Login, Search, Downtime

[alvanx]

With the openSUSE 11.1 release, I migrated to openSUSE from Kubuntu for a better KDE4 experience. When I was still using Ubuntu, I was used to its almost proverbial great community support. One of the main factors for me to choose openSUSE was the fact that it is popular and well-established and (thus) known to have a great documentation, and I have mostly found this to be true. Love the distro!

That being said, I haven't been posting in these forums too much so far, but I have been searching them for help, and also used the wiki a couple of times. I have noticed a lot of great features that make it unique that I am just beginning to understand.
However, there are a few factors that after a while made me prefer different ways of getting oS-related help. I am posting these now because I think they might be hindrances to the growth of the forum community and to the convenience of each user. They are probably already well-known, but I haven't found a thread that discusses them, and I have been wondering why some of the following things are as they are. They might as well be simply personal problems that I have that wouldn't occur if I had just read maybe a particular page on the wiki. So I might not be the right person to speak here, and if you see me as just another noob who doesn't know left from right, forgive me for my ignorance!
So if this won't serve for the greater good of the community, it will at least help me understand things better. So here we go:

1. It is not very convenient to have to manually sign in every time I visit the wiki or the forums. I know almost no other forum that has no auto-sign-in function. (But even worse, it takes me to an extra page instead of offering the form directly by the login button in the top right corner.) Are there matters of security that need to be considered, or has this not been implemented yet?
So my suggestion is to:
-allow auto-login
-have it all on the same page.

2. I have had issues with the search function. I am usually able to put forum searches to a good use, but in this forum, I can remember only few times that it actually helped me find a solution to a problem I was facing, and several where the results just didn't seem to match my query at all (or there were none). This seems to be the case especially when searching for more than one word.
I don't exactly know how this works as I haven't come across documentation for it yet, so this might be totally me and not the fault of the forum search at all.
Suggestion: Maybe add a short explanation of valid search parameters to the search page.

3. The forums and the wiki seem to be more down than up. More than half of the times I try to connect to it, it won't load. I have subscribed to the openSUSE News feed, but I don't think it ever made mention of this problem, and I thought it was unusual for a website such as this one to have so much downtime. I don't run into problems like this with other websites, so it seems safe to assume that it really is opensuse.org or parts of it (especially the forums) that are down a lot.
Is there a reason this happens? Is there a fix in the making? Or what is the story behind this?

Hope this is the right forum - and thank you for the time you take to reply.

[caf4926]

1. control session timeout? - openSUSE Forums

2. Not sure about this. Never really use it enough to comment

3. Very seldom have any problem here.

[kastorff]

On 2009-06-03 15:26:01 -0400, alvanx <alvanx@no-mx.forums.opensuse.org> said:

>
> With the openSUSE 11.1 release, I migrated to openSUSE from Kubuntu for
> a better KDE4 experience. When I was still using Ubuntu, I was used to
> its almost proverbial great community support. One of the main factors
> for me to choose openSUSE was the fact that it is popular and
> well-established and (thus) known to have a great documentation, and I
> have mostly found this to be true. Love the distro!
>
> That being said, I haven't been posting in these forums too much so
> far, but I have been searching them for help, and also used the wiki a
> couple of times. I have noticed a lot of great features that make it
> unique that I am just beginning to understand.
> However, there are a few factors that after a while made me prefer
> different ways of getting oS-related help. I am posting these now
> because I think they might be hindrances to the growth of the forum
> community and to the convenience of each user. They are probably already
> well-known, but I haven't found a thread that discusses them, and I have
> been wondering why some of the following things are as they are. They
> might as well be simply personal problems that I have that wouldn't
> occur if I had just read maybe a particular page on the wiki. So I might
> not be the right person to speak here, and if you see me as just another
> noob who doesn't know left from right, forgive me for my ignorance!
> So if this won't serve for the greater good of the community, it will
> at least help me understand things better. So here we go:
>
> 1. It is not very convenient to have to manually sign in every time I
> visit the wiki or the forums. I know almost no other forum that has no
> auto-sign-in function. (But even worse, it takes me to an extra page
> instead of offering the form directly by the login button in the top
> right corner.) Are there matters of security that need to be considered,
> or has this not been implemented yet?
> So my suggestion is to:
> -allow auto-login
> -have it all on the same page.

Thanks for your suggestions and feedback!

The sign on process is a by product of having a single sign on for all
Novell/openSUSE sites. It was considered an advantage for the community
members to have to manage only a single accout to get access to all
official openSUSE community resources. Everyone seems to favor the
concept, but the implementation varies depending on which site we
visit. Those sites that are generally custom built, like the main
Novell site, or those that are designed for extensive modification and
interaction, like the wiki, are far more seamless in their integration.
For the forums, which run vBulletin, we are dependent on the vendor's
capability to integrate with the security solution chosen by Novell. We
end up with a security wrapper around the forums, with some access
information passed over to the forums software when you log in. It's
less than optimal, we admit, but beyond our control to change, as we
don't have access to the workings of Novell's security system. It's
simply the best compromise solution.

>
> 2. I have had issues with the search function. I am usually able to put
> forum searches to a good use, but in this forum, I can remember only few
> times that it actually helped me find a solution to a problem I was
> facing, and several where the results just didn't seem to match my query
> at all (or there were none). This seems to be the case especially when
> searching for more than one word.
> I don't exactly know how this works as I haven't come across
> documentation for it yet, so this might be totally me and not the fault
> of the forum search at all.
> Suggestion: Maybe add a short explanation of valid search parameters to
> the search page.

We have limited resources available for programming the forums. The
real issue is that anything we change, we have to maintain outside of
the vendor supplied code, so any custom mods require resources forever
for maintenance. It's not a one time fix/change/mod, since we update
frequently to the latest vBulletin code for security and functional
reasons. For this reason, we offer only one truly custom skin, and
generally avoid changing things like code supporting the search
function. My experience with search engines is that most of then fail
in some way. They're either too hard to use, return everything, or
return way too little pertinent information. AFAIK, there isn't
additional help for vBulletin's search function other than what you see
on our search page.

A number of staff picked up a trick a while back for using Google to
search the forums. From Google's search box, use the following syntax:
searchterm searchterm site:forums.opensuse.org. Since Google indexes
our site, you'll gain the power of Google's search engine. For example:

wireless network site:forums.opensuse.org

>
> 3. The forums and the wiki seem to be more down than up. More than half
> of the times I try to connect to it, it won't load. I have subscribed to
> the openSUSE News feed, but I don't think it ever made mention of this
> problem, and I thought it was unusual for a website such as this one to
> have so much downtime. I don't run into problems like this with other
> websites, so it seems safe to assume that it really is opensuse.org or
> parts of it (especially the forums) that are down a lot.
> Is there a reason this happens? Is there a fix in the making? Or what
> is the story behind this?
>
> Hope this is the right forum - and thank you for the time you take to
> reply.

I use an NNTP client to access the forums, and I've had one or two
issues the past year accessing the forums. That's a different network
path that HTTP access using a web browser, so I'm not the best gauge
for the forums relability. I can say the number of folks I've heard of
with issues is very low relative to the total amount of traffic we get.
I'm very interested in others' experience with forums reliabilty. I can
assure you that if the issue lies on our end we'll get it resolved. It
would help if you'd post in the Forum Usage Support & Information
section of the forums when you experience issues so we can determine if
your timing coincides with any known issues on our end.

--
Keith Kastorff

[john_hudson]

I suspect issue three is a purely local issue; logging in mostly twice a day I have encountered two occasions since the forums were merged when I could not log in (and they were down to someone working on the interface, not a connection issue as such); otherwise I get in very quickly every time.

> 1. It is not very convenient to have to manually sign in every time

many agree and it has been discussed often, without change..


> 2. I have had issues with the search function.

best way to search is to use google and specify the site, as mentioned..

format: [search string] site:forums.opensuse.org
example for your #1, above: forum sign in site:forums.opensuse.org

> 3. The forums and the wiki seem to be more down than up.

i think this is more of a problem for you and your location and/or
network situation...it has not been widely reported by others..

(this is not a technical help forum so don't answer here! but: have
you yet turned off IPv6? and/or have you done a traceroute? are you
connecting from (say) a university/job site/country which may filter
or block? are you on a shared connection which sometimes gets metered
or jammed with traffic? [in other words: where ARE you, what kind of
connection to the net do you have?]...and, yes i saw you said "I don't
run into problems like this with other websites" and ask, are all
those other web sites use the _same_ net routers? are any of the other
web sites cached/mirrored nearer? etc? i suggest you post a help
request in the network/internet forum..)

--
natural_pilot

[kgroneman]

Hey natural_pilot:

>The forums and the wiki seem to be more down than up.

Since the forums opened almost exactly one year ago, I can only remember
one time when they were offline for more than just a few minutes and that
was due to some routing hardware failures in the data center.

--
Kim (6/4/2009 9:12:30 AM Mountain)

right, like i said it is something about _his_ situation...probably
fixable so i pointed him to the networking forum for help..

--
natural_pilot

[alvanx]

Hey everybody,

Thanks for all the answers!

As for my points 1 and 2, if I understand karstorff right, these seem to be limitations that the software imposes on the staff.
I don't know if it is any use at all (and hey, I don't have a clue about web developing), but that reminded me of the crazy folks over at ubuntuusers.de (a big German Ubuntu support forum that I used to get my issues fixed at) that wrote their own software that provides one portal for a forum, wiki, blog, and planet. It's called Inyoka, and it might not be as fancy as some of the features here, but it is very intuitive and convenient to use (in particular, it gets the auto login and the login simplicity right). According to their website, they are going to release the code as open source soon. Maybe it might be of some use here! (I'm sure you can make it look totally un-Ubuntu and really green and all. Sorry for using the U-word so many times ;-) )
Done rambling!

As for 3., (of course I'm not answering any questions here since this is not a support forum, right?) I live in a mid-sized city in Germany and usually use my private connection, so I'm not sure I should be having some of the suggested issues. I will open a thread in the respective support forum though. Thanks to natural_pilot though!