Regarding thoughts for encourage more users to post/participate on UNIX.com site.

Hello All,

Greetings!!

Have a thought about how could we encourage more users to post and participate more on UNIX.com(because more we get questions, more we learn more), few are my ideas which I am posting feel free to add/edit more ideas in here. Keeping this as a POLL too.

I- Allow Guest users with optimum level of restrictions to only post real questions?

II- Make new user's registration easy(may be club it with GMAIL and other email services) so that it will be easier for users to join may be a single click(this is my fav though)

III- Add more technology(specially new technologies eg----> Docker, CLOUD, AWS, R, Regex) sub forums in forums.

IV- Invite specialists in new technologists so that we could get knowledge on forums and people start asking questions related to new tags may be?

V- Start a simple award system for users(we could discuss within ourselves which kind of system we could keep if needed).

Would like to request you to participate in this post so that we could take help in improvement(After seeing Neo's dedication and hard work I am inspired from it) for this GREAT forum

Thanks,
R. Singh

Thanks! All great ideas but for me I am busy rebuilding the forums to move completely off legacy table tags and on to using more modern / responsible frameworks and tags, including HTML5, CSS3, JS, jQuery and other JS and CSS frameworks.

I can permit guest postings if other want it, but in the past, this just creates more and more and more spam for mods to deal with and they are busy enough already.

Regarding "one click registration" this is also a great idea, but the result is spam, spam, spam when we make it too easy.

I prefer to have users and members who want to be a part of our community versus having "one click in spammer to manage".

These are all great ideas, but we do have to keep the quality of the posts high, and the number of spammers low. If we make it "one click posting"... this place will turn into a full time anti-spam management exercise, LOL,

Hello Neo,

Sure, thank you for your encouragement. I actually didn't mean to give every user capability to post, I meant with some restrictions we could
allow them or make their id creation easy(may be take their information like Name etc and all from gmail etc ids). Also adding new FORUMS (eg---> R, ML, Docker, CLOUD) will give our forums good shape as they are emerging technologies. Cheers and let us all contribute to this GREAT site

Thanks,
R. Singh

Anyone can add a tag to any post thread.

It's always a good idea to add tags to discussion and to post about new technologies

Apologies Neo, I need a strong cup of TEA :o. I meant new technologies FORUMS(not post tags)

Thanks,
R. Singh

I need to find a new "ROTFL" kinda icon from Fonts Awesome and add:

To the thank you box or maybe below that box, LOL

Thinking about this... the blame squarely is on my shoulders for this forum falling behind the new generation sites with fancy tag-driven javascript sites.

We were one of the first forums which had professional moderation back "in the days" when tech support on the net was just starting. Since, those days the world has really progressed, as far as internet resources, forums and tech support networking sites go. I am amazed at the high quality of YouTube videos from tech experts on every new subject under the sun.

While the world was rapidly undergoing this revolution in online tech support, I was busy on other projects and let the forum fall behind. Also, a lot of our members did not want us to change, but ironically those members in the past who did not want the site to change, are not posting here much anymore.

In my view, we have little choice but to modernize the user experience; and this means the front end client side experience, not necessary the back end.

For years, I looked at other solutions like a CMS or WP or other forum type of UI for the front end, but those all of those suffer from the same "bah humbug" feeling; and all the new tech support sites which have exploded past us in popularity are custom built, tag driven, javascript based sites.

Now I've been examining the latest and greatest, trendy areas in Web Development, and thinking where we should go next.

Also, I noticed that over the last two years, when I was busy coding in C# and Unity 3D for my cyberspace SA project, I let the site down with regard to keeping up with the latest trends in meta tags; and so we dropped in search engine rankings.

I'm trying to make up for that now; and so everyone's ideas and suggestions are very much appreciated.

We really need to create a more interesting user experience; site which has more "wow" but in a good, clean tech way. Instead of breaking the site as it is now, I have decided to rewrite it myself starting with getting rid of the 10 year old legacy table format which restricts the site. I'm making progress; but have a quite a way to go. We have so much original embedded table tags, that even when I add frameworks like Bootstrap Grid or CSS Grid, things break due to the table tags.

If I had of done this hard work years ago, we would be much farther along, so it's clearly my fault the site has fallen behind the times in the modern world of frameworks, HTML 5 CSS 3 and all the many modern Javascript frameworks, IDEs and other development tools.

It's exciting to review most of them; and so I think it is a good thing to now be focused on modernizing the user experience.

Exciting times for sure!

Hello Neo,

I believe it is still NOT late(please don't think like that this SITE is always WONDERFUL), I would like to request you that since you are busy in site's enhancement(which is no. 1 priority), if we could form a team with MODs and Forum advisers who could come up with plan for the site's future(adding new sub forums, add courses like man pages etc etc)? We all could give our thoughts or share ideas along with discussions and could let you know the PLAN for future and then if possible we could try to contribute to it too?

Thanks,
R. Singh

Ideas are good; but I think the future may be based more on tags and less on forums, since the trend for forums seems less relevant than tags.

Every discussion should be started with at least one tag, I think; because that seems to be the long standing trend; and hierarchical forums seems to be on the decline.

Isn't that right?

After all, with tags we can do all that is done with forums, and for existing thread, we can easily right code to tag each thread in a forum with a tag which is related to that forum, like a "shell script" tag etc; and then some day we can get rid of the forums and make the site tag based?

Here is one thing that might be useful.
(Apologies for typos etc...)

The 'Thanks' button could be open to the public and not to the logged in members only.
There is many a time where I have searched for something and would love just to give a thanks or an upvote because it was just what I was looking for.
It doesn't need to be hidden until logged in after all it is just a counter and you get the word 'Guest' appear on your post, whether the post is locked or not, to acknowledge the fact.

On the front page you could mention:
"If you have found a solution to your query please press the 'Thanks', <icon_here>, button on the relevant post(s)."

As it stands the UNIX pages are fast loading, nothing infuriates me more than a large page taking all day to load. I have no problem with bringing the code up to current standards but if it slows down the user experience then it is not necessarily a good move.

Yes, it's doable, of course.

Yes, it keeps getting faster as I consolidate code, clean up CSS and JS, and get rid of image files and replace them with fast loading CSS text-based icons, etc. It will be even faster when I make more changes to the code.

Since I'm the only coder coding the site at this time, I have no choice but to prioritize; and the priority is to get rid of obsolete code, especially table tags.

We cannot keep these table tags, it is too constraining and someday soon, table tags will be completely obsolete in HTML.