NeghVar
July 15th, 2007, 11:03 PM
In advance I wish to apologize for anyone I may offend, this is not my intention, I merely wish to point out what I see as a growing problem here in Ubuntu. To the people who create these pages and offer their services I am most grateful and actively encourage you to continue doing so. Now on with my view point.
Well, after having run breezy, dapper and now feisty I have noticed a definite drop off in useful support for Ubuntu. At one time the Wiki had all the information one could possibly need, now the ones down by Ubuntu are on the verge of useless and the Community Wiki seems to have been stripped out. This is compounded by the fact that the search used in the Wiki does not actually appear to search anything at all it appears to be to lazy and comes back saying there were no topics, yet a simple search of the data by hand shows 5-10 articles, half of which are now empty.
To add to this the Forums have become so fragmented that people seeking support are overwhelmed which pushes more of them into the Beginner Section or into areas that are not really the best place to get help. I know the idea was to break up the questions so they could be answered quicker by people with expertise in that particular area however in some ways it has had the opposite effect with more users going to the general area, which in turn has pulled attention away from specialized areas. The result being that the people who post in the "right area" have fewer people to help them than in the old system.
Now then, I'm not a genius but it would appear some of these "problems" can easily be fixed. With regards to the Wiki, I understand that cleanup needs to happen but when cleaning it instead of just deleting a page and leaving the Title and link it should be removed and automatically redirected that way a user doesn't have to look at blank pages to find the information. I'm not sure how to fix the search issue as it may only be what I need to look for but there must be a way to get better results.
The Forums would be the most difficult fix as here you have a psychological issue as well, people get used to the system and don't want it to change. I for one definitely preferred the old system in use at the beginning of dapper. It was easy to find help and to find other posts which had already been answered.
Just my thoughts on the changes I have seen here in the support department throughout the distros.
Well, after having run breezy, dapper and now feisty I have noticed a definite drop off in useful support for Ubuntu. At one time the Wiki had all the information one could possibly need, now the ones down by Ubuntu are on the verge of useless and the Community Wiki seems to have been stripped out. This is compounded by the fact that the search used in the Wiki does not actually appear to search anything at all it appears to be to lazy and comes back saying there were no topics, yet a simple search of the data by hand shows 5-10 articles, half of which are now empty.
To add to this the Forums have become so fragmented that people seeking support are overwhelmed which pushes more of them into the Beginner Section or into areas that are not really the best place to get help. I know the idea was to break up the questions so they could be answered quicker by people with expertise in that particular area however in some ways it has had the opposite effect with more users going to the general area, which in turn has pulled attention away from specialized areas. The result being that the people who post in the "right area" have fewer people to help them than in the old system.
Now then, I'm not a genius but it would appear some of these "problems" can easily be fixed. With regards to the Wiki, I understand that cleanup needs to happen but when cleaning it instead of just deleting a page and leaving the Title and link it should be removed and automatically redirected that way a user doesn't have to look at blank pages to find the information. I'm not sure how to fix the search issue as it may only be what I need to look for but there must be a way to get better results.
The Forums would be the most difficult fix as here you have a psychological issue as well, people get used to the system and don't want it to change. I for one definitely preferred the old system in use at the beginning of dapper. It was easy to find help and to find other posts which had already been answered.
Just my thoughts on the changes I have seen here in the support department throughout the distros.