On Mon, Sep 10, 2012 at 11:03 AM, Brandon Allbery <[email protected]> wrote:On Mon, Sep 10, 2012 at 1:34 PM, Gary Pitman <[email protected]> wrote:Has there been any discussion on possibly throwing up a online forum sort of like linuxquestions.org but more specialised to the sysadmin world and OS agnostic?
It might be a nice way to promote the organisation.The problem there is that you're immediately competing with StackExchange (superuser and serverfault in particular). It's a trifle late to get into that game.Just today, I was reading somebody's blog post about how ServerFault is having trouble maintaining quality as the site and the audience grow (http://sysadmin1138.net/mt/blog/2012/09/being-flooded-by-non-professionals-a-serverfault-problem.shtml). Perhaps LOPSA might have something to contribute there?
And that's part of why I wrote it. We DO need people who are:
- Community minded
- Like helping people
- Willing to put downward pressure on our more snark-happy active users
The snark problem has been with us since shortly after it left private beta back in 2009. Sysadmin communities self-police through snark, so keeping that to acceptable levels has been an ongoing effort. As ServerFault's google-rank has risen, we've gotten a lot more people seeing the site and the sheer numbers of people that just read the title and think "oh, server stuff goes here" and post has increased a lot. Even though the percentage hasn't changed. It's a numbers game.
It's also one where a few active posters who are there, participate in meta.serverfault.com, actively post answers, and high quality answers at that, can have a sigificant impact on the community. And more importantly, the perceived *culture* of the community.
There is a certain tipping point when people think it's OK to take the safeties off their snark-cannons, and that's when I have to step in as a moderator. When that starts being seen as OK to do, the perception of ServerFault as being worthwhile declines to the lurkers-in-Google.
LOPSA members are community-minded Sysadmins just by joining. That one step is a big one, and we'd welcome even more of you than are already there!
I put LOPSA on my user-profile for a reason: http://serverfault.com/users/3038/sysadmin1138
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