Linode Community Update – November 2018

At Linode, we consider our user community to be one of our greatest assets. If you’ve been following our journey since the launch of the Linode Community Site, you’ve probably seen and felt the ways in which our user community is growing. We want to take some time to talk about some of the great things that have come since, and recognize your contributions to its value and success.

To start, since launch, we have over 18,000 established user profiles on the Community Site, which includes over 15,000 user profiles that we migrated from the phpBB community forum. As we mentioned in our initial blog post, we migrated 15 years of forum history to the Community Site, which included over 10,000 posts and over 50,000 responses. Since then, we’ve seen thousands more questions and answers posted by users like yourself, having conversations on topics ranging from general Linode-related questions to more specific questions about Linux and related applications.

We also want to mention some of the newer features that we’ve added to the Community Site since it launched.

In March, we improved the Markdown functionality, which allows users to better format questions and answers. In April, we added new sorting options, and in May we improved further, allowing users to find unanswered questions and be the first to share their own knowledge on the wide range of topics being discussed. Linode Staff can now pin topics, making recent, more relevant discussions easily discoverable. In June, we added the ability for users to @mention others, similar to what you’d find in popular chat applications and social networks. Users that are mentioned will receive a notification within the new Linode Cloud Manager, and from there, they will be able to jump right into the conversation. Most recently, in September, we added the ability for users to share a little love in the form of “likes” for questions and answers posted by others. We’ve also included the Community Site as a resource in the “Get Help” page of the new Linode Cloud Manager.

We’ve come a long way since launch and we have even bigger plans for the Community Site that we’ll be revealing in the coming months. In the short term, look for changes to the search functionality, which we’re looking to enhance using predictive search. We’re also planning to integrate Community Site search within the “Get Help” page of the new Linode Cloud Manager, as well as likes and email notifications to keep you in the loop with conversations that are important to you.

Our foundation here at Linode has been built in large part by your conversations with us, your enthusiasm for being a part of our journey and your insight into ways we can do better. This Community Site is our way to give back and help you grow too. We hope this resource will be a place for you to ask questions, find answers, and exchange ideas and information with other users like yourself. We’re really excited about the progress we’ve made so far, and we want to thank you for being a big part of that.

So, thank you!

As always, we welcome your feedback about how we can improve the Community Site and our platform further.