Standing in the street trying to hear yourself think

[Evan]

On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 10:08 PM, Andrew Sayers <
andrew-ubuntu-devel at pileofstuff.org> wrote:

> Evan wrote:
> <snip - metaforums and subforums>
>
> I like this idea in principle, but in practice I'd be worried about
> messages being pushed back and forth between forums - your sound driver
> breaks, and the audio forum pushes your question to the driver forum,
> which pushes you back to the sound forum, ad nauseum.
>

That's a good point. The first thing that comes to mind is requiring karma
to move a post any direction but down, however that seems to like it could
get overcomplicated and over-restrictive quite quickly. Besides being much
harder to write for the forum coders.


> I suspect the answer might be simpler than this.  I've been hanging
> around the beginner team this week, and a frequent complaint seems to be
> that people post without searching older threads (or sometimes even
> older posts in the same thread).  Adding a duplicate-checking feature to
> the beginner's forum (like we have for bugs in Launchpad) might make a
> significant dent in the number of duplicate threads.
>

There is a 'check if already posted' button beside the title in the New
Thread page, but it probably doesn't get used much by beginners. Perhaps
asking "Are you sure your problem isn't one of these..." before actually
creating a new thread?

- - -

I think the best place for the nested meta-channels would be on IRC. IIRC
this already happens to some extent (there's a long list of specialized
channels at [1]), but it would probably help if we created a few more
subchannels, formalized the naming structure for them, and designated
#ubuntu a meta-only channel. Again, there are definitely issues with this,
but it seems a better fit than trying this on forums or mailing lists, and
it's by far the easiest to implement / revert, depending.

[1] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/InternetRelayChat#Channels
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