allposixwiki.com/ (I am committed enough to this to have pulled a 5 year domain registration for it, and DNS has perked to many places. I also have paid 6 month's worth of hosting as a first block installment for it.)

As with this site, you do not have to register to read, but do need to in order to post. Why not partner together and refer to each other's sites??? One way to get a better whole set of resources is to team to build multisite sets of them, and those sets can be in many virtual places.

In a sense, this is part of my payback to Open Source, and it is set up to be a resource that all can use and contribute to. It can search on text on each page, and in topic title, and gens pages on the fly from a registered user's browser input. So any user can add to that site, and the page title becomes a linkable word that the user can use, and repeats of that word autolink from any page on site. It is a Perl subversion of WikiWikiWeb that is called TWiki.

--
John Danielson
(some info about me HERE: http://www.johndanielsonii.com/ )

A HOWTO/tutorial (wiki-like) section has been on the TODO for LinuxQuestions.org for some time. A few lingering things have finally been completed so work on these kinds of sections can commence in the near future.

--jeremy

Ok... BUT I could have such outlined in a twiki in a couple hours-- what us there NOW is less than a full day's work (about 12 manhours, 10 mine, I do not limit myself to 8 hour days... ). So, why not do what you folks do best?? Forums, and other web venues, news, security, etc (BTW, as far as security, here is an interesting place for you all-- http://linsec.ca/ ). Traffic would not be hurt if we pointed to each other as far as sites went.

IF you want to do this, you might look at PHPWiki 1.34 or 1.32. It is a Linux\FreeBSD\Windows compatible that gets along with vbulletin on one shared server. Expect a learning curve, but since it is open source as is TWIki I think you could customize it very well. It feeds one heck of a smaller badnwidth load than does a more graphic website, and the webmaster deos not have to build the index. It DOES want prsql, msql, or mysql, though. Twiki is more compact yet, and is one heck of a fast little thing that likes Apache mod_perl and Perl 5dot6 by preference. It is approximately for free-form data collaboration what vbulletin is for forums.

I have looked at PHPWiki and a few others - still deciding what avenue to take. I appeciate and respect your dedication to this, but I tend not to rely on other sites if at all possible. The interface side of this is going to by far be the easy part. The getting it populated part is what will be tough. As I said this has been in the works for some time here at LQ. That being said I wish you luck with your project.

--jeremy

The nice thing about wiki is that the users get to help populate it, edit it, and correct it if they think need be. Something as actively developed as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Linux needs flowing and revisable docs. The admin ends up defining the skeleton and guiding, but not providing huge amounts of content.

It becomes a knowledge base. Most of the beginning content is here in your forums, actually. while you could use a Q&A apporach, I would build to start with a topic index of what is here, and gradually move the best threads to a twiki. Keep the fora for current things, move old to twiki by topic.

Just an idea, fly with it or not at the whims of the admins here(you will recall I offered help, but am not into PHP so would not want the adminning of this project even to save my life....). It is actually easier to admin than forums, because it autosorts itself by the nature of its entry method. it is like forums with no TIME sort, just TOPIC sorts, and the tree can be 3-4 layers deep.

I understand that control is good, but I also understand that collaboration spreads COSTS and time investment across more people's schedules and pocketbooks. True collaboration bypasses power games. And the core of Open Source, IMHO, is collaboration. So, best of luck, I will be around some, will catch you later-- either way you all choose to go.
I need to go

John