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Old 5th February 2020
ntx ntx is offline
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Question Forum resurgence?

How could we go about making this forum busier than it has been? I've been a lurker for a while, and my incentive was that I have a desire to contribute to helping other BSD users and contributing to the project itself in ways of non-programming efforts.

What are some forum-wide incentives, or efforts we could offer to make people feel inclined to join the conversations and register with us?
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Old 5th February 2020
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I can't speak for others, but I like this forum the way it is. You don't have tons of irrelavent question or total garbage troll posts like you get on another unanamed bsd forum. The quality of answers is very high also and since there are not a lot of garbage posts they don't get lost. Popularity does not equal quality.
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Old 5th February 2020
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Resurgence?

These forums are not dead!

They are not very busy because of the quality of the answers given, & most BSD users will look through documentation first - unlike some other O/S users.
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Old 5th February 2020
ntx ntx is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by roddierod View Post
I can't speak for others, but I like this forum the way it is. You don't have tons of irrelavent question or total garbage troll posts like you get on another unanamed bsd forum. The quality of answers is very high also and since there are not a lot of garbage posts they don't get lost. Popularity does not equal quality.
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Resurgence?

These forums are not dead!

They are not very busy because of the quality of the answers given, & most BSD users will look through documentation first - unlike some other O/S users.

That's fair, I hadn't thought of it that way. I'm used to sifting through sub-par posts to find the better ones; I suppose it works out because there's less (pointless) information overload and it saves room for purposeful discussion.
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Old 16th February 2020
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History lesson for the young:

When the original FreeBSD forums, which included questions about other BSDs, died (the owner was sick and all that was being posted was spam) Carpetsmoker started this forum. It was intended as a replacement. However, shortly afterwards, FreeBSD.org started its own forum which became the main, and busiest, FreeBSD forum. This one has become more or less an OpenBSD forum, though questions about other BSDs are fine. My guess, (just my personal opinion) is that one reason these forums are so quiet is because OpenBSD is less known, or at least less popular, than FreeBSD.

There are good and bad points to something becoming popular. In my opinion, Ubuntu (a Swahili word meaning I can't configure Debian) --Sorry, I love that joke though it's unfair--and Mark Shuttleworth did a great deal towards making Linux mainstream. The advantage is that hardware and software makers start paying more attention to Linux. (And FreeBSD can often be a beneficiary as well).
The downside has been mentioned--garbage posts and more noise. So, I think that if OpenBSD becomes more mainstream, these forums will be busier. But would it be good for OpenBSD or even FreeBSD to become more mainstrean?

(Talking too much because I'm sick and getting bored--though getting better)

Scott
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Old 16th February 2020
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Quote:
Originally Posted by scottro View Post
My guess, (just my personal opinion) is that one reason these forums are so quiet is because OpenBSD is less known (...).
My guess, (just my personal opinion) is that one reason these forums are so quiet is because OpenBSD must be learned before being used, unlike Linux, Windows or OS X.
One can try Linux or Windows or OS X, and require help to the community to go forward, while one must learn OpenBSD to be able to really use it the right way.

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There are good and bad points to something becoming popular.
Thanks Theo, OpenBSD doesn't care about popularity
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Last edited by LeFrettchen; 16th February 2020 at 09:40 PM.
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Old 22nd February 2020
ntx ntx is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by LeFrettchen View Post
My guess, (just my personal opinion) is that one reason these forums are so quiet is because OpenBSD must be learned before being used, unlike Linux, Windows or OS X.
One can try Linux or Windows or OS X, and require help to the community to go forward, while one must learn OpenBSD to be able to really use it the right way.


Thanks Theo, OpenBSD doesn't care about popularity


Fair points! I've only been on OpenBSD for ~2 months, but here was my experience thus far:

In the beginning, you can treat it like Linux (Not all that true, but I hope you know what I mean when I say that). You can "skate by" by just installing what you need without really learning anything else.. But in my case, I *wanted* to know more after a little bit. At first, I decided to compile my kernel. Then I uninstalled Firefox entirely and am relying on GTK/WebKit (through suckless' surf) for GUI browsing and mostly using links.

I have even written a script to read ebooks.

1) `lesspub` is a script that removes html tags from the .html files inside of epubs so you can read books with `less`.
2) `browsepub` is a script that doesn't remove them, but instead just uses a text based browser to read the unzipped epub files.

Here are both scripts!

My desire for minimal dependencies and POSIX-compliancy has taken over and so now I'm trying to give back to the community however I'm able to.

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