We’re pleased to announce that the content of the qubes-community project has been migrated to the forum. The guides are now in the Community Guides category, and can easily be browsed with Discourse’s doc plugin interface, in addition to the standard search.
Rationale behind the migration
The forum has become the place that the qubes-community project was originally meant to be - and much more. In a recent discussion between Qubes OS “documentation” people - the forum admins/mods, the official qubes-doc maintainers, and qubes-community admins - it was agreed that it would make sense to migrate most of the qubes-community documentation to the forum’s “Guides” section.
The main reasons for doing so are:
- visibility /and as a corollary, avoiding duplication/: there is a significant amount of posts in the forum in which people are asking questions (or providing solutions) that are documented on qubes-community - that for some reason they didn’t find.
- ease of use/contribution: admittedly, Discourse makes it a lot easier to contribute than GitHub/git.
- avoiding document “rot”: with wiki-type guides, an easy-to-use platform, and easy-to-find resources, we hope that people will contribute more frequently to existing guides, even if that means simply posting a short but helpful comment.
Maintaining the documentation’s high level of quality on a more “open” platform
Content quality: we will employ tags to signal high quality reviewed content and selected guides will likely be linked from an index page on the project’s website. Nevertheless the good will be stored in the same place as the questionable and we’ll have to work out ways of signalling to the reader which is which.
Other than that the respective category is just another place to host. One doesn’t have to be logged in to read and if there are some who do not want to create a forum account to contribute I am sure we can find ways to make that work: send the contribution for discussion to qubes-users and I or others can post it then into the forum with proper attribution.
Regarding edits: there is a history of who changed what and mistakes/vandalism is easily detected/mitigated. We might form a group of ‘guardians’ who subscribe to notifications for any changes to those wiki posts, so unwelcome changes don’t stay up very long. If that fails, we can raise the trust level required for edits and have contributors below this level submit their changes as comments to be then applied to the wiki post by someone with trust level 2.
In general we want to trust the positive spirit of the community and hope it won’t be an issue.
Thanks!
