Answers to: We're looking to move StackExchange based LinuxExchange.org to shapado or OSQA ASAP. Any real word feedback or suggestions?

Answer by Ron

Ron — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 18:11:58 -0500

Jeremy,

Any update on the migration as to which format we'll be moving to and when?

Answer by pcardout

pcardout — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 04:02:28 -0500

Hi There --

I am pleased to be one of the more senior users of this site and am happy to weigh in.

I don't think it matters what platform you build on. I think the site suffers from confusion about its identity and competition. LinuxQuestions was and is great. It is hard to see how this site differs (except for having very little traffic). When I was first enticed here by Jeremy's LQ post, I interpreted the function of the site to be minitutorials. LQ is more about (sometimes) fairly specialized questions getting a lot of traffic with specialized answers.

Still, this site competes with LQ. For the NOOB's, the site also competes with Ubuntu forums. Ubuntu forums seem to work really well even if they have a high percentage of somewhat clueless posts. The beginners all help eachother and eventually get the job done. And for so many of those users, I do not think they think to look beyond Ubuntu. Ubuntu IS Linux for them.

Of course, for long tutorials, there is TLDP. So -- given TLDP, LQ and Ubuntu forums, how does this site contribute?

One thing marketeers always worry about it what their product is called. In these Google-y days, a routine name does not pop up well in search results, but unusual names (e.g. Dale Chihuly) are easy to find. LinuxExchange tends to bring up a lot of results about Microsoft Exchange (ugh). Linux Collective is better, but not great. I can't claim I have a really good name, but maybe you can do better than LinuxExchange. Ideally it ought to capture what is special about the site. LinuxQuestions was self explanatory. How is LinuxExchange different? Maybe you want to create a discussion about the name/function of this site?

I've been using this site to ask and answer my own questions as I run into problems and solve them on my own. I could just put them on my own blog, but I am not committed enough to that to get much traffic. I assume that by putting them here they do more good. I always feel a little weird answering my own questions... maybe you should make that more natural -- Perhaps let people say in advance that they have an answer they'd like to share.

I have also found that there are not nearly enough useful TAGS. You ought to drop your threshold to create to say 100 posts ... or even 50. You may have seen you frustrated some NOOBs on this site who wanted their own tag and weren't allowed to post without one.

Taking the "TAGS" idea and running with it a bit further -- Some questions are generic (about IDEs, or tools, or terminals) while others seem to be distro-specific. I know lots of folks (again, Ubuntuans) who don't even look at an answer that is not about their distro. Firstly, you ought to have Tags for all the major distro families ... and/or you ought to have a required field when you generate the post that specifies whether this is a distro specific question or a generic question.

To sum up:

Permalink on LQ directing people here and explaining why it's a useful site.
Change the name to get away from Microsoft Exchange (or add a new name).
Permalink here explaining the same.
Better "branding".
Making it more "wiki-like" in addition to Q/A.
Give existing users more power to improve site (TAGS, cleaning up old posts, etc, as suggested by others as well.
Make the distros that a Q/A combo applies to explicit (e.g. All Linux, All open source, Mandriva only, Debian derivatives ... etc.)
... And more trivially ... let us upload our own avatars. I don't want to register for yet some other service to have an avatar show up here.

Answer by Jazz

Jazz — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 00:55:22 -0500

As another long time user, I perceived two main usability problems:

There are tons of zombie questions floating around, for which none of us has the rank to vote to close them.
If new questions are answered, they often don't get accepted or rated, even if the creator of the question is happy with the given answer.

If a transition to another service solves those problems, I would welcome it. Although manually giving trusted users the right to close-vote and adding the accept-rate-functionality from other stackoverflow-sites present two simple solutions.

As Ron already mentioned, the main problem is the low activity on the site, though. There are hardly any new and interesting questions which would motivate people to participate in this project more often.

Edit: To round some comments up:

A transition to another service is a good idea, if it makes managing and cleaning of the site easier.
The main problem is low site activity, and thus independent of the service used. A discussion on how to create more activity, or even why activity has faded, could be useful.

Answer by Ron

Ron — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 23:25:09 -0500

Well, what are the advantages/disadvantages of each system?

Would I lose my rankings/etc or will those migrate as well?

Would I need to setup an account again?

Also, regardless of what system you use, the key is to generate more traffic to the site (regardless of what it runs on), and to get people to participate on it.

I personally vote for leaving it the way it is now and get more people here. If I have any influence at all, I hope it is because of my participation here, my ranking of stats (if that means anything here), etc, as I'm right under you, Jeremy. I'm probably the heaviest, regular user of this site as such, I really have to say we don't need more software...we need more users.

Look at the main page.. 3 days between posts.

Addendum on 01/25/2011 - Jeremy, look at this own post of yours, it's basically jazz and I agreeing and commenting back and forth. 2 users out of how many that are on this site? It's your site, do as you will, but I think this stands to only serve to further prove my point. Your post has been up 24 hours thus far, with very little action from the site-at-large really.

Moving this site over to a shiny new platform is akin to Microsoft or Apple saying that "the next version of XYZ is going to be soooo cool".