The Future of the Forum

[coffeecat]

In an earlier post, I suggested some kind of poll visible to all users to gauge sentiment about the continuation of the forum.

Sadly, no admins have responded to this idea.

Not gonna happen.

It's obvious from this thread that there is an overwhelming desire for the continuation of the forum in some form. We don't need a poll. And I don't need any more unwanted and unnecessary work that I have neither the energy nor the time for. I have enough on my plate at the moment liaising with the Community Council about all this. Things are moving forward. The responses in this thread have, for the most part, been positive and useful, and will be taken into consideration by those who will be moving things forward.

[Rubi1200]

It's obvious from this thread that there is an overwhelming desire for the continuation of the forum in some form. We don't need a poll. And I don't need any more unwanted and unnecessary work that I have neither the energy nor the time for. I have enough on my plate at the moment liaising with the Community Council about all this. Things are moving forward. The responses in this thread have, for the most part, been positive and useful, and will be taken into consideration by those who will be moving things forward.

I am sure we are all glad to hear that things are moving forward.

I was not trying to make "unwanted and unnecessary work" for you or anyone else. It was merely a suggestion.

Thank you for clarifying the situation.

[dragonfly41]

My brief thoughts before they get lost in this discussion thread is to build a toolset using existing Ubuntu tools to grab interesting threads from this forum and others not related to Ubuntu and archive them in my own managed archive. There will be much dross to eliminate but in my view these curated repositories of knowledge are too important to lose. If and when I get around to this I will post progress. But it boils down to creating an automated personal curated vector database which can be shared with others in a future protocol. That is we create a network of knowledge repositories rather than dumping everything into one Grand Central Station forum.
A distributed Wayback Machine.

[1fallen2]

However this ends up, I personally would like to acknowledge the Very helpful current Staff, they have served us with a Distinct Professional manner.

Thank You ALL past and present.

[grahammechanical]

Has anybody considered Matrix? I am struggling to understand it. Canonical hosts instances of Matrix sessions. It has "rooms" which might equate with forum "threads" or even "sections."

https://ubuntu.com/community/communications/matrix

https://ubuntu.com/community/support

https://matrix.to/#/#community:ubuntu.com

Regards

[ian-weisser]

I use Matrix.

It's a lot more like IRC or Discord. (not Discourse, which is much more like a forum)

While a room can be --sort of-- threaded, the threads aren't easily findable.

My opinion is that most of the folks who really like the forum experience won't enjoy the Matrix experience. But I could be wrong about that.

As there is already a Canonical-owned Matrix server, it should be fairly easy for the Forums Council to open up a room and see for themselves if it's a viable alternative.

[wildmanne39]

I agree with you Ian as a member of the Ubuntu Membership Board we have a room on Matrix but we are still using IRC and both of those venues are a poor substitute for the forum in my opinion, I tried to give support on IRC years ago but I did not like it for support, I believe that the forum moving to its own discourse instance is the best option.

[werewulf75]

Maybe I'm something of a fossil, but Matrix and IRC are absolutely no kind of substitute for a proper forum IMO. Nor is Discourse. I'd have nothing to do with any of them.

[TenPlus1]

Most of the forums I use are based on phpBB and work quite well, and while they offer a Matrix alternative I never really use it. A good forum has it's place, one that is easy to navigate and quick loading.

[charles woodward]

As someone who hasn't used the forum for years I suppose that I'm one of the reasons it is declining, but then I started with Xenix, Unix, aix and then Linux. So I've used this type of system for about 40 years. I only use it to refresh my memory, but I do think that a major problem is that it has become unwieldy, a simple request can produce thousands of results, with few being really relevant.
Although no longer a regular user I would like to thank those who've dedicated their time and effort to this. I worked in it support and now how difficult it is to operate something like this. Thanks for all your efforts