Forum usage as advocacy

[Ole Juul]

I notice that there is actually a lot of PC-BSD exposure out there. Anybody who is likely to try it, has probably heard of it. What there isn't a lot of is Googlability of problems. Compare FreeBSD where a simple net search will often lead to their forum and a useful answer. Dru mentioned the importance of documentation in another advocacy post, and I agree, but easy accessibility to community might be even more beneficial to the actual promotion of this OS.

I think that this forum is perhaps one of our best advocady tools to attract users. The low participation here is probably not encouraging and perhaps even a disincentive to newcomers. How many posts go unanswered? Lots. The membership list has thousands of single post users. I look in here to see how things a going and when I come back 4 to 8 hours later, there's no change. Weekends are almost dead. This is very depressing for a newcomer. It also doesn't look good to those just browsing in to see about this OS.

I am not suggesting that those that do participate, particularly those who a making contributions in other ways, should do more - although perhaps a little more attention to keeping things going may be an easy contribution for some. What I would like to suggest is that some effort to promote the use of this forum could be beneficial. Could a link, and perhaps other encouragement or mention, be provided in other places? I'm thinking of on the download page, at time of installation, at boot-up time. I don't know, but it seems like if there are 30,000 users (and I think over 1/3 of those speak English) then there should be more activity here. And more friends made.

Thoughts?

[fluca1978]

While your statements are pretty obvious, I must admit that I agree with the forum participation: it should be more!
With regard to un-answered posts there must be another consideration: PCBSD is a OS that aims to end users with little Unix experience, while FreeBSD is something that is aimed to more experienced users, or at least someone that has the will to read all the documentation. Therefore, here users usually post some claim message without enough details to allow for a (quick) answer.
By the way, I hope that everyone here is going to do a hand-by-hand help. After all having to post a few posts per day is not that much effort!

[Weixiong]

I agree it's a sad state of affairs and wasn't always like this. It used to be an active, vibrant community. Check out some of the posts from when I first got here. People posting screenshots, joking around, etc. but there's only so much a few people can do. I've tried to liven things up, look at my goofy thread about getting junky old computers going. I didn't have to share that.

I've been around, although intermittently, for 7 years and it's frustrating for me when I post a question, however minor it might be, and don't get an answer. And I can get my system up and running. I can only imagine how someone new to PC-BSD and FreeBSD in general must feel when they're trying to get set up and having problems.

[thedaemonofid]

Well, here I am joining in. I hope to be an active member of the forum. I plan on setting up my main desktop workstation with PC-BSD and a network server with FreeBSD. So I should have plenty of questions, and possibly even a few answers. I do have experience with BSD but it's mainly been a hobby and I haven't really used FreeBSD since version 6 or so I think. But I'm back. Once I figure out how to get Blender SVN compiled I will work on PBI's for it as well, to break my PC-BSD cherry so to speak.

[fluca1978]

I believe that a problem of the forum systems, not strictly tied to this forum, is that there are too much forums for similar products. At the moment I'm following the FreeBSD forums, the PCBSD forums and the FreeNAS forums since these are products I use and I care of. While I consider myself a quite polite user, and I resist the temptation to cross post to different forums, I must admit that sometimes it is easier to find the solution to a problem related to PCBSD or FreeNAS into the FreeBSD forums. It is not that these forums are not good enough, but simply the mainstream OS gets more attention, and therefore a wider user list. I'm not sure that merging the forums is the right choice, since it could bring more chaos than order, and I don't want to have PCBSD developers always present on the forums (I'm glad they spend their time developing instead of writing posts), but I hope some gurus will be more present on the forums too. In the meantime I encourage myself and all other community members and believers of this project to be active on the forums, either proposing solutions or trying to "guess" solutions to someone else problems, or just promoting their experience and considerations. All this is to contribute to the Open Source spirit of the project.

This is my personal opinion, I hope nobody is going to misunderstand my words.

[Ole Juul]

In the meantime I encourage myself and all other community members and believers of this project to be active on the forums, either proposing solutions or trying to "guess" solutions to someone else problems, or just promoting their experience and considerations. All this is to contribute to the Open Source spirit of the project.

Exactly what I was suggesting as "advocacy". We're on the same page there.

However, I was also asking if encouraging new users to come here would not be beneficial toward a general goal of getting some critical mass. There may be better ways than my suggestions, but I think finding some ways to get people here, as well as keeping them, is in order.