The Future of the Forum

[Irihapeti]

I would not be too quick to say that Canonical gets nothing from community users. What about the people who do the testing prior to every release? They aren't getting paid. If they didn't do their bit, wouldn't Canonical then have to pay professional testers?

[QIII]

I was speaking specifically about professional support.

But you are most certainly right. Canonical definitely gets something from those who do testing, discuss it here and make bug reports!

[&KyT$0P#]

I very much appreciate this site being a support/chat forum. There are accessibility reasons why a forum is the best working communication format for some people (compared to e.g. AskUbuntu format and especially compared to real-time chat formats).

1 Declining Membership.

Why is this an existential issue at this point? Aren't there are still plenty of people here? Most other forums/discussion spaces I visit have far less activity and membership than today's Ubuntu Forums, and they're doing fine.

Do we lobby Canonical/The Community Council/whoever to build a new forum on better software?

+1

What about archiving and making available all the material here?

Not clear how useful that would be long-term.

Ubuntu evolves over time in ways that make many old solutions either not work at all (and potentially harm a new system), or only partially work, or at least a suboptimal old method where a newer, better, more robust solution exists. With Ubuntu Forums a living resource, people can ask about how older solutions may or may not apply to newer systems. And new, current solutions will keep coming.

A static archive won't get such updates, so has significant potential to become increasingly harmful over time, especially after the last Ubuntu version it handled goes EOL.

Could Ubuntu Discourse be persuaded to launch a technical support section?

Interesting idea. However, wouldn't this lack some benefits this forum has stemming from this community being independent from Canonical? For example, I would hesitate to go to an official Canonical venue to ask for help with an Ubuntu system where it's relevant that snapd is removed and flatpak is used: don't such arrangements have zero official support from Canonical and Ubuntu devs?

[aljames2]

Wow! I'm experiencing some Kernel panic here. Or is that a palpitation... nope, it's Kernel panic.

Without UF, I would not have made the effort, invested the time, and grown the interest to learn Linux. So not only is UF the reason I use Ubuntu, but also where I learned anything about Linux.

Forums are where collaboration and work gets done. It's where education can happen for someone researching to learn. As Qlll said, forums are full of back & forth teamwork figuring stuff out. I rarely visit the StackExchange's & Reddit's of the world. Those platforms seem to contain more incomplete posts, not organized well, and often not useful for searchers looking for real support, in my opinion.

The UF community is significant and should survive. I don't think Ubuntu is going anywhere, and I would think this forum will continue to have seekers looking for it & engaging with us. I am happy to step up and volunteer how you need with the forum chores of the day.

I've been secretly trying to get my posts up helping folks out where I can, shooting for that 1,000, and mainly just trying to answere questions if I think I can bring some value. There is a lot of talent in these forums, so I seem to do more more reading than posting.

On my iPhone, I easily read 1-2 hours a day on UF. UF works exceptionally well on mobile in my opinion.

[kinddolphin8827]

I have to say I would be very sad to see this forum to be shut down.. People here are so helpful.

This has always been suitable place for ask help and pasting code to here is much easier than Stack Exchange...
Maybe this forum could be archived?

I have to say I would be very sad to see this forum to be shut down.. People here are so helpful.

I do find this forum very very helpful and therein would be extremely saddened to see it evaporate into vapor.

This has always been suitable place for ask help and pasting code to here is much easier than Stack Exchange...

I find this is very vert true however, I also realize that there an endless number of people whom are willing to maintain the infrastructure needed to run a forum or community such as the Ubuntuforums.

Maybe this forum could be archived?

I think that in the event that in the event of the Ubuntu forums are officially closed and speo-ple are redirect to either a forum like LinuxQujestions.org
or other potential sites to redirect users to once the Ubuntu forums have been archived and officially taken down for good.

[mikodo]

As we discuss this matter here in the Forums community, perhaps a suggestion might be for the Forums community members to cite this thread and contact the Ubuntu Community Council and express your concern that ...

This seems to me to be something that those who wish they could help in some way, but don't feel they have the "technical" capacity to do so, could do.

- and all that QIII wrote in his post -

Ubuntu Community Council:

https://ubuntu.com/community/governa...munity-council

"You may contact the Community Council by posting a topic in this category or by sending an email to community-council@lists.ubuntu.com. All Ubuntu community-related queries and questions are welcome".

[guiverc]

> Could Ubuntu Discourse be persuaded to launch a technical support section?

Interesting idea. However, wouldn't this lack some benefits this forum has stemming from this community being independent from Canonical? For example, I would hesitate to go to an official Canonical venue to ask for help with an Ubuntu system where it's relevant that snapd is removed and flatpak is used: don't such arrangements have zero official support from Canonical and Ubuntu devs?

I'll respond with details as I understand them, and please note I'm no expert in Discourse.

I'm a moderator on two Ubuntu flavor discourse sites (shield logo; Lubuntu & Ubuntu-MATE if it matters), and if you move into the Ubuntu Weekly News section of the Ubuntu Community Hub anything I post there also has a shield or moderator tag (same applies to Bashing-om who's posted already on this thread). This applies to many parts of discourse; where Ubuntu community members have moderator rights to areas of the site that are owned/operated (technically?) by Canonical.

Discourse does allow parts of a site to be controlled by others, whilst I'm a 'full' moderator with more rights on the flavor sites, the moderator control I have in one section of the Ubuntu Community Hub gives me control in that area of discourse.

I don't see much direct control by Canonical... in fact when I've had issues, most have been handled by Ian Weisser who is another community member (non-Canonical), though yes the occasional one requires involvement from a Ubuntu Community Team members (ie. these are Canonical staff) who usually add permissions so we can proceed to do what we're setting up (these Canonical employees I've always found most helpful!).

With regards snapd; don't forget three Ubuntu flavors allow of a snap free install for 24.04 LTS; whilst nothing is actually disabled (installs just don't include snap infrastructure if chosen by user at install), I've seen/heard of no push back for this from anyone. The costs of this into the future (24.10 & later) may however remove the usefulness of this (if anyone sees a benefit from it; personally I don't, besides i'm aware of a number of Canonical developers having blogged how to achieve snap free installs too even if not recently).

[philhughes]

The forums are still the best place to get support. Reddit is, well, Reddit. AskUbuntu is a blackhole.

You've identified the problem - old-style forums take a lot of time and knowledge to run and there are fewer people able or willing to do that (I wish I could).

If you can get enough people to rebuild the forum, that would be ideal. But you probably wouldn't have had to make this post if that were the case. Lobbying Canonical to provide help via whatever contacts you have would be a good idea, but I'm not hopeful.

If the forums can no longer survive, the best alternative in my view would be to add a support section to Ubuntu Discourse. But with AskUbuntu being there, I'm not hopeful about that either. May be AskUbuntu would become more useful in that case.

And a big thank you to anyone who does or has helped with the forums.

[nicolasdentremont]

I would be sad to see this forum disappear. It's a great place for help, tips and tricks. I don't post a whole lot but I read new posts on a daily basis and have learned a lot here.

I would volunteer to help keep this place operational if needed.

I think there has been a decline in forum memberships throughout the worldwide web.

Large centralized services like Facebook and Reddit attract more people than old school forums do. People would no doubt rather sign up to one site that will offer support to anything they want rather than individual sites for each topic regardless of the quality of support they get.

They way people use computers has changed dramatically in the last decade too. I don't know anyone who personally uses a desktop or laptop computer on a daily bases outside of work anymore. People have switched to phones and tablets for their daily computing and web browsing.

Updating the forum would probably help bring more people in but I think it would need a better mobile UI. I read this forum on my phone a lot and the mobile UI could be improved.

Releasing an Ubuntu Forum app might also help bring people in. I don't know much about app design and programming but I understand it would probably be a lot of work but that seems to be what people want. I'm a member of a Jeep forum that has an app. It basically seems like it's just a watered down version of Firefox modified just to access the forum.

[TheFu]

Let's be practical.

Canonical isn't going to write new forum software. They won't. That's too much to ask and costs them too much to accomplish. The best we can hope for is for new forum software to be deployed and if there is an easy method to migrate existing posts (there probably isn't), then that may happen. Expect data/posts to be lost. A static version of the forums as they exist today may be possible. However, I've noticed that some parts of the forums here have been going away. Some of my technical diagrams have disappeared, for example.

I use a desktop computer at home, daily. I have a new laptop, but never have used it for these forums. Same for a phone and tablet. I have family members that only use a tablet for reading things, but if you don't have a home computer, then you probably don't need UF since you won't be trying new things or attempting to deploy stuff onto Ubuntu. Very different people - those without home computers from the people who use these forums.\

Whenever someone comes here seeking answers for work needs, they are almost always asking such specific questions that nobody here can answer. Business servers have 10G networking, most homes do not. Business servers and desktops want to hook into MS-AD, most homes do not. Businesses want to use Juju or K8, no home users do. Every time I see an Azure-specific question, I don't know what to do.

Also, I specifically do not want to use 3rd party credentials to login anywhere. Why provide even more tracking data to those companies than we are already forced to? Seems crazy to me. No way would I use google or facebook login credentials anywhere else. In fact, I have multiple google accounts to keep the different google services I can't find replacements for separate. I do have all "sync" disabled and all "history" disabled in my google accounts as one level of added privacy. OTOH, I know things that are disabled are likely just not shown to me, but still happening. Do you use Google's Chrome browser? Read this: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...ic-court-says/