The FreeBSD Forums: official, or not?

msplsh said:
If it's an actual bug, somebody else will have it and you'll all find each other to band together and post a bug report.
Click to expand...
Well, does anyone else have it? :p It's easy to reproduce but likely not something noticed unless you're looking for it (I doubt anyone looks at FPS on browser 4K@60Hz vids (less-so on FreeBSD) and it looks relatively smooth even with the FPS issue/unsuspecting)

That video just had me check if Firefox was HW-accelerating on Linux :p (4k had no drops with resizing suspiciously; needed gfx.webrender.all: less CPU on htop and Video load intel_gpu_top now)
Screenshot_2025-10-20_00-08-49.png
 
msplsh said:
Devs don't have time to "stumble into" bugs that may or may not be PEBKAC or Your Specific Installation Issue. If it's an actual bug, somebody else will have it and you'll all find each other to band together and post a bug report.
Click to expand...
I don't think it's out of question for a dev to just browse through user forums as a way to pick up more info about a specific bug/ticket. Sometimes, a user has a very good description of how a bug is triggered. Sometimes, a dev would notice that a surprisingly high number of users are actually complaining about an issue. And it's not out of question that after reading comments on the Forums, the issue is shown to be a PEBKAC, and bug probably needs to be closed in Bugzilla...
 
drhowarddrfine I was there in the early 2000's, then around the time that admin got ill, I wound up at a CentOS shop. So, from around 2007-2013 I wasn't very active in the new forums or daemon forums.
 
Why do you care?

Why do you need to sort and qualify input into categories, instead of reading it and using your brains to decide on your own whether it is valuable or not?
 
At one time, StackOverflow developed some pdf files that purported to teach you subjects based on the valued questions and answers on SO. I haven't looked at them in a long time but I didn't think they worked out very well but it would be interesting if something like that could be created based on the questions and answers of this forum.
 
This issue is much simpler than it looks.

Imagine I now post here plans to enrich uranium, build atom bomb, etc. Imagine no moderator takes my post down. Imagine nobody responds to abuse contacts for the domain.

Police will come knocking on the door. Whose door is it?
 
scottro said:
A quick history of these forums as I remember it. There was a BSDforums or maybe FreeBSDforums, but whatever it was called, it was primarily FreeBSD. It was privately owned, and the owner became quite ill. The forums started getting tons of spam, and by that time, there were only a couple of moderators left, and they more or less gave up. (This is my memory, lots of it could be wrong). A couple of people looked into buying it from him, out of affection for FreeBSD, not profit, and talks were started but the guy disappeared, and didn't answer any attempts at communication.
At that point, a gentleman named Martin started daemonforums.org. It was meant to replace the defunct (or maybe just spammed to death) freebsdforums.com (I think, but I really don't remember what it was called), and it began attracting the people who had been using the old, privately owned forum. Then, I don't remember how long afterwards, these forums came into being and if I remember correctly, they were official from the start. So, people who had been posting about FreeBSD on daemonforums, gradually moved here, and daemonforums became mostly, (though not exclusively) for OpenBSD.

So, these forums were official, whatever that means, from the start, and grew out of the fact that a good forum, the former bsdforums.com, had its owner more or less abandon it. This is all from my memory and I may have some specifics wrong, but that is generally how these forums came into being, supported by FreeBSD.org
Click to expand...

Yep.

More or less like that.

Check these at my 'EXTERNAL' tab - https://vermaden.wordpress.com/external/
  • 2005-2008 @ bsdforums.org – Learning FreeBSD
  • 2008/04 @ daemonforums.org – DaemonForums
... also a screenshot of the (now gone) BSDForums.org below.


bsdforums.png
 
I remember the BSDForums.org! It got a little overrun with spam towards the end. I was very happy to find out that FreeBSD then started to host their own instead. Much of the community did carry over too.
 
Espionage724 said:
These being "The FreeBSD Forums" and hosted by the project in official capacity implies project devs of the "FreeBSD" OS would at least hang around, where some other likely-average users of the "FreeBSD" OS are likely to be discussing things. Like, surely devs don't hang around more on less-official Reddit and Discord... right?
Click to expand...
Almost all FreeBSD developers are volunteers. They look at whatever social media sites suit them.

There are far too many to participate in them all.
 
linimon@ said:
They look at whatever social media sites suit them.
Click to expand...
I had mentioned this somewhere else before. It would seem to me that FreeBSD devs first choice should be this one and all others (social forums) would be secondary.

Someone I know asked a well-known dev on reddit why he posted there and not here. He said, "I'm hanging out in other subs so I just happen to show up on the reddit FreeBSD sub cause I'm there." This makes me have a lot of questins and it makes no sense at all.

Years ago, I had to do some work at a hospital next to an insane asylum (don't recall the technical term). I did not hang out there after work just because I was there.
 
scottro had it mostly right.
The Forums started out not only because other forums failed or went away, but also because people at FreeBSD felt it needed its own community support beyond the mailing lists.
This was at a time when mailing lists fell out of general use, and forums became more prevalent (this was also when things like blogs and wikis became all the rage).
So FreeBSD developer Brad Davis rented a VPS and installed forum software (with the admin user joining as member #1 on Sep 26, 2007), all on his own dime, but of course under the freebsd.org domain.
This was before the Foundation supplied things like central funding for FreeBSD (other than maintaining FreeBSD itself).
A couple of developers and volunteers were quickly added on as administrators and moderators. Little has changed over the years, activity levels may have shifted.
Because the Forums were installed and run separately and developed their own little ecosystem over the years (maintenance, installation, monitoring, external access, scripts, firewalling, etc. etc) it is almost impossible to integrate them into the current FreeBSD ecosystems and clusters. Many exceptions would have to be made, and this works perfectly fine.
The Foundation has taken over the financial side, so the software, plugins, licenses, hosting costs, are all taken care of.
Even though the Forums have formulated their own set of rules and regulations, and are run very much independently from the other FreeBSD infrastructure, they are very much "super-governed" by the FreeBSD organization ("Core"), though there has never really been a situation in which "Core" had to intervene or put the hammer down, or anything like that.
It's best to consider the Forums a fully-owned subsidiary or a satellite in fixed orbit around FreeBSD-proper.
And yes: it's official (r/FreeBSD is not). It is linked directly from the navigation bar at freebsd.org, and from the Community page at the FreeBSD Foundation.
The reason why there are not a lot of developers here is two-fold:
1) they really like their own historic channels (mailing lists, IRC channels, and development platforms)
2) the Forums are specifically not about development, they are here for user/administrator support and community-building; some developers do interact at that level, but it's not their daily FreeBSD driver.
 
Thanks DutchDaemon for the blast from the past.

I registered soon after it was open. I also remember the announcement. The reason why I didn't register at get go is probably too much going on at that time (months of graduation, end of college, first jobs etc) but I consider myself being here right from the start :)

Zare

Post in thread 'Some thoughts about FreeBSD'

We don't need freeBSD to go into desktop waters. We don't need hordes of Ubuntu-type kiddies doing troll propaganda because they've installed freeBSD by click-click-next principle and they like it because it's "not Windows". What's more amusing, Linux people think their system should be a rolemodel in the *nix world; freeBSD should do this because Linux does it, freeBSD should have that because Linux has it.

That's *beep**beep**beep**beep**ng amusing. What's more amusing, freeBSD has, and always will have basis for a good, rock-solid desktop system. Linux never had and never will...
  • Thanks

My first post. I shit on Linux like a seasoned vet :D
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top