Forum Policy Request: Please Include URLs

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edoc
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Forum Policy Request: Please Include URLs

#1 Post by edoc »

Is it possible to ask all Forum posters to provide a URL whenever referencing a pup or app or other Puppy-related file?

It is really frustrating to have to spend so much time trying to track down the dozens and dozens of pups and other resources mentioned but not linked.

It is extremely common for pups and apps to be referenced in one thread that really belong in another, or one that is buried somewhere in multiple pages of a thread and may exist in more than one version, or may be on a private page (like the now obliterated edgarbrits wifi page from bladehunter), or on the wiki somewhere, or, or, or ...

It would take a tiny effort for the poster as they know exactly to what they refer and where it is and would make getting things done for everyone else far more efficient and pleasant.

It would, of course, be incumbent upon moderators to fix such links should they move something.

An even better solution would be a more thoroughly linked Search engine -- one that can find things in the Forum or the Wiki and can go directly to them and not merely show 10 threads in which they may be buried.

Just a thought! doc
[b]Thanks! David[/b]
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MU
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#2 Post by MU »

good approach, but my years of experience in moderating a german linuxboard tell me, people like to forget such advices ;-)

There are basically 3 ways to find a dotpup:

Index of Additional Software, with other useful links.
http://www.murga.org/%7Epuppy/viewtopic.php?t=672

The wiki:
http://www.goosee.com/puppy/wikka/DotPups

Puppynaptic (a wiki-Dotpup-Downloader with integrated search):
http://www.murga.org/%7Epuppy/viewtopic.php?t=2144

Unfortunatly, these do not cover all dotpups.

Mark

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rarsa
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#3 Post by rarsa »

edoc wrote:It would take a tiny effort for the poster as they know exactly to what they refer and where it is and would make getting things done for everyone else far more efficient and pleasant.
It would take a tiny effort for the reader to go and search for him/herself and I'm sure something else will be learned in the process.

edoc: Many people here, including my self, try to help. Most of the time we have other responsibilities to attend. When we write a quick post to try to help someone, we may not have all the time to go and search the link. I do that frequently but it's very time consuming.

So, what you are asking is for the person helping to do all the work so the person that needs help does not have to do anything?

In Spanish we have a saying for those cases that would be looselly translated as "begger with a club" (or maybe "begger with a stick) I think that the closest semantic translation is "do you want fries with that"?

What about a policy for the people that received the help to post back the link once they find it. They would be giving back for the next person to find the link.

I hope this post does not sound rude. I'm writting it very matter of fact-ually.

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edoc
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#4 Post by edoc »

rarsa wrote: Many people here, including my self, try to help. Most of the time we have other responsibilities to attend. When we write a quick post to try to help someone, we may not have all the time to go and search the link. I do that frequently but it's very time consuming.
And I as much as anyone have appreciated that from so many.

I guess my perspective is that people give up after a while and start just asking the same questions over and over because chasing the answers scattered across hundreds of threads and multiple locations and formats overwhelms them -- and as Puppy grows in popularity it is going to get worse.

Planning now needs to presume major growth.
rarsa wrote:So, what you are asking is for the person helping to do all the work so the person that needs help does not have to do anything?
I am suggesting that folks include those links so that they do not end up frustrated by the endless requests for help like bladerunner and walk away.
rarsa wrote:What about a policy for the people that received the help to post back the link once they find it. They would be giving back for the next person to find the link.
I have tried to do that, in fact I have tried to post the step by step that I have used with very detailed comments without presuming <b>prior knowlege of assumed steps</b> necessary to success (the sort of docs that are rare in Linux, the absence of which frustrates potential Linux users).


The reality is that as Puppy grows the knowledge-base of the users will rapidly shrink -- if the database of FAQ's/links. info is out of date, incomplete, or hard to access newbies will give up and drop out.

It really is a matter of anticipating the <b>unavoidable need</b> and to provide the resources that protect the developers by equipping the newbies or else the distro becomes stuck as another niche distro that cannot grow because newbies are overwhelmed by the enormity of the learning curve and the inefficiency of information access.
rarsa wrote:I hope this post does not sound rude. I'm writting it very matter of fact-ually.
I am also a frank kinda guy with a very thick hide. I pray that my posts are taken as useful testing of the distro, occasionally containing information useful to others, and overwhelmingly positive because I really love Puppy!

doc
[b]Thanks! David[/b]
[i]Home page: [/i][url]http://nevils-station.com[/url]
[i]Don't google[/i] [b]Search![/b] [url]http://duckduckgo.com[/url]
TahrPup64 & Lighthouse64-b602 & JL64-603

raffy
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#5 Post by raffy »

Thanks to your initiative, Doc. In fact, EarlSmith (among others), has done some work in this area, here.

You are of course right in anticipating bigger number of people browsing the Puppy pages. One way you can help them is prepare even a one-page "recommended links", say in the Wiki, and append the link to that page whenever you post something (usually a reply to a query).

Just my $0.02 :oops:
Puppy user since Oct 2004. Want FreeOffice? [url=http://puppylinux.info/topic/freeoffice-2012-sfs]Get the sfs (English only)[/url].

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ozboomer
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#6 Post by ozboomer »

A lot of what has been posted here pre-supposes the wiki is working... and that's probably true for most users... but I'm still having the same troubles with the wiki (that is the server is overloaded and each pages takes its normal time + 80 sec to render), via different routes and different providers, so the wiki is unusable for me at the moment (though would be the preferred means to locate things).

As there are only a couple of DotPup pages on the wiki, most of the... 'production'... DotPups could easily be found by referring to those couple of pages... but perhaps we need an 'In Development' DotPup page, for all of us to post our own 'non-official', 'non-approved' DotPups. They would live there until -whoever- approves them and the author says 'send it live' at which point they'd disappear from 'Development' and end-up on one of the 'Production' pages.

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#7 Post by Ian »

Oz I didn't realize you were still having problems with the Wiki, have you tried accessing it from a different machine locally or do you have some people close who could try for you and see what results they get.

I only mention this because I have had only a couple of small problems lately and thought that the wiki seemed to be running reasonably.

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puppian
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#8 Post by puppian »

I also find that the wiki is very slow sometimes.

However, if I delete the cookies, especially the one called "PHPSESSID", things become fast again... weired...
[url=http://puppylinux.org]Puppylinux.org - Community home page of Puppy Linux[/url] hosted by Barry (creator of Puppy), created and maintained by the [url=http://puppylinux.org/user/readarticle.php?article_id=8]Puppy Linux Foundation[/url] since 2005

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