Cafe so slooow!

[LillyDragon]

As for me, I was mostly away doing other things, but I still kept tabs on the Cafe from time to time. I got really caught up in a coding project, and then finishing up a couple of art projects as well.

[QIII]

... people don't respond almost as if they were scared to voice their opinion.

I doubt that is the issue.

[sammiev]

I like reading in the forums and noticed that if you view new post that the time of post from top to bottom on the first page was about 1 to 2 mins. Now it's at least 45 min to over an hour. I cleaned my glasses many times and the results are much the same. I hope to see it pickup again.

[toupeiro]

I still lurk on occasion but haven't had much to say. This is the natural progression of forums in my experience. One could speculate forever to the whys but it's agility, development, and "Linux for Humans" that brought people to ubuntu. For the want of simplicity, humanity was lost?

[evilsoup]

Ever since the site got hacked, things haven't been as active IMHO. Seems like the same dozen or so posters rehashing the same conversations ad nauseam. Discourse doesn't seem much busier: 4 threads with posts in the last 24 hours.

This is a serious issue, I think. The new login method doesn't remember me. Whenever I come back to the site I have to log in, ugh. It may seem like a small thing, but it has seriously turned me off to these forums. I come here much less often than I used to (about once every month or two, while it used to be one of the things I checked daily -- having to log in has killed that, because I can't just spend five minutes finding out if there's anything new).

There's also the fact that askubuntu.com has pretty much usurped this forum as the main community support channel, which means less people posting in general, which means less people coming to the cafe.

[Erik1984]

I'd say it's a combination. People losing their old account after the attack, 'competition' from other Ubuntu support sources (Ask, Discourse, Reddit to name a few) and natural forum dynamics. I also have the idea that forums in general have become less popular due to the advance of social media. I'm not saying social media are a proper substitute for forums but one only has so many hours in a day to check news sources and contribute.

[QIII]

Nobody "lost" their accounts. What many did not do was read the instructions for how to access their accounts and assumed they were lost when they did not follow those instructions.

As for the new login, the Admins work with Canonical IT on a regular basis to make things less onerous. There are no simple solutions. Canonical hosts the UF and they decided that risk mitigation should include SSO, so that is simply a fact of life now. There was certainly no intention of making things difficult just to be spitefully callous with regard to the convenience of our users.

AU and Discourse are not competition. I see them as complimentary and welcome. AU excels at what it does: straight forward Q&A for suitable inquiries that apply 90% of the time. That sort of resource is a good thing. Here at UF, we excel at helping people when the 90% solution does not work in their case -- we can do the troubleshooting that cannot be done at AU. We can still answer the 90% questions when they arise here, of course, but if traffic at UF has gone down because most people can find an answer already discussed on AU then that is wonderful. What Discourse will eventually become is yet to be seen, but I am sure it will settle in to a role complimenting AU and UF.

There are also the very active IRC channels for those users whose needs can be met through that venue. Many of us are also active on IRC. Perhaps some traffic has gone there, and that is good if people are finding answers.

This is all a good thing. UF has not become in any way irrelevant. There has simply been a natural evolution in the "division of labor" -- which is a good thing for users. They have a selection of tools for the right job.

[t0p]

As a number of posters mentioned above, it does seem to have slowed down in the wake of the security problems and adoption of the new login system. It's good for the site to be more secure, but a lot of computer users value convenience over security. Also, I think some users have been bamboozled by the SSO system, particularly those users who who didn't already have an Ubuntu 1 account. I liked the Cafe because there were interesting conversations that didn't necessarily have anything to do with Ubuntu. The support forums aren't such a big issue to me, there are other places to find help. It's the "off-topic" stuff that I miss. The quality of discourse here has declined, as happened to Slashdot.org in the past. This is probably just the way things are, and I'll have to find somewhere else to have general chat. Shame.

[tgalati4]

No Haikus to read.
Other forums have less rules.
Careful what you say.

[KivalliqKid]

I think things have slowed down because of Google Plus. There are great communities and pages out there, a lot of discussion and questions.