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This month has seen several forum contributors apply for Ubuntu Membership.   The successful applicants were:

• Ms.Daisy
• papibe
• dmizer
• Effenberg0x0
• Grenage
• matt_symes
• cprofitt

Congratulations to all the new Ubuntu Members.  If you are an active forum user then you are welcome to apply for membership. Information on how to do so can be found here. Good luck!

Migrating Tutorials and Tips to The Community Wiki

The Tutorial & Tips  sub-forum has been an invaluable resource for the Ubuntu Community, however, as the community has grown, the time has come to move this activity to the Community Wiki.

Advantage Wiki: Community maintained, peer reviewed, and easier to maintain.

Disadvantage Forums: Limited peer review and maintenance (only forums staff and the Original Poster).

This does not mean that the tutorial forum will be completely closed.

We propose that:

1. Authors post tutorials on the Ubuntu community wiki. Before starting a new page, search the wiki to see if your content exists and/or simply needs to be updated.
2. The community assists in both migrating the forums tutorials and maintaining the wiki.
3. The Tutorial & Tips section should be used to support specific wiki pages. Support questions should be migrated to the support sections.
4. Collaboration with the community. Other projects (outside the forums) use the wiki documentation.

As far as outdated information is concerned, we would like to archive old threads as either they fall inactive or become outdated. Please report outdated tutorials using the standard method – clicking the Report Abuse button.

The wiki that will be home to these new creations will be the Community Wiki and not the Official Documentation Wiki.

Ubuntu Forums IRC Channel

We are making a big push for greater community interaction, and are actively promoting our IRC channel.   Many of the forum staff now link to it in their signatures and we would encourage others to do so too.  The forum now has a link to the channel under Quick Links menu item. The IRC channel is a place for friendly lighthearted chat with forum members and all are welcome.  Please note that the channel follows the Ubuntu Code of Conduct and trouble makers will be removed.

U+1

With the release of the latest Ubuntu version we have closed the Precise development subforum and moved it to the archives.  The new Quantal Quetzal development forum has been created and can be found here.  Anyone looking to get involved with testing should have a look through this excellent wiki page.

Next Forum Council Meeting

The next Forum Council meeting will be held in #ubuntu-meeting on May 23 2012 23:00 UTC. Here is the agenda for the meeting.  If you would like to add anything to the agenda then feel free, all we ask is that if you add to the agenda please attend the meeting.  All are welcome to attend them and participate in discussion.

Monthly Forum Stats

• 24748 new users registered
• 68707 new posts
• 14988 new threads created

* these stats are accurate for up to 27/04/12

Generally I am happy with the composition, the colour contrast is quite good.

A brief  history lesson

The Ubuntu Forums were created by Ryan Troy in October 2004. The forums became a popular resource for Ubuntu and were deemed the Official Ubuntu Forums in November 2004. The forums hosting continued to be maintained and paid for by Ryan until March 2006, when Canonical graciously offered hosting for the forums. In June of 2007 the forums domain, license and assets were transferred to Canonical who is now the sole owner of the forums.

So Canonical own the forums, what does that mean?

Basically it meant that the Ubuntu Forums became the official forum for Ubuntu.  The Ubuntu Forums were made “part of the family”.  As part of the transfer Canonical took responsibility for server and software maintenance.

Great, so what went wrong?

To  be honest I am not completely sure.  I think frustration with support from Canonical has been a factor that plays on the forum staff (all volunteers) minds. Recent examples include the slowness in the implementation of a fix to database errors we were experiencing last year (which resulted in the closing of all non-support areas of the forum for nearly 1 month) and allowing the forum to fall behind in software updates, with requests for an upgrade coming from the community in November 2009.

Closing the non-support areas of the forums suddenly made the staff “the enemy”, with many of the forums community voicing their displeasure at the actions we had to take. Nobody likes taking heat for things out of their control. It is demoralising and can leave  certain resentment to those who had the power to do something about it before the problem escalated.

This slowness to act resulted in some security breaches of staff accounts on the forum, with their very privacy violated. To put it lightly the forum staff felt wronged and were not at all happy with the level of support received. This security issue was known and well documented yet we were not patched against it.  This was eventually resolved, but it took a breach of our privacy to get a minor software update.

Personally speaking I believe that some hostility is felt towards Canonical and this has shown with the forum staffs interaction with the wider community.To go further I think this hostility has been returned in equal measure. I would be willing to guess that the forum staff feel they have to nag to get anywhere and that the people the forum need help from are thinking “What do they want now? With that attitude I am not going to help.”

I do not believe for one moment that the staff like nagging and that the community like being nagged at either.

What am I getting at?

Mistakes have been made in the past by both parties and I don’t think either side is especially happy with how things have turned out. For what it is worth I, on behalf of the Forum staff, would like to apologise for any heated exchanges that have occurred in the past. We care about this community, put a lot of time into trying to get everything running smoothly but we get frustrated when it is perceived others aren’t helping us.

It is time to stop this infighting and work together. We all want the same thing, a fantastic product and a brilliant family friendly community that can rise to any challenge it faces.

It is time to let the past slumber, lets move forward with a clean slate and continue to make this community remarkable. I am willing to do this, are you?