<p>Hi There --</p> <p>I am pleased to be one of the more senior users of this site and am happy to weigh in.</p> <p>I don't think it matters what platform you build on. I think the site suffers from confusion about its identity and competition. <strong>LinuxQuestions</strong> 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 <strong>LQ</strong> post, I interpreted the function of the site to be minitutorials. <strong>LQ</strong> is more about (sometimes) fairly specialized questions getting a lot of traffic with specialized answers. </p> <p>Still, this site competes with <strong>LQ</strong>. For the NOOB's, the site also competes with <strong>Ubuntu forums</strong>. 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.</p> <p>Of course, for long tutorials, there is <strong>TLDP</strong>. So -- given TLDP, LQ and Ubuntu forums, how does this site contribute? </p> <p>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?</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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. </p> <p>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.</p> <p>To sum up:</p> <ol> <li>Permalink on LQ directing people here and explaining why it's a useful site. </li> <li>Change the name to get away from Microsoft Exchange (or add a new name).</li> <li>Permalink here explaining the same. </li> <li>Better "branding". </li> <li>Making it more "wiki-like" in addition to Q/A.</li> <li>Give existing users more power to improve site (TAGS, cleaning up old posts, etc, as suggested by others as well.</li> <li>Make the distros that a Q/A combo applies to explicit (e.g. All Linux, All open source, Mandriva only, Debian derivatives ... etc.)</li> <li>... 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. </li> </ol>