The FreeBSD Forums: official, or not?

fraxamo

fraxamo

Has anybody else seen this Reddit thread? Any thoughts? I had always assumed that the Forums were official and part of the FreeBSD project, but this thread makes it seem that they aren't. Can anybody with more knowledge (possibly one of the mods) please clarify? And what are the chances of the Forums being sunset? Thanks
 
I haven't got clue about the administrative structure but potential forum shutdown or validity of information presented here doesn't have anything to do with official/non-official.

Officium is literally constructed from "power to produce" in Latin and stands for duty or service.

Many, many official forums suck intentionally (not this one!). If you have ever participated in official game forum of an AAA game that is going through controversy, you know that official status does not imply validity of information. The game I've played for years, World of Warships, had its forums intentionally gimped after a few years, and then completely shut down and "community" moved to Discord where discourse can be tightly controlled.
 
It all feels like - I want to shit on the forums because in my view I got treated badly, and I've cherrypicked couple of remarks from books and "AI" about that. Spreading fud.

First of all the book quote cannot be taken out of the context and second, LLM can be coerced to print out anything if it doesn't touch banned topics like crime.
 
For historic reference, the poster/mod there was an avid fan of Reddit (or more likely the power he had by setting up the unofficial FreeBSD reddit channel). He was politely asked to stop spamming these forums with reddit links by a number of our members, myself included. He got upset and left.

To be fair, some of his posts were genuinely helpful to new users but many of his posts were also quite misleading (and weird).

Luckily we still have drhowarddrfine as our resident Reddit guru ;).
 
cracauer@ said:
My IQ dropped 15 points reading that Reddit post.
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The poster is still on this forum but not under that name.

I assume AI falls into the "official" discussion because of Reddit's heavy weight in AI responses and if the forums should weigh similarly.
 
I'd say that these Forums are in fact the official thing, given that they are under the .freebsd.org domain...

The FreeBSD Foundation pays the bills to host the Forums.

Sometimes, it's helpful to review how the Forums started out, what purpose they served, and how they changed over time. I see that as something interesting to know. I mean, the FreeBSD Core Developers team actually hangs out on Reddit, and holds discussions there.

Having your own Internet domain name - that used to be quite important when IPv4 was the king on the global Internet. But now with IPv6 allowing for many more devices to have a unique IP address (and hence a presence), having your own domain name has become harder to maintain and pay for.

I personally hope that the FreeBSD Forums will continue, and not get sunset...

Edit: I tried to re-read that Reddit thread... and it seems like a common complaint is that the AI services don't do a very good job of finding FreeBSD-specific help, or recognizing when a page is from an official source of info or not. And some of the comments are actually the kind that I'd find on here on the Forums.

Reddit is organized rather different than the Forums, it's still on the individual human user to have the skill to extract useful info and to exercise critical thinking skills. Yeah, reddit has its share of morons due to its free-for-all access. But now that I have actually read the comments, I'm actually thinking, it's not a bad alternative if Forums do get sunset...
 
More information. The guy who shall not be named above but is the FreeBSD reddit mod, also announced recently that he no longer uses FreeBSD but has switched over to Linux. In case anyone wants to know how I know this (cause I mentioned I never go there) I have a friend who does (and I admonish him for that).
 
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
 
kpedersen said:
For historic reference, the poster/mod there was an avid fan of Reddit (or more likely the power he had by setting up the unofficial FreeBSD reddit channel). He was politely asked to stop spamming these forums with reddit links by a number of our members, myself included. He got upset and left.
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Nuff said. Thank you for reading Reddit so I didn't have to.
 
bakul said:
Please don't add to FUD. Even Perrin seems to have removed the "sunset" part from his reddit post. I won't comment on the reddit thread but best to simply ignore it.
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Sorry. I ended up playing the devil's advocate here... 😅 I do know that the Foundation pays the bills to host the Forums, and keep them ad-free. This can't last forever. I know that is an unpleasant idea to consider, but at some point one does need to think about what's coming down the road, and what can be done to stay out of trouble. Making some plans for oneself early on, knowing what the options are - I'd think that's not FUD, that's staying prepared, even while enjoying what we have right now.

Reading this thread, I'm getting the impression that the very term 'official' is losing its clout. In the past the term, 'official' was equated with 'verifiable', 'reliable', 'functional', 'useful'. It was a word that merited respect, because respect is something you earn. But when the term 'official' gets equated with 'slow', 'murky', and other unflattering terms, it kind of loses the clout, the power. Especially when alternatives do appear to offer some benefits over the 'official' stuff. As an example, in US, FEMA is supposed to be the 'official' agency to go to for help with recovering from a weather-related disaster. Unfortunately, FEMA is such a tangled bureaucracy that rank-and-file people who do actually need the help - they don't have much respect for FEMA, and would look elsewhere.

In context of this thread - it does take some brains to know what the system is good for. It does take some discipline to stay consistent like FreeBSD has been so far.
 
There is very little official about the FreeBSD forums. They are hosted by the project, but the moderators are mostly not project members and the project does not monitor what goes on there.
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That's a problem, but I'm curious why project members don't use the forums more?

I posted a Firefox issue on 14.2. I still saw the issue on 14.3 p2. I didn't make a "proper" bug report, but I was kind-of hoping that'd be fixed before a new OS version. I don't know if devs test conditions like that on a regular, but I liked the idea of a dev stumbling onto that report, looking further into it or passing it to someone more-specialized, and issuing a fix.

But if devs don't visit the forums, I feel that hampers bug reports and quality-assurance. For obscure issues I use forums; I'm not familiar with mailing lists, I hung around IRCs with no responses for hours on unrelated projects, and likewise filled out bug reports on OS-specific bugzillas either ignored or locked for an automatic "outdated OS" system after a while. Forums allow easy discussion over a period of time.

If I have to debug anything, I'm pretty serious about it and write to public forums so everyone can give feedback. 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?

Unrelated, but I ran into WoW crashing with Wine and DXVK. I could post obscure details to DXVK's bug tracker and likely not get feedback before having to use unique manners to get more info (old client nobody else is running for testing; they want bisects or replays), but knew I'd have better luck just tossing random settings at it until something worked (magic setting might be d3d9.useD32forD24 but I don't want to undo it and break something again :p)

I doubt I'll make a DXVK report about it as I'm not sure what the real issue is (don't want to be passed-off to Intel or Mesa bugtrackers if driver-side) and don't have the time to retrieve the debug info needed for a proper report or git bisecting; I'm just fine with it running for now! Meanwhile this info is only posted to a forum currently :p but where else should it go?
 
Espionage724 said:
That's a problem, but I'm curious why project members don't use the forums more?

I posted a Firefox issue on 14.2. I still saw the issue on 14.3 p2. I didn't make a "proper" bug report, but I was kind-of hoping that'd be fixed before a new OS version. I don't know if devs test conditions like that on a regular, but I liked the idea of a dev stumbling onto that report, looking further into it or passing it to someone more-specialized, and issuing a fix.

But if devs don't visit the forums, I feel that hampers bug reports and quality-assurance. For obscure issues I use forums; I'm not familiar with mailing lists, I hung around IRCs with no responses for hours on unrelated projects, and likewise filled out bug reports on OS-specific bugzillas either ignored or locked for an automatic "outdated OS" system after a while.

If I have to debug anything, I'm pretty serious about it and write to public forums so everyone can give feedback. These being "The FreeBSD Forums" implies project devs of the FreeBSD OS would at least hang around, where some other average users of the "FreeBSD OS" are likely to be. Like, surely devs don't hang around more on less-official Reddit and Discord... right?


Unrelated, but I ran into WoW crashing with Wine and DXVK. I could post obscure details to DXVK's bug tracker and likely not get feedback before having to use unique manners to get more info (old client nobody else is running for testing; they want bisects or replays), but knew I'd have better luck just tossing random settings at it until something worked (magic setting might be d3d9.useD32forD24 = True but I don't want to undo it and break something again :p)

I doubt I'll make a DXVK report about it as I'm not sure what the real issue is (don't want to be passed-off to Intel or Mesa bugtrackers if driver-side) and don't have the time to retrieve the debug info needed for a proper report or git bisecting; I'm just fine with it running for now! Meanwhile this info is only posted to a forum currently :p but where else should it go?
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Devs do visit the Forums here - it's just that they don't post all that much, they mostly 'lurk' around.

And I mentioned how the FreeBSD Core Developers team in fact hangs out on Reddit, and holds discussions there... Sometimes it takes paying attention and following up on things like links to Bugzilla, the cgit/Github links, links to mailing lists, etc. After awhile, the development process does become more coherent, and it becomes easier to connect the dots. I do that for Plasma Wayland, for example.
 
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.
 
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