What about issues (Community Support) that find their solution more than one year later?
Does not seem all that uncommon in the world of open source.
(And also in the realm of hardware development when the schedule is already overloaded.)
Is the solution to just create a new topic and link to the old one at the beginning?
You mean if the OP finds the solution more than 6 months later? Or someone else comes up with a possible solution.
I donât think OP would find a solution more than a year later and would want to go back to the original thread to update it. If that happens, we should be able to assist them if they reach out to the moderation team.
I also vote against the 6-month default closure. It just adds to the confusion of this chaotic type of forum. (I much prefer old-fashioned phpBB forums, like Linux Mintâs. The structure and overview there fits my orderly brain better than long, refreshing pages that are difficult to search with the âsearch in pageâ function of browsers, just to name one factor.)
In my experience it just leads to a lot of quoting and rehashing of previously discussed options, explanations and suggestions.
There are people here â I assume Iâm not the only one â who have very little time to browse the forums. And even less time to find time to dedicate to hunting down solutions to problems they may have. 6 months is not very long in those circumstances.
I bought a Framework laptop because I believe in the premise of repairable electronics; I didnât need a new hobby, i.e. trying to keep up and filter out whatâs important on this forum.
I find it actually incredibly hard to not miss important things like when firmware updates are issued, or tools, like the tuned for battery management. I attempted to set up an alert for the Optimizing battery life under Ubuntu page, for instance, but my tracker service (followthatpage.com) gets blocked.
[I have a 13", 13th gen intel, running Linux Mint 21.3.]
Well, one of our community members has kindly given us the perfect example of why we need a rule like this!
Most of those threads are more than three years old. Now all four of them are at the top again, and for what?
I honestly want our forums to be less chaotic and much easier to navigate. Not everyone has hours to find what theyâre looking for, and I agree with you on that. Weâve been implementing some changes to make searching and filtering easier. Right now, we have device tags and distro tags, which means you can filter all Framework Laptop 13 - Intel 13th Gen threads under the Framework Laptop 13 and Community Support categories, or filter all Linux Mint distro threads under the Linux subcategory. Weâre on the same pageâfinding what you need should be simpler.
However, I donât see how this new change is going to prevent that.
Our end goal is to eliminate duplicate threads. If multiple community members are facing the same issue, it should be discussed in one thread instead of having a new thread created by each member. This way, the thread remains active until a solution is found, and other members facing the same issue in the future wonât have to sift through multiple threads to get help or necropost in 3-year-old threads.
I hope this makes sense.
The topic timer only locks replies, so wiki posts can still be edited by anyone with trust level 1 or greater. Either way though, forums (especially Discourse forums) are not especially well-suited for long-lasting wiki-style posts. Iâd encourage you to contribute to Framewiki, the unofficial Framework Wiki (disclaimer: I am the founder of Framewiki) which is purpose-specific and easier to navigate when looking for evergreen information. See Framewiki:Contributing
I think the whole closing posts automatically thing makes searching harder, like right now you can search for a specific issue and find at most 3 posts about it, but with the automatic closing you could potentially get 10 times more matches, and it will get worse over time
You are correct that you will get more results for a searched topic however, I personally disagree with your opinion that itâll make searching for things harder. There are multiple ways to sort results to suit what youâre looking for. In addition, if someone is looking for a solution for something, Iâd say itâs usually best to consult more recent topics. Older topics may contain potential solutions however, they can be erroneous or no longer applicable. Also, some of these threads have tens to hundreds of replies which can make searching for stuff harder.
I have often done exactly that many times in other contexts/forums.
I think a community vote should be held as a final decision.
This way we can see how many people agree or disagree with this decision. Just go by the results of the vote, and if there need to be further changes made, another vote can be held.
Would you say this happens often enough to warrant a sweeping measure versus relying on moderators handling those cases individually? (In the case pictured either letting individual know this is not ok, or joining the four threads into one.)
The vast majority of the threads we have to close are months- or years- old threads that get revived well after theyâve run their course, taking them off the rails into toxicity or otherwise.
Without closing old threads, the moderation load scales with exponentially to time, instead of by concurrent user count. The moderation team is a total of four volunteer moderators â we have to do what we can to keep the workload manageable.
Iâll mention that A) thread locking is commonly found in other social media platforms and B) itâs multiple individuals. As we are a small team, with the continued growth of the forums, we need to keep workload manageable.
Thank you
Thatâs the thing - if itâs commonly found, it doesnât necessarily mean it makes sense for this forum. And there were questions pertaining to the motivation behind it so that normal posters can also understand the move. But all we got at first was a ChatGPT excerptâŚ
Thank you! This makes a lot of sense now
I encounter the following problems with creating a new thread (though some people have tried to help with me these problems; my thanks to those people).
The single-distro problem. The category âFramework Laptop 13 - Linuxâ offers as tags the names of Linux distributions. The system makes one use at least two tags. Yet, most people using a single distribution. The same point holds for the category âFramework Laptop 16 - Linuxâ.
The single-device / tag-reveal problem. The category âCommunity supportâ offers tags each of which, I take it, is a device model. And again one must choose two tags. And again most people will have only one device. Yet, I discover the following. After and only after one has chosen a first tag is one offered a further range of tags, those tags comprising topics/problems such as âtemperatureâ and ânot-bootingâ. This two-stage reveal confuses, partly because it does not occur with every category (!).
The itâs-fine-until-itâs-not problem. If one changes category - i.e., if, having selected a category, one proceeds to select a different category - then any tags that one has chosen persist. The persistence proves futile and confusing, because, since tags are category-specific, they will get rejected once they are placed under a new category.
What is to be done? Re 1: allow a single tag. Re 2: make it clear, somehow, that the user is being made to choose one tag of one type and a second tag of another type. Re 3: I donât know; perhaps the system should remove invalid tags immediately, or - better? - mark them as invalid by colouring them red, or something.
The Linux forum doesnât want two tags for the distro, when you open the distro tag selection it shows âselect 1 tag from âŚâ
Ah. So here we have a case of problem 2? I am unsure that we do, for, having selected a distro as a tag, I see an instruction to add another tag and . . no way that I can add another tag. Screenshot:
Where am I supposed to click (within that which my image shows)? I find no place-to-click that lets me add a further tag.
in the text box where you write your âissueâ?
Thanks. So: in the place shown in the following image?
That place - that box - offers no dropdown menu; seemingly one has to guess which tags there are. Or can one enter arbitrary text?
Why do you have framework-laptop-16 tag in there if you are posting to Framework Laptop 13 - Linux section? That second tag box just wants the tag for your current linux distro (mint)
Remove that one and then click in the big text box and under the âWhich Linux distro are you usingâ if you want to start writing the actual post.
