We are in the process of merging our user-support forum Ask Fedora into Fedora Discussion — our site geared towards contributor and project team conversations. Historically, we’ve used tags differently on those two sites. This means we need to figure out an approach for combining them. Please take a look at the Adding -team to (almost) all of the tags in Project Discussion? thread and add your thoughts.
History of tags
These sites were initially separate because of the different target audiences. We learned that is often confusing to people, and it’s hard to re-categorize posts that land in the wrong place. Plus, making a strong distinction between users and contributors has never been the Fedora way. Almost all contributors are Fedora Linux users too, and we always welcome all of our users to get more involved. So: together!
In the current Fedora Discussion site organization, tags are roughly the equivalent of team mailing lists. If you’re interested in documentation, you subscribe to the #docs tag. If you’re interested in marketing, subscribe to the #marketing tag. Then you get notifications (including email, if that’s your preference) when someone posts about those things.
On Ask, we’ve used tags more loosely, and in a more traditional way: tags describe the content. For example, if a question is about Fedora Workstation, it might include the #workstation tag.
Merging
This is all fine, but we have a concern for the merged site. After the merger, will topics from Ask Fedora will overwhelm those from Project Discussion? If you’re following the #docs tag, you’ll get notifications for both support questions and team discussion. If you’re getting email notifications, you can filter on X-Discourse-Category and X-Discourse-Tags headers to distinguish, but that doesn’t work for the site’s notification menu.
I proposed that existing tags get a suffix, becoming #docs-team, #workstation-wg, #kde-sig, etc., to distinguish them. But, folks from several teams have now told me they prefer having the same tag. And I can see the simplicity and elegance of that, too.
So why is this on the Community Blog rather than just Fedora Discussion? Because I’d like to encourage wider use, and so even if you aren’t following the forum a lot currently, I’d like your input! Please take a look at the Adding -team to (almost) all of the tags in Project Discussion? thread and add your thoughts.
Not sure if it fits her, but I try it anyway
I would like to request the #ask- tag to use as forwarder links we had #start-here faq etc.
etc …
Forward them to topics where are moderated by a person or we have a wiki in the top section to maintain by a group of individuals.
About the the whole e-mail situation, sometimes i do get overwhelmed, and would like to totally switch them off. I not found out how yet to do this on a simple way.
While traveling and away from the computer it would make sense to use them again. Because while try to switch off … following the whole pulse of conversation online too, not makes a lot of sens in my opinion.
I don’t think we’ll need to use an “ask” prefix. We can restrict tags like hardware or software to the Ask categories. See How should we use tags in the Ask Fedora category? (I’m inclined to leave out “software”, though — it’s almost always software in some way or another, even when it’s hardware…)
And see Ask Fedora merge structure second thoughts… I’m intending for the top-level to have the FAQ and guide posts.
You have obviously invested a lot of time and thinking about this merger/transition. and I thank you for that, as a new Fedora user.
I will first say that Fedora IMHO is the future, and I am particularly impressed with its organization of information, support, discussions, projects, and it is good that you are thinking about merging before this becomes unmanageable and confusing to new users.
The concept of immutable file systems appeals to me and it has not been without its challenges, but the bigger question is, do I post to to Fedora with silverblue tag or do I use one of the other less traveled paths like r/silverblue which is specific, but not as many members to answer?
Fedora has spliced Silverblue into the Fedora discussion without any major issues so far, but as Silverblue and other spins take on lives of their own, each with their own challenges, I think it will become a bit confusing where to go for help.
On the surface, this looks like a very sound decision to managing what has become an unwieldy urban sprawl of Fedora discussion groupss.
Yes the user guide to specific information to return necessary info’s for helping. And not say 100 times the same in a initial reply.
For example someone says, after update of kernel my wifi not works anymore (Initial topic).
We could respond then: Please open the #ask-hardware document and read there the section for WIFI/Network problems. There we do explain that in Linux, Hardware with closed source Drivers, have to be updated because Closed Source driver are not available for Linux on new Kernels. There we can also mention that we would need output from
inxi -N && uname -sras a minimum of information.On #ask-software in the other hand we could make a index with drivers for the network hardware we asked before. Link to docs/quickdocs and other resources as gitlab/hub etc who show how to get the hardware running (again).
The ask prefix for forwarding links, not tags to categorize. If you put this start-here after the domain you get to the topic where also links #start-here
#start-here was forwarding to a doc from @ankursinha
faq to one from @hhlp this even was a wiki that we could participate and help to keep it up to date.