Questions are being asked that are in the WIKI and Tutorial section here, how about ?
 

The nice and very descriptive links in the Tutorial section and WIKI section would probably do wonders for new people partly because many people don't know what a WIKI is and secondly the layout is better than saying "have you rtfm today?".

The actual links to each section in the layout they are in the individual sections might reduce the redundant questions that seem to be endless. And having worked in many "call centers" that supported OSes like NetWare, SCO, Solaris, Windows NT/2000/SBS, RHEL, OS/2, MacOS, IRIX, AIX, and DOS, I can tell you that many people will still look at the paragraph and ignore the nice words anyway because a sandwich list at a deli works better than a novel paragraph explaining how to eat.

So my suggestion is to have WIKI and Tutorial side by side like at a Deli.

On the left or right the following which can always be edited and augmented with new sections as time goes on:

Tutorials
Networking
Security
Hardware
Applications / GUI / Multimedia
Programming
LinuxQuestions.org
Jeremy's Magazine Articles
LQ ISO


And then it's counterpart on the right or left, the WIKI selections here:

WIKI
* Applications
* Commands
* Common Questions and Misconceptions
* Common Tasks
* Distributions - List of Linux distributions
* Future Tech
* Gaming
* Hardware
* Installation
* Networking
* People
* Programming
* Security


All of which are actual links and not just a list. (why make that dog dig, when you can just give the bone to him??)


EDIT: Also there are articles in the LinuxQuestions.org section that should obviously be elsewhere.... so how about it?

Even if we crammed the page with 16 pt size fonts with blaring red text explaining all this to people, they would still post the questions again and again.

A better solution would be to point out to the particular wiki page with a link in replying to the questions.

Colors don't mean anything if the browser is elinks or lynx.

EDIT: That's what the list is, the links to a better area where the answer is instead of someone like you or me or someone else searching through the pages to get the link for them because the main links are not on the front page of this place.

Its a common mistake to put News up in the center of forum website front page. All news should be in a section and a link should be up like "Latest News" to facilitate the users getting what they really came for and that is a direct answer on the "homepage".

I'm looking at page 7 of over 37,000 unanswered posts and you want me to search for the answers here because the main page is not set up correctly?! Is that the point you are trying to make? Page 7 is from this month and its what date????

Man pages are no help because they made The Linux Documentation Project later on to stop the confusion that man pages cause despite the "man <command>" simplicity.

I doubt many people use Lynx or Links to browse LQ.

What is seriously your fetish with getting rid of all posts with 0 replies? Take into consideration that 37k posts that have gone unanswered along with a large % of those that don't really necessarily need replies as they can be news, general threads, announcements and so on.. and then take a look at the total number of threads and posts which was just over 308k when I last peeked at it... I'd think that is quite impressive for the amount of threads and questions that do have some kind of response.

Yes, we can try our best to teach others how to properly search and read to find their answers but that isn't what this site is about. Some like to get that actual response from others in the community so they're totally welcome to ask, even if they do believe the answer is out there and they didn't search for it. LQ.org allows anyone to ask without being totally criticized without searching and just being fed a link to a howto or site. This is and never will be a RTFM type site. Anyone caught just feeding links to new comers to this site and or Linux will usually be handled with as that is not what LQ.org is about. There are times though when a link to a howto is sufficient, on a case by case basis. But I think placing more links and cluttering up the site even more is not going to slow down the number of questions on the forums.

LQ.org provides direct help from the Linux and Open Source Community back to that same community, newbies and for the experienced.

I have a few times... ;)

I don't mean to flame, but as far as web design goes, people who live in glass houses shouldn't really be chucking rocks about.

Dave

Hey now, lets not make this a personal matter.. :tisk:

Right now I'm using the browser called lynx and the intro page or first page of this site would look so much more appealing to people running lynx is they didn't have to look in HCL, Tutorials or WIKI to find the links that are there and then click/click, etc.

And then of course we must think about those who are coming from the Microsoft environment where the term or word WIKI doesn't exist. For them it's called Encarta. All things they want are on microsoft.com/support and not in a WIKI. This is my main point. *I* didn't know what a WIKI was until someone from #bitchx on EFnet told me about 6 months ago.

If the menu list the way they are in the individual sections are to make it easier to find things, think of how much easier it would be if the items were on the front page.

Most people who are newbies don't know the categories to look things up too which only compounds the sitution.

You can always leave it this way and attempt to answer the 37,000 unanswered questions when a minimum of 600 new questions come each day!

The reason I bring up my idea is its obvious that SOMETHING is wrong if you have the nice explanation paragraph and the minimal link and people are STILL asking questions about things that are covered in the WIKI section here.

**

It's the people who don't read. You can lead the horse to the pond, but you can't... as the saying goes.

The moral of the story is the information is there for everybody in an easily accessible manner on this site. There just seems to be no way to force people to read it.

The best way is to forget the whole thing and continue answering questions to newbies by being friendly, helpful and providing links in your answers to the wiki/information pages wherever relevant.

In the latest LQ Members Choice Awards, in the Favorite Browser category, Lynx received a total of 3 votes out of 2050, with Firefox being the runaway winner. Designing LQ so that it is optimized for Lynx would mean that LQ's visual appearance would not be optimized for the browsers that over 99.9% that LQ'ers are using. I'm not sure I see how this would be an improvement.

The simple fact is that no matter how the site's pages are designed or laid out, or how many helpful links you provide, there are going to be some people who simply either ignore them, or just scan over the pages so fast that nothing registers. To use an analogy: Doors that need to be pushed to open have signs on them that read "Push". Doors that need to be pulled to be opened have signs on them that read "Pull". Now, you can make the signs as big as you want, and use flashing red neon lights for the letters, but you STILL will have people who just won't pay attention. Sure, it's as obvious as it can possibly be, but people will just flat out ignore it.

My advice is to just accept it, and let it go. Why get all worked up over something trivial - there are more important things in life. -- J.W.

Besides all that, J.W., LQ is a community driven site. It's basically the forum which makes the site so good.

Content pages are good, but in a forum environment it is natural that the other parts of the site are not used as much and most people will come to the forum for help.

The objective of a site like LQ is not only to provide content, but also help people who are not willing to do too much research. That's what drives more people to this site. To receive easy to use answers rather than be forced to go through a lot of documentation that may or may not be relevant to their problems.