i used ubuntu in college, but i haven't used it since then (almost 2 years now). well, i was just considering giving it another try with a fresh install, and i'm not sure if the ubuntu forums are going to provide enough support for me. i was just poking around to see if anyone ever hacked a driver for the sound blaster extigy (external sound card) to play DVDs in 5.1 channels. short answer: no. long answer: the issue hasn't developed at all in the past 2 years; in fact, i'm encountering horror stories about intrepid making the extigy stop working in WINDOWS.

so many questions go unanswered in ubuntuforums, so many posts without replies. it's scary. it reminds me of some of my negative experiences with ubuntu in the past: trying to change the cursor (to replace that big, fat, stupid i-beam that used to be the default--i hope they've changed that) yielded no responses in ubuntuforums....

anyway, i just thought i'd express my appreciation for the responsiveness of this forum. i feel like people are actually listening when i post here.

I was shocked at how well Ubuntu handles hardware these days. Ubuntu Hardy handled almost all my hardware without problem, when XP on the same machine couldn't even get on the network due to missing network card drivers. Audio works very well now, multiple applications (such as Counterstrike:Source and Skype ) can use the sound card flawlessly together, and everything just feels more polished.

Of course, when I couldn't get my webcam to work, I couldn't find anything on the forums about it...

So, Ubuntu = rocking, ubuntu forums = not so much

(that's weird. the thanks button is missing from your post.)

ya, i'll probably just give it a shot and see what happens.

The flood of newbie questions, often the same questions asked again and again by people who don't search (or think) first is one of the reasons why I moved to Arch Linux. Their forums and wiki are top notch.

Well, Ubuntu is designed, at least in part, for newbies. So their forums will reflect that.

Ubuntu is actually "Linux for Human Beings".

It just happens that newbies are much more likely to self-identify as a simple "human being", while more advanced users favor other responses, such as "coder", "hacker", "Sith", "caffeine/sugar/starch processing plant", or "loosely-coupled cyborg".

You are right. But It seems like a tragic law that whenever a forum gets popular it becomes useless even to newbies because questions are left unanswered and searching the forum will lead to less useful information.

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LOL @ Benson
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By nature, humans look for instant gratification, which is why many members of a forum choose not to do a "search" before posting. As a parent I encourage my children to do research before asking me a question. However, since we, here, are all peers, we readily help others who are in need.

Exactly; reflecting newbies. It's known as "the blind leading the blind".

More seriously, growing a successful community is something like certain Ponzi scheme variants, only with problems instead of cash. New members come in at the bottom, and give their problems to the next layer up. They move up a layer and hand more advanced problems (those they're advanced enough to run into, but not advanced enough to solve) to the next layer up, and so on.

Now a real Ponzi scheme, of course, requires keeping each new layer bigger than the previous, so more money flows up; by contrast, here the larger the new layer is, the more problems flow up, and you can have a backlog. Growth is generally accepted to be a desirable thing, overall, so we still want each layer larger than the previous, but it's clear that too much growth may cause problems, if it outstrips the "graduation" rate, will cause serious harm to the community.

And Ubuntu has very low barrier to entry at the bottom, but (IMO) no real improvement on the barrier to advancement. Learning how the system works is still done by using, fiddling with, and learning from it; it still requires similar time and motivation. So it's very nicely set up to suffer from an overload of newbies.

Am I advocating an artificially-imposed entry barrier? Hardly. (Actually, I'm not proposing anything, just talking about an interesting problem. Since it's not my problem, I've no concern for the solution.) Too many unanswered newb-queries will pose a barrier for additional users, by frustrating them, so adding a barrier is a singularly inefficient allocation; it'd be better to work on encouraging the users you have to move up the scale (thus alleviating the newb-query problem, and permitting reaccelerated growth with matched advancement). OTOH, I think this argument does imply that once the entry barrier drops to a certain level, it's inefficient to allocate resources to lowering it further, and I do think Ubuntu has likely passed that point already.

(Another possible source of trouble, if it's sufficiently focused on newb-friendliness, is people working up to a certain level and then leaving for a "real" distro, pruning out the upper layers of the pyramid. I doubt this is a significant factor for Ubuntu, as they inherit enough "real-distro" genes from Debian, but it bears considering.)

how about formally dividing the site into the tiers you're describing? and reward people for answering newbie questions by advancing them to a higher tier, where more difficult questions could be answered by the members who are tired of answering newb questions. newbies would not be allowed beyond the newbie tier until they've received thanks or something from $x newbies, then they'd be granted higher-level access and they could choose not to be bothered by newbie posts anymore. (and so on and so forth, with several, or at least a few, tiers total.)

surely this has been tried before...?