Forums Ideas

This thread is to present some ideas I have about the Nixers.net forums.

Introduction

Hello fellows nixers,
I had some nice ideas that I'll explain in this thread. Please take in
consideration that those are completely subjective speculations and that I'm open
for discussion. Those ideas might never be implemented and I don't have any
agreement with the admins about them. It's just a presentation of what I
have in mind. I'm just looking for a debate.

Ideas

• Threads about daily reviews of casual activities explained in an understandable way(diaries)
  
• Crossposting interesting threads from Nixers.net forums to other social-networks, forums,or boards
  

Diary

Having people post about their daily life on unix-y systems is a very interesting
concept. The general view I have of it is that when someone solves a problem in
their daily routine they can then report online how it been done.
It's also interesting in a way touches our curious side, we are always wondering about what other people
do in their daily life on their machines.

The Good Sides:

• Helping others
  
• Making the forums more interactive
  
• Satisfying our curiosity and interests
  

The Down Sides:

• Hard to filter what posts are appropriate
  
• Hard to incite people to post about things they might not consider interesting but in fact are
  
• Might become boring
  

X-Posting

I won't dig too deep on that concept because most of us know what x-posting is.
My view of it is that by sharing interesting posts from the Nixers.net to other
forums we might get more reviews, popularity, and discussions.

The Good Sides:

• Helping the Forums grow
  
• Getting more discussions and opinions
  
• Reviving old threads that could have grown
  

The Down Sides:

• Most of the discussions might happen outside the forums
  
• The threads might easily go offtopic
  
• the quality of the posts might drop
  

So what do you think of those, let's get the debate started?

To me it sounds like the diary is pretty similar to a blog, which quite a few people have expressed interest in. Some nixers even have their own blog already and I think it would be a good idea to link them in somewhere (probably the forums) since there have been some great posts on there and a lot of information that could help newbies and veterans alike.

I'm not quite sure about crossposting though. I think it might attract the wrong sort of crowd. We might end up losing a bit of our identity that way. This might still happen with blogs, but I think to a lesser extent if any. Another downside I can think of to crossposting is it might create a bit of friction, especially since we're fairly elitist (or at least I really want us to be).

(26-07-2014, 08:38 PM)dami0 Wrote: To me it sounds like the diary is pretty similar to a blog, which quite a few people have expressed interest in. Some nixers even have their own blog already and I think it would be a good idea to link them in somewhere (probably the forums) since there have been some great posts on there and a lot of information that could help newbies and veterans alike.

I do enjoy z3bra's blog in particular. He writes about simple things but in a captivating way. Now the questions are: Would it be the same with more people writing about their experiences? How many will start spending time writing diaries/blogs?

(26-07-2014, 08:38 PM)dami0 Wrote: I'm not quite sure about crossposting though. I think it might attract the wrong sort of crowd. We might end up losing a bit of our identity that way. This might still happen with blogs, but I think to a lesser extent if any. Another downside I can think of to crossposting is it might create a bit of friction, especially since we're fairly elitist (or at least I really want us to be).

Personally, I'm ok with loosing a bit of our personality to extend the forums views. It might attract the wrong persons but it won't be a burden if it brings up a lot of new discussion subjects. At the moment the forums is biased on certain subjects and doing that would widen our horizons.

I'm pretty okay with the "diary" thing, in fact, I think it would bring interresting content to the forum. I would personnaly not leave my blog in favor to this, but why not linking it, or even totally copying the content in a thread ? It can also help people not running a blog to share their experience, which would be nice. I'm totally in !

For the cross posting though, I'm a bit reticent... I try to put myself in the position of people from the other board. Someone come saying "Hey, here at nixers, we are actually discussing <thread name>. Would you like to join us ?". It seems a bit like hooking to me, or like saying "We're unable to discuss this alone, because we miss interesting users"

Otherwise, thanks a lot for sharing your ideas.

Go ahead with the diary! I'm all for more board activity. So on that token, I think what we need to do is start recruiting people instead of cross-posting. But in order for people we bring here to stay, I think the board needs to be more active in the first place.

I really like the diary idea. I feel a bit "sheltered" here in my GNU/Linux world. I want to know what people running more obscure systems are using their machines for.

+1 for the diary thing. Even though I'm already writing for my own blog I might be able to share some stories.

Two ideas:
1) add Arduino, etc. to the embedded section.
2) add *nix security section for discussions on hardening, patching, etc.

Cheers,
Soda

sodaphish, there are sections related to what you want and not a lot of people posts to them.
1) embedded devices http://nixers.net/forumdisplay.php?fid=19 (7 threads)
2) security http://nixers.net/forumdisplay.php?fid=27 (21 threads)

If you can dig old threads or start new ones in those sections it would be nice.
Also, there might be a reason why those sections don't have many threads, maybe their titles are misleading or something. What do you think?

I guess I don't consider Arduino an ARM/MIPS... maybe the heading of that sub is misleading? Maybe a less generic title like, "Embedded Platforms", or "Hardware Hacking" or, something clever and deprecating? I don't know... something.