Improve 'Support over Forum' situation

[chwe]

5 hours ago, Igor said:

If you didn't find the solution on their forums, open a topic there, perhaps you get some hints or help for implementing. I can only do that.

hmmm I don't want to give you more workload to do, but since I've no admin (and just to make it clear, I don't want to have admin on the board cause I probably mess up everything ) implementation will be your work anyway.. Cause you're registered anyway it could make sense that you ask in their forum? 

I guess something like this might work:

https://invisioncommunity.com/files/file/7509-media-tags/

but for sure it's additional work to do and probably not of a high important task. 

The way to add .png to the link followed by adding the link to the picture works for me (even if the preview is annoying large). 

[tkaiser]

In the past we had displayed on top of every single technical support subforum a link explaining 'most common issues' (power supply and SD card crappiness). This is gone now. Why exactly?

[Igor]

2 hours ago, tkaiser said:

This is gone now. Why exactly?

Gone automatically with the last forum upgrade.

Haven't figured out why.

[guidol]

short Question: is there something special why the "Makers" arent in alphabetical order?

Are they sorted like "mostly downloaded"?

[Igor]

28 minutes ago, guidol said:

short Question: is there something special why the "Makers" arent in alphabetical order?

Are they sorted like "mostly downloaded"?

 

It seems they are not sorted at all - as they were added. We had many troubles with this plugin so my modification: manually order by importance without showing exotics - fell out. All variants have advantages and disadvantages. I'll adjust that asap.

[Igor]

5 hours ago, tkaiser said:

In the past we had displayed on top of every single technical support subforum a link explaining 'most common issues' (power supply and SD card crappiness). This is gone now. Why exactly?

Fixed but a bit different since it doesn't work the way we have before.

[tkaiser]

5 hours ago, Igor said:

Fixed but a bit different since it doesn't work the way we have before.

 

Thank you. But for the target audience needing to read this first it's unfortunately invisible (two black bars somewhere with small white text they never read).

[chwe]

@Igor can't edit yours cause I don't have permissions to do that..  Have a look at the 'test annotation' (only visible for moderators in the AMlogic subforum). It's ugly red, but it follows you wenn you scroll so you've no chance to miss it...  It's hard to believe that someone can miss it...  

[Igor]

4 minutes ago, chwe said:

@Igor can't edit yours cause I don't have permissions to do that..  Have a look at the 'test annotation' (only visible for moderators in the AMlogic subforum). It's ugly red, but it follows you wenn you scroll so you've no chance to miss it...  It's hard to believe that someone can miss it...  

2

Switched. Let's see if it's any better but ... they can disable it.

[chwe]

But if you close it, it's a clear sign that you noticed it..   

 

You can't miss it. It's ugly as hell on both themes we provide.. 

[Tido]

@Igor, can you turn off annoying GIF as Avatar?

For example:  https://forum.armbian.com/profile/9223-maxfed3/

[Igor]

Not with technology but you can ask him to change it.

[JMCC]

A question about Forum structure: There are those forums labeled as "Tech support", for supported boards, which I understand are only meant for support questions. Then, there is a "Peer to peer support" category, for questions that do not pertain strictly to Armbian tech support.

 

But very often people post other kind of questions, related to supported boards, in the tech support forums, even though they are asking for some kind of help that goes beyond strict tech support and would be better in Peer-to-peer assistance.

 

I see that sometimes Devs get upset about it, and you guys have your point, but it is also true that it is more intuitive to go directly to the forum labeled with your SoC, rather than going to the community forums category below. So we must assume that those things will happen, and it is an understandable mistake. Maybe we can find some way to re-structure the forum somehow in the future to avoid that confusion. But, in the meantime, I suggest that Devs just ignore those questions, and leave them for the community, if they don't feel like answering them. Eventually, some mod may move them to the community subforum, or not.

 

I think that leaving it unreplied is better than the Dev telling the person "you should not ask this question here"; it wears you out to answer that again and again, and you guys have enough worries already, no need to add unpleasant experiences for you in having to make those answers. And also, it can give sometimes an impression of hostility against newcomers.

[chwe]

@Igor is it possible to get a valid TLS certificate for the forum too? I realized recently that www.armbian.com has now a certificate, whereas forum.armbian.com doesn't have one.

Well, that was even faster than my post...  Can you read minds? Do we plan to roll out mind read as a service soon? 

 

On 7/8/2018 at 2:21 PM, JMCC said:

Maybe we can find some way to re-structure the forum somehow in the future to avoid that confusion. But, in the meantime, I suggest that Devs just ignore those questions, and leave them for the community, if they don't feel like answering them. Eventually, some mod may move them to the community subforum, or not.

I think re-structuration and re-re-structuration was done quite often, and I don't really see that this will help that people post their stuff in the 'right' sub-forum. If you read through this one you see that my opinion on this was slightly different in the beginnings..   turned out that I was wrong (or that I'm wrong now, who knows). Sometimes It's not really clear where a question fits perfect (e.g. it might be kernel-related or not..).

Somehow, developers can 'smell' why a beginner fails and why *random issue* shows up. Is it worth to 'lose' the fast answer to be 'more polite'.. IMO (at the moment -  obviously my opinions can change over time) no. When you step into 'Arm Linux' from x86 and or RPi world things differ.. There aren't that many people taking care that you don't have to care about how your thingie works, what's needed to keep it working and why *random simple task* might not be that easy as you thought. There are two red messages showing up before your account gets validated by a mod:

Spoiler

Power supply issues are one of the three biggest issues you'll face when starting with Single Board Computers (SBCs). SD card issues, whether fake or faulty, are another and issues resulting from poor board design is the other common issues you can encounter.

 

Power supply issues can be tricky. You might have a noisy power supply that works with one board because it has extra filtering, but won't work with another. Or you're using that cheap phone charger because your board has a microUSB connector, and it is either erratic, or doesn't start up, or even becomes the cause of some SD card issues. 

 

Some tips to avoid the most common causes of problems reported:

 

Don't power via micro USB  - unless you have optimised your setup for low power requirements. Micro USB is great for mobile phones because they are simply charging a battery. It's bad for SBCs. Yes, it does work for a lot of people, but it also causes more problems and headaches over time than it is worth, unless you know exactly what you are doing. If you have a barrel jack power connector on your SBC, use it instead! If there is an option for powering via header connections, use that option!
 

Don't use mobile phone chargers. They might be convenient and cheap, but this is because they are meant for charging phones, not powering your SBC which has particular power requirements.
 

When you are evaluating a power supply, make sure you run some stress tests on your system to ensure that it will not cause issues down the path.

 

(Micro) SD card issues can be sneaky. They might appear right at the start causing strange boot and login errors, or they might cause problems over time. It is best to run a test on any new SD card you use, to ensure that it really is what it is, and to ensure that isn't faulty. Armbian provides you a simple way to do this   --   armbianmonitor -c /path/to/device/to/test

and 

Spoiler

We can only help if you provide quality information for us to work with. All stable images from the download section are tested, most stable upgrades are tested and we have tens of thousands of users. Even with regular and extensive testings, bugs sometimes do slip through. This is a voluntary support service and is unrelated to board makers, and is not obligated to provide you any answers. Repeated asking the same questions because you're not happy with the answers will result in you being ignored.

Before you post a question, use the forum search as someone else might have already had the same problem and resolved it. And make sure you've read the Armbian documentation. If you still haven't found an answer, make sure you include the following in your post:

 

1. Logs when you can boot the board: armbianmonitor -u (paste URL to your forum post)

 

2. If your board does not boot, provide a log from serial console or at least make a picture, where it stops.

 

3. Describe the problem the best you can and provide all necessary info that we can reproduce the problem. We are not clairvoyant or mind readers. Please describe your setup as best as possible so we know what your operating environment is like.  

 

We will not help in cases you are not using stable official Armbian builds, you have a problem with 3rd party hardware or reported problem would not be able to reproduced.

 

for sure, we might shorten both of them a little bit, but I'm not convinced that this will help to get more 'proper' first time questions. Sometimes a grumpy answer helps, sometimes it's counterproductive. I might have a 'blind spot' on this (for sure you'll find some grumpy answers I gave - everyone has bad days)... 

[ag123]

i noted that armbian sbc users can come from all rays of the spectrum

sometimes i may chip in if i think i may help, then for some cases, i'd simply leave it alone (i.e. ignore it)

users new and old, novice, noobs or otherwise have their struggles, perhaps a rather common sight is 'unsupported', 'partially supported' boards, so the users are basically openly voicing their struggles, if i've no idea about it, the response is to simply ignore the thread.

you can't fault people who messed with something foreign to them, struggled and hence post a topic, clueless or otherwise

i mean they really do not know anything / something about it

[chwe]

Ce sont pour les Québécois sympathiques.  I had to learn most of the console work too when I did more stuff on SBCs, as long as they're able to read and you see progress, I hope this forum is also a place for 'linux beginners'.. Debian/ubuntu can be a hard change if you come from windows-world. But especially for python etc. a linux shell is a way more userfriendly than windows once your familiar with the shell.. Actually I hope that a beginner writes tutorials after he got his first successful little python project running, I think they're best in writing a tutorial for other beginners cause they probably face the same issues when they start. The more experienced once often fail to explain stuff for beginners (remembering my quantum mechanics classes where youtube was often the better source of information than the weekly lecture )..

Spoiler

 

best explanation I ever had for group theory...  3 profs tried to explain it, nobody did it better... at least for the calculations.. 

 

[martinayotte]

12 minutes ago, chwe said:

Ce sont pour les Québécois sympathiques. 

[Igor]

Forum enachements:

• theme "armbian" updated with upstream version,
• manual fixes and adjustment with theme designer,
• fixed recycle bin,
• updated member map plugin
• added crowdfunding plugin (this will show supporters automagically)
• added "show new topic rules" plugin (currently enabled in recycle bin for test)
• added raffles and giveaway system (will be enabled for users when properly tested)

Please report if you find any bugs in the forum theming

[olivluca]

In the unread content section I cannot find the button to mark the forum as read

[Igor]

Its in the user menu.

Wrote on mobile

[olivluca]

Oh, thank you, I didn't think to look at the user menu.

However the previous location (at the end of the posts stream) was more intuitive and convenient (it didn't require to scroll up).

[Igor]

Any objections to merge/move H5 and A64 from https://forum.armbian.com/forum/18-allwinner-a64-h5-h6/ to https://forum.armbian.com/forum/27-mainline-kernel/ ?

Before

Allwinner A64, H5 & H6

Pine64, H64, Pinebook, Olimex Teres, Olinuxino A64, Orange Pi PC2, Zero+ 2 H5, Prime, Win; NanoPi Neo 2, Neo+ 2, M1 Plus 2, FriendlyElec K1+

After

Allwinner H6

Pine H64, Orange Pi One +, Lite2

[martinayotte]

26 minutes ago, Igor said:

Any objections

I don't have any ...

[chwe]

could we 'switch' the behavior as well? E.g. default is mainline kernel and subforum is outdated 3.4 kernel which is only available for H3 anyway? Some kind force that people should move to mainline..

[Igor]

56 minutes ago, chwe said:

could we 'switch' the behavior as well? E.g. default is mainline kernel and subforum is outdated 3.4 kernel which is only available for H3 anyway? Some kind force that people should move to mainline..

OK, switching sounds as a good idea too.

[Werner]

56 minutes ago, chwe said:

could we 'switch' the behavior as well? E.g. default is mainline kernel and subforum is outdated 3.4 kernel which is only available for H3 anyway? Some kind force that people should move to mainline..

Like. 

As an alternating suggestion is to merge mainline and legacy kernel forums and use pre-defined thread prefixes like [Legacy] or [Mainline].

Though two problems: I do not know if possible technically as I never managed Invision forums. vBulletin and WBB only. The second issue I see is more generic as especially new users may not know the difference between legacy and mainline. I did not know by myself a year or two before. At the moment no idea how to solve this. Maybe this is not even a problem as big as I may think.

 

18 hours ago, Igor said:

Any objections to merge/move H5 and A64 from https://forum.armbian.com/forum/18-allwinner-a64-h5-h6/ to https://forum.armbian.com/forum/27-mainline-kernel/ ?

Before

Allwinner A64, H5 & H6

Pine64, H64, Pinebook, Olimex Teres, Olinuxino A64, Orange Pi PC2, Zero+ 2 H5, Prime, Win; NanoPi Neo 2, Neo+ 2, M1 Plus 2, FriendlyElec K1+

After

Allwinner H6

Pine H64, Orange Pi One +, Lite2

 

Are A64 and H5 stable enough to be removed from development?

[chwe]

The questions which come up in the 'development' forum are anyway more like the average 'supportquestions' there's not much a difference... IMO development was never used the way it was supposed to be used..

[Igor]

3 hours ago, Werner said:

Are A64 and H5 stable enough to be removed from development?

Level between development and stable is hard to define. To be more precise, IMO they match H3 levels which also have certain problems and shortcomings. Despite that, those boards can be used in production. Major problem in this sense is actually on the H3 side due to "power-off" problems.

 

3 hours ago, Werner said:

As an alternating suggestion is to merge mainline and legacy kernel forums and use pre-defined thread prefixes like [Legacy] or [Mainline].

Prefixes are supported by the forum software but we don't use them. They are only used here: https://forum.armbian.com/forum/26-research-guides-tutorials/ but also without any proper meanings since all subforum is anyway dedicated for Tutorials/Research. 

If this feature is not strictly used, it's pointless to have it there. And someone (which is not me ) would have to manually resolve prefixes for at least last two pages of topics.

 

2 hours ago, chwe said:

The questions which come up in the 'development' forum are anyway more like the average 'supportquestions' there's not much a difference... IMO development was never used the way it was supposed to be used..

Agree. In this sense it might be worth to think about merging "Armbian build framework" and redirect the rest to the "Technical support area" or "Peer to Peer" if it has nothing to do with Armbian.

Another option to limit pressure on support is by enforcing forum payment system. System is here, it's highly integrated in forum ... and it works. Not exactly to charge for support but to return a pressure back.

[Werner]

1 hour ago, Igor said:

If this feature is not strictly used, it's pointless to have it there.

 

Agree. In this sense it might be worth to think about merging "Armbian build framework" and redirect the rest to the "Technical support area" or "Peer to Peer" if it has nothing to do with Armbian.

Another option to limit pressure on support is by enforcing forum payment system. System is here, it's highly integrated in forum ... and it works. Not exactly to charge for support but to return a pressure back.

 

Well I'd guess that using prefixes can also be enforced by the system. So you have to choose on topic creation.

 

Quote

And someone (which is not me ) would have to manually resolve prefixes for at least last two pages of topics.

Agreed. Annoying work. I already did stuff like that many years ago...

 

 

Quote

 In this sense it might be worth to think about merging "Armbian build framework" and redirect the rest to the "Technical support area" or "Peer to Peer" if it has nothing to do with Armbian.

What about simply redirecting  "Armbian build framework" to https://github.com/armbian/build as all stuff regarding the building process, script and so on is discussed (or should be at least) discussed there?

[Igor]

15 minutes ago, Werner said:

Well I'd guess that using prefixes can also be enforced by the system. So you have to choose on topic creation.

Yes, prefixes can be optional or enforced.

 

18 minutes ago, Werner said:

Agreed. Annoying work. I already did stuff like that many years ago...

First we need to find out if this is what we need

 

32 minutes ago, Werner said:

What about simply redirecting  "Armbian build framework" to https://github.com/armbian/build as all stuff regarding the building process, script and so on is discussed (or should be at least) discussed there?

Perhaps. @zador.blood.stained?