We need to change our behaviour here at NethServer Community

Hello,

I’m honest.
My problem is the language. Less posting messages, but understanding the concerns of other friends here. As a former sailor although I understand the technical terms in the field of mechanical engineering, but unfortunately rarely out of the IT business. Although the translator of Google can help a little, but every word does he not understood.

Regards

Uwe

Ehi Manuel thanks for joining the discussion!
How do you suggest to improve information? Currently all data are here in community and in the official manual.
A few months ago we have created a new wiki trying to organize docs better.

That’s very sad man :cry: please I’d like to go deeper and understand what happened. Would you mind to open a new topic on support category? We need to make the product runs smoothly as you expected.

Please, I’d love to hear your thoughts on that going deeper into the matter, a new topic may be needed.

That’s a hot point. I know that writing in a different language isn’t trivial and I understand your concern since I’m not good in English at all. As I said in the past organizing a multi-language community isn’t straightforward, information may be scattered in multiple non-english discussions, but I’m always open to new ideas.

Recently I have noticed this community, they are using Discourse and the community is product-based like us. Check the topics with flags in the title

Also, Interesting how they have organized their docs+howto+wiki
https://forum.fairphone.com/t/pencil2-the-fairphone-forum-wiki-how-tos/5056

Hmm… interesting. I have the opposite view of the NethServer Community in the sense that this is probably one of the more active, helpful and welcoming communities that I’ve ever been in. In my experience, the following things happened:

  • Got a welcome message as soon as I joined. Had a post to allow myself to introduce myself
  • Listed a problem I was working on and immediately got help and an offer to walk me through the issue from a member of the community

I couldn’t ask for more from the community personally.

In general, I don’t always respond because the Nethserver work I’m doing is more of a personal interest but it does forecast into what we could be working on from a work perspective in the not so distant future. So I tend to jump in and out of the things that I’m trying to work on. I suspect that will be true for a lot of different people as well.

In order to keep myself better engaged, I have changed the notification settings so that I get notified of messages that I’ve missed during the day.

All in all, I couldn’t be happier to be part of such an amazing community. Thank you for all the effort to make it such an awesome experience.

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I don’t post simply due to a lack of know-how. But I am very interested in Nethserver, and the community.
I support the suggestion of How-tos as this is the first time I’ve built a server, and am trying to learn the basics from the ground up.
I use my Nethser ear just as a file server just now, but would like to add email.
But this means adding security to open the server up to the Internet.
So I suggest one of the proposed How-tos should be about making your server as secure as it can be.

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Ehi Kelvin, thanks for your words you’re making some guys very happy here. :heart_eyes_cat:

Of course, people tend to jump in discussions they are already interested in, my concern is that people don’t feel at ease to add anything new to the conversation. So I try to understand why and how can I help with

That’s a good habit, everyone should change the notification settings at will, just a clarification about that:
https://meta.discourse.org/t/whats-the-difference-between-tracking-and-watching/5430

Thanks for your reply and proposal.
We’re already working on this, would you mind adding your feedback?

Hi there,

I am quite new to Nethserver and it’s community.

As soon as I registered and asked a couple of questions I found people willing to help, and it’s clear this comes from the “upper levels” in the team as well as from users helping each other. That part you got covered very well.

Leaving docs aside (I haven’t delved deep enough to comment about that) one thing I find pretty uncomfortable is this “forum” system… Maybe I am getting old, but I prefer more traditional systems, where things are more clearly organized, there not so much waste of screen state and you can narrow down your searches.
I visit other support forums using this same system and it puts me off too…

Best regards.
MadOp

Hi to all,

I’m a german people and as discussed before english is not my own language.
I’m working as product manager at an local city carrier (not DTAG) but
I’m not a technician. I want to expand my experience for two reasons: I
want to recommend solutions to our customers in addition to our products
and I want learn more about these solution by using them. This is the
reason that I use Proxmox as (excellent) HA-virtualization platform,
running nethServer as VM (by the way: I used SME-Server over years before). It’s running very well!

How ever. The administration manual is not bad, but if I search for specific information such as login/password for the additional services you offer - and I find nothing … ?!?

Anyway: congratulation for your solution and many thanks to developer.

Best regards from Germany

Telekomiker :sunglasses:

Ehi @MadOp thanks for replying to my call and I’m glad to hear that you have been feeling at ease here :slight_smile:
what do you mean with “the forum system” what are you suggesting as more traditional systems?

Hi @alefattorini, it’s nice to see devs caring about the community, I actually said that when I went through a survey a while back.

By “this forum system” I mean the platform we are using to exchange this posts, here at “http://community.nethserver.org”. I don’t know (or find) its name o who is the developer.

And by “more traditional options” I mean regular forum boards such as SMF, phpbb and so on.

Hi MadOp,
Yes the initial feeling is that it is strange :smile:
Give it a try for a couple of weeks and then you will get accustomed with it.
I find it easy now to use it and it is more “live” than a traditional forum board.

The “live” feature is the one that I like about Discourse

I understand pretty well your concerns, but trust me (and trust @Ctek as well) it’s matter of time and community is going to be your second home. The platform is called discourse and I’m sure that all old forums are going to be upgraded to platforms like this.

It’s an attempt to reimagine what a modern Internet discussion platform should be today, in a world of ubiquitous smartphones, tablets, Facebook, and Twitter.

Try it on mobile too :smile:
The icing on the cake, it’s open source and super cool! I hope you will feel comfortable very soon.

I disliked Discourse, I was really against it and I was fighting to stay within the old mailing list system.

But @alefattorini twisted my arm…and he was totally right! Discourse does a really good job, and is much much better than a normal ML. Of course the tool is not enough, the people are the real important part and having a great Community Manager like Alessio make a really great difference! :smiley:

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Good, maybe too shameless but good. Money are coming :slight_smile:

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I thought it was just me. The new ‘standard’ web design/interface is quite irritating. I can never find anything without endless clicking> no that’s not it> maybe this? click> nope> argh! just label things! get rid of vague icons that you have to click just to figure out what they are! rant! rant! I’m old! (no, I really am)

This is not a NS thing. When 1and1 went to a similar design I lost hours trying to work. One plus is the design does bypass language barriers.

You can reply by email as well! Discourse guys are working to Improve the user experience for email-only users :smile:

I’m keen to know what these guys think: @web.smf @abazaba @Nicola_Nicolai @rowihei @Mepata @enrilor @enricobacis @T_C @Adam_S @Nexus @apradoc @haliparotin @macwunder @Walter_Schoenly @AbsyntH @syntaxerrormmm @xcod @Vinny74

In comparison to several other similar software solution/platforms I would say that NethServer has developed a superior community and I wouldn’t say that it is solely due to technical innovation. It looks like discourse will be a good addition to communication within the community, but I would say that the biggest difference between this and others is the human factor. The obviously very involved community manager, and the courteous user base. The question that is important to me is “how to keep that going?” How do we encourage natural good will within the community?

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Hi all guys, as requested I would like to share my own 2 cents.

First, an apology. Unfortunately my presence here is much more scarce than I would like to. This is an amazing, supportive and friendly community, maybe the best one I’ve seen so far by these criteria, and it really deserves at least half of the love developers, community manager and other people involved feel and show for their work, for NethServer and for newcomers. Thank you very much for your hard work, everyone :slight_smile: This is really appreciated, and I think this IS the distinctive mark, so far, of the NethServer community.

Another distinctive mark is, as I may see, the lack of time of a lot of people that would like to be involved more (myself included). And this is a pity, unfortunately.

I second that easy-to-follow and simple (as “less technical”) guides (read: HOWTOs) will surely improve the feeling of a newcomer towards NethServer and its community. This is actually a big point and I know this would cost a lot of effort to get nailed. I would like to propose to publish these HOWTOs not on Discourse but on a public wiki: usually wikis ease the collaboration, requiring much more “quick and dirty” jobs like cleaning out the layout of the page, doing some proof-reading, etc. that are much lighter (in terms of time involved and energies to be consumed). Small work, potentially much more people that can do that, and again much more possibilities that someones decides to dedicate more time to NethServer and its community.

Regarding the community platform: I don’t generally like forums or BBs because they are too fast-paced, requires quickness in writing and expressing your thoughts (which is not always a good idea), easily misused (especially when someone tries to implement documentation with these tools and then someone else hijacks the howto for his own support needs), and all these reasons make discussions/information harder to follow and find. Much more with Discourse, since it minimizes all the artifacts of a BB and focus on the quickness of the message.

Still, I think anyone who posts here is polite, tidy and follows the general netiquette/indications on how to post (this is usually a big negative point when dealing with newcomers on communities). And additionally, Alessio and the other people at Nethesis do their best (with success, I may say) in splitting/reordering the discussions that somehow managed to escape the right path. So maybe Discourse is not to be trashed, yet :wink:

I’m going through hard times if I am to find other negative points of the community, really. I think all was done until now was done with love and respect and this is really good. I think right now easy documentation for newcomers is the goal to achieve, to allow growth in the community.

Thank you again guys and keep up the good work :slight_smile:

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