We are pleased to announce the new Linode Community Questions site!
It’s a great place to ask questions, to share ideas and knowledge, to discuss Linode, Linux, the cloud, and everything else in the Linode ecosystem with peers and Linode team members. You’ll be able to start conversations, get help, give advice, and offer solutions.
Community environments get better the more people use them. We hope this will become a great resource for everyone.
There is also a new community user profile that currently lists your questions and reply activity. Your profile will eventually include additional interactions such as your comments on Linode guides and things you’ve starred. We’ve been prioritizing community and team focused functionality in the designs of upcoming stuff.
In the next few weeks we will be sunsetting the phpBB community forum. Don’t worry – we’ll be migrating all 15 years of posts (!) into the new Linode Community, and you’ll be able to easily reclaim your old forum user and posts.
Thank you so much for your participation over the years. You are, quite literally, the community and have made it what it is.
We welcome any and all feedback to help us improve the Linode Community and make it more useful and enjoyable. Thanks!
Comments (15)
Looks great so far. Here are a few suggestions to get you going:
– Add a rating system – voting for the best answer and likes/dislikes
– Ability to choose a “Best answer”
– Some sort of mark that indicates a solved/answered questions. A check mark or a “Solved” tag
– A filter to only show questions that haven’t been Solved yet and questions with no replies.
I know it’s still new so you’re probably already planning some of these features.
Thanks for the suggestions!
1. I take this was easier than migrating to phpBB 3.2 and integrating the Prosilver style to make it mobile friendly?
2. Will “legacy” links be maintained using a redirect system or will bookmarks need to be changed?
3. Do you plan on making the phpBB read-only prior to moving the data so no posts get lost?
Hi could you clarify if the login for new forums is our linode username or we create a new username ? do we expose our linode manager username when logging into the forums ?
@William No posts will be lost when we perform the final transition over. We’re still not sure we’ll have a read-only period or if we’ll perform multiple merging imports. As for links, we hope to have a redirects in place issuing 301s for a while, but I can’t commit to that just yet…
@GeorgeL – the new community stuff is “single sign on” using your Linode account credentials. On first access to the community site, you’re asked to choose a “Display Name” for use on the public areas, in the case you don’t want to expose your Linode username… You’ll be able to change it in My Profile soon (it’s not there yet).
Thanks @caker for clarification 🙂
I’m confused – is that list really meant to substitute for the forum? As it looks right now it can’t possibly scale to that *at all*. It’s just a list of Q/A.
Hey Tor. The Linode Community page is intended to replace the forums. Pretty soon Linode users will be able to claim their forum posts to be moved over to the new community page. This is an ever evolving page and the Community page you see now is not going to be the final version. As it grows we are confident it will effectively replace our forums.
I hope this helps ease those fears a little.
-Blake
I have personally moved my forum two times, using 301 to preserve bookmarks, however in my case it was a simple task as the software stayed the same, thus I could just 301 at the http server level.
I am guessing you will have to do some sort of database queries if you manage to pull off your transition and support 301 redirect?
Out of curiosity, is this community system also based around Hugo, or you’re using a custom service as the base for it?
@kuteninja, The Community Questions site is a custom Python Django application.
@Blake:
What you say doesn’t match what we observe, and what Howie just said about the Community Questions site – a custom Python Django application.
What you are doing is *removing* the forum and moving to a much more simplistic Q/A list. It is not a forum (with discussions, information trading etc.). Why not say so?
The part about moving forum posts to the community site doesn’t make sense other than for question type posts/answers. Unless you transform the community site to a forum, which I bet you are not planning to do – otherwise you wouldn’t have started it as a Q/A list.
– addendum: Or are you actually planning to add a forum *in addition* to the Q/A list?
We hope to achieve both use cases with the new site, as it develops. Thanks.
Excluding those on legacy plans from logging into the new site effectively cuts us off from doing anything but reading the site, effectively removing community support…