Not a mod, but I want to take this opportunity to repost my suggestion from an old thread:
I like the broad concept of this–I’ve long felt it hard to separate the wheat from the chaff here, especially as the number of topics expands.
What might help is something like a “Best of” category where individual posts or entire threads deemed worthy by team members, mods, leaders, etc. are copied to. They would be selected on the basis of quality, relevance (how often does this issue appear?), technical content, or even entertainment value. Ultimately its main function would be as a quality-controlled community guide/FAQ.
What’s important for technical content is that they’re relevant, so stuff about R3.X that’s now outdated, for example, would be removed.
It’s been 4.5 years since I posted that. I just made myself feel very old
What I suggested was a broader category (not just guides)
e.g. My CPU Survey and Quick Quality-of-Life threads would fall outside of the guides category but inside of this broader one.
The problem right now seems to be a lack of content leading to talks of deprecation, so why not cast the net wider?
One huge issue I see with this forum is discoverability–this forum (Discourse) is designed to encourage freshness at the expense of persistence. As a result, there’s little incentive to create higher-quality content since it’ll just get drowned out unless it’s highly findable by other means.
Also I can immediately think of some high quality guides worthy of inclusion off the top of my head
E.g. the VPN guides by @solene, the OpenBSD guide, even the Redshift guide
There’s no lack of content, just a lack of will (not implying anyone’s lazy since moderation and curation aren’t easy with all the stuff going on in anyone’s life)
I see it more as moderators not being able to serve as reviewers in addition to all their responsibilities. I have flagged a guide to be added to this category two years ago, but there have been no activity after the initial response.
I was about to volunteer but realized curation for guides (specifically) implies a need to do what’s in the guides in order to verify its quality, and this can be very time consuming, so I get the hesitation.
What about offloading the burden of verification to trusted users to do, if they happen to use it? All they need to do is let people know if the guide works as intended (i.e. a technically competent guide). The mods know who they are after reading a ton of posts. We don’t need perfection, just that it’s safe, secure, and does what it says it does (i.e. no malware or bad advice)
I have this site on one side of one screen all the time, so I see it a lot (passively), and I really think the problem of discoverability is the big issue here and would like to help improve this.
This is a good idea and I think this is what we are actually doing at the moment (every one of us, individually and as a community, and not just on this forum but in general)
The foundation is shaky and I don’t care, I still agree. Good is the bridge that barely stands.
Technically, there is no need to ask moderators to moderate things. Simply review guides. Trusted users are trusted. Screw moderators (respectfully), there is no moderation better than self-moderation. We still want them to mark things for newbs though.
Welcome back. I moved this into a separate topic since it seems a bit different. We could easily solve this by having a high-quality tag. The issue becomes the maintenance and disoverability of said tag.
What happened in the original thread is that the high quality guides ended up never being used because it requires actively choosing them and nobody did. The suggestion there is to have an archived docs category.
For this one I feel like it will suffer from the same problem. But creating a tag is totally fine. Can see after a while if it gets used. We could even add it to the forum nav bar as “best posts”. But idk if that would be better overall.
Discourse can also list the top posts (based on views and other metrics such as engagement). I think this is better in the sense that it already exists and is automated. Anything else that requires on human curation feels tough to do.
But it doesn’t stop anyone from creating a meta-post named “best forum content” and linking to various posts.
Right now the forum is just a singular feed. You go to forums.qubes-os.org and you’re greeted by just this feed, with everything else de-emphasized (at least this is how it looks to me on desktop, even full screen). If you want to find the High Quality Guides category, you have to click the category button and then type “High” or more to search for it, otherwise it doesn’t even show up! It’s the very picture of inaccessible.
Just having a forum nav bar or some other element guiding people to recommended posts helps a lot, because Qubes is already an overwhelming OS to learn, and this site makes the process feel harder by having users swim through a constantly churning forum for content that shouldn’t change that much (just from watching passively it feels like the churn has gotten worse because of more users, LLMs, etc.).
In short, a big neon sign pointing to a small collection of selected posts as a starting point helps a lot. It also helps to have a few staples.
Mods and other trusted users should be able to tag at will, and there will always be subjectivity (therefore potentially controversy) and that’s fine. Mods have the final veto. This should make managing this easier for everyone.
Just my two cents. About to go enjoy my weekend–I hope you all enjoy yours too!
re: Discourse’s top posts function: It’s still subject to the churn and is highly biased towards more recent posts. With Qubes things don’t change that quickly (I still used a good portion of my notes for R4.0 to re-install R4.3), so there’s a fundamental mismatch between the algorithm and the content.
Discourse’s algorithm is not good for this purpose. Just like on the other platforms, controversial topics receive most attention and discussion, and go “viral”. Same with guides - mediocre guide on popular topic can be more successful than a good guide on the same topic just because it is slightly confusing. People need help to get things working or just asking questions, thus keeping the guide up top for other people to see, which leads to more attempts and more questions…
With user contribution guide still can be improved enough to become good, but I don’t feel confident about this.
That feels like fighting fire with fuel. What’s next? Compilation of good compilations? This situation calls hard for a proper wiki, but the problem won’t disappear. Perhaps I could force people to contribute to docs more, and core team to accept more docs? Is it that hard to just sit and review writeups? I don’t have thoughts in me head
What if the solution is to basically have the good docs list be the one on the external section on the forum? It already links to some forum posts (or I recall it linking). That would be the curated list. It doesn’t solve the discoverability from the forum, but it solves for people who go to the docs directly.
I’m not sure I understand what the “external section on the forum” is (is it the top bar with “Qubes Home Support Docs Donate”?), but a good threads list sounds like a good starting point.
So it looks like we have a system where
Mods and trusted users tag posts they deem high quality or worth preserving/spotlighting
Guides are verified by trusted users who have used them (maybe a script adds a “Did this work?” poll or survey to every guide, and mods can see the trusted user vote count)
The cream of the crop are added to the good threads list which is highly visible on the forum homepage external section (?)
Slight digression
Your response made me realize I made it sound as though the forum is just for newcomers, which wasn’t my intention. However this also highlights a broader issue I have with the forum–it lumps everyone who visits under the same category.
Some people come for simple advice (newer users), some come seeking answers to harder questions (older users), some report bugs, some make HCL entries, some give ideas, some socialize around the topic (e.g. Memes about Qubes OS).
The welcome page lumps everyone under one catgory and presents a singular feed and this feels crowded and chaotic. This thread started with a quote which came from a thread titled “Noise-to-signal ratio” from 4.5 years ago, so this problem has been around for literally as long as this Discourse forum existed, but my perception is it’s been made worse in the last year or two by increased user count and LLMs.
This feels like the root of many issues, including quality and discoverability, with this forum–the deeper issue. However I don’t know if I’m the only one feeling this. Does anyone else feel this way? I don’t have a solution for this (better partitioning? Multiple small feeds?), I just wanted to put into words what I feel whenever I glance at the main page.
