BSD Q&A site

jgillich

jgillich

While this is my first in this forum, I've written thousands of posts in various other forums in the past. But since the rise of Q&A sites like StackOverflow, I use forums less and less because Q&A sites are just so much better if you all you need is a good, up to date answer without having to read through a lot of pages.

Various Linux distros have such a site already (AskUbuntu, Ask Fedora), so I think it would be cool to have one for BSD, too.
  • So, do you think it would be a good idea to start a Q&A site focused on BSD?
  • Would you use it?
  • And do you think one single site for all BSDs would be enough?
I am willing to pay for hosting if there is enough interest, but I don't consider myself competent enough to provide really good answers (I have years of experience with Linux, but only recently started using FreeBSD on a production machine).

Forums or mailing lists are great for having lengthy discussions, this is not about replacing them. A Q&A site is only superior if you need a real problem solved, both from the standpoint of the initial poster and anyone coming from a search engine.

Thanks for sharing any thoughts on this. :)
 
"BSD" is very general. Too general, actually. The *BSD family of operating systems has many common elements and a lot of shared history, but they are vastly different, and increasingly so. They can hardly be lumped together under one Q&A platform. They are not distros hanging under a common and shared kernel development. Other than that: this forum focuses entirely on FreeBSD.
 
DutchDaemon said:
"BSD" is very general. Too general, actually. The *BSD family of operating systems has many common elements and a lot of shared history, but they are vastly different, and increasingly so. They can hardly be lumped together under one Q&A platform. They are not distros hanging under a common and shared kernel development. Other than that: this forum focuses entirely on FreeBSD.
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I do realise that. But there is also a huge amount of different programming languages and can you still get very good answers at StackOverflow. They way they handle that is by using tags; a question gets tagged with the language and everyone who subscribed to the tag will see that question hightlighted. I think it could also work like this for the various BSDs.

I hope it's still ok to have this topic here; I only use FreeBSD so it was the obvious choice for me to post it here. But feel free to move this to the Off-Topic section.

wblock@ said:
Why not just use Stack Exchange? The question is whether there are enough people to make it fly.
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I'm actually trying to find out if there will be enough people before deciding which platform to use. ;) But I didn't even know that it is possible to propose new Stack Exchange sites, thanks for the link.
 
There's already a UNIX and Linux Stack Exchange site which has a decent amount of traffic, and already has some good questions/answers for various BSDs (FreeBSD, BSD, POSIX, pf). IMO, it'd be better (and easier) to promote the use of that site rather than starting a new one.

I think the FreeBSD.org site links to the server admin stack exchange, but that doesn't do much good for those using FreeBSD for desktop/workstation/embedded use. For those people (like myself), the UNIX/Linux site is more appropriate.
 
jackp said:
There's already a UNIX and Linux Stack Exchange site which has a decent amount of traffic, and already has some good questions/answers for various BSDs (FreeBSD, BSD, POSIX, pf). IMO, it'd be better (and easier) to promote the use of that site rather than starting a new one.

I think the FreeBSD.org site links to the server admin stack exchange, but that doesn't do much good for those using FreeBSD for desktop/workstation/embedded use. For those people (like myself), the UNIX/Linux site is more appropriate.
Click to expand...

Sure, Stack Exchange has three sites where FreeBSD questions can be asked (Unix/Linux, Super User, Server Fault). But at least on my searches, I almost always ended up on this forum or on the mailing list, rarely on any Q&A site. So sure it is possible to ask questions there, but these sites are not recognized as the first place to go when you have a question. That is exactly what I have in mind, and I think only a site focusing entirely on *BSD has the chance to become it.

Just to be clear, my intention is not to just put yet another site on the net. I mainly want to use such a platform to get my questions answered (and to provide answers when I can). I already use the various Stack Exchange sites for that purpose, but the current situation is not really optimal.
 
My main problem with Q&A stuff is that more than often people join in for the wrong reasons; not so much to try and help other people out but to gross in more 'likes', 'thanks', or whatever other means of appreciation is being put to use.

Where that all leads to is best seen on sites such as the ASP.NET forum and some of the other Microsoft communities; more than often do you see people answer with little more than a bunch of URL's to go over, and of course the always present request to like or rate their answer.

Another issue is that many people also tend to copy answers without having even the slightest idea what they're talking about. If it can get you some likes, then why not, and if an answer got highly rated then surely it has to be good. Who cares if the message is three years old and basically not appropriate any more...

This is not saying that all Q&A stuff is bad of course, but I've simply seen too many bad or dated examples getting copied all over the place that I somewhat gave up on them. That is; I'll easily go over such websites when searching for something, but I enjoy participating in forums a whole lot better myself.
 
ShelLuser said:
Where that all leads to is best seen on sites such as the ASP.NET forum and some of the other Microsoft communities; more than often do you see people answer with little more than a bunch of URL's to go over, and of course the always present request to like or rate their answer.
Click to expand...

I share the same opinion about the Microsoft Q&A stuff and a lot of other sites, most of them aren't very good. But this is not so much of a problem at Stack Exchange because they enforce very strict rules. Everyone is kind of a moderator that has to earn any rights first. There are a lot of high quality questions and answers that rank very high at Google. You might want to watch this to understand how this is possible.
 
This came up at the OpenDoc conference this summer. It turns out that forums are good for conversation, but can have problems with questions and answers. For instance, the correct answer might be on page 30 of a thread where it can't be easily found. The Stack Exchange format eliminates the conversation, and the voting allows good answers to go to the top, and bad answers are eliminated.
 
Hmmm. This thread sort of recalls another suggestion I may have made in another thread, to add subforums to this site. Reviewing the two Linux links in the first post, there would be many subforums, but not unfavorably, such as...
  • # DNS #
  • [Sticky] DNS faq
  • [Sticky ] Unbound in base
  • Unbound thread
  • ldns thread
  • No-IP thread
  • Dnsmasq thread
... where hopefully, the number of threads would be less than the number of ports in a category, but would serve as a source of information where one would not have to Google/Ixquick/Startpage investigate an answer as often, saving time and also strengthening the FreeBSD vs Linux argument somewhat (readily available answers to problems here!), although installation and other issues would still be probably solved in the other more usual ways unless someone eventually figures out how to make additional subforums to the ones I've posted, as the "installation and other issues" subforums also exist here. If it were possible, posts to those sections could even be subject to moderator approval, lessening the exponential number of posts that might occur, and ensuring that only smart (not in the thread already) questions are posed. It seems like a maybe-fair tradeoff, unless it somehow meant more work.

Which brings up another question, additional moderators with expertise in each port category maybe would be possible, lessening work for the present-day moderators.
 
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