Comments on: Why don’t you use Userbase?

By: Hide window border for maximized windows « Who Says Penguins Can't Fly?

Hide window border for maximized windows « Who Says Penguins Can't Fly? — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 22:36:19 +0000

[...] Why don’t you use Userbase? [...]

By: Stefan

Stefan — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 19:01:09 +0000

I think there’s another approach that could yield good results – integration with KDE. Whether this be an app or a plasmoid, I don’t know, but the web doesn’t feel close at hand in KDE. There are plasmoids and apps which bring parts of it close, but KDEs primary interface is not a web browser. I’m not saying this is a bad thing, but it means that it doesn’t feel natural to browse somewhere to get KDE help. Google is the primary interface of the web for many (most, really) of us, with bookmarks probably taking a very distant second. I like to think that most people don’t have sufficient need of userbase (because KDE is already so awesome) to warrant a bookmark.

By: Elvis Stansvik

Elvis Stansvik — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 08:34:18 +0000

I’m going to be quite frank. Mainly two reasons:

1) It’s very far in between the times when I really have a user question about KDE. It just works good for me.

2) The few times when I really do have a user question, I always use Google as the primary interface for finding an answer, as it covers the largest corpus of information. And it’s not that often that Techbase articles show up there. A bit of a chicken-egg I guess.

Regards,
Elvis

By: Robert Smits

Robert Smits — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 03:19:08 +0000

Why don’t you use Userbase?

Well, to begin with, no one ever mentioned its existence.

Secondly, I’ve been a KDE fan since 2005, and read the KDE-PIM listserve, and the OpenSuSE KDE listserve. I vastly prefer mailling lists to any kind of web based forum or site. They’re faster, and my threaded Kmail makes it easier and faster to read, too.

I can’t imagine a reason why I would go there again after visiting it today. Most of my KDE questions centre around KDE-PIM, and both of my mailing lists are the first place I look for answers. I only go to web based forums or websites if there is no other way.

Bob Smits

By: anonymous

anonymous — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:33:13 +0000

Off topic:

http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/KDE-a-resource-hog-949634.html

Phoronix made some biased comparison and now this FUD is spread…

By: Hans

Hans — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:28:26 +0000

A lot of good points here. Some were expected, naturally, but there are also a few surprises (at least to me).

Keep them coming!

By: Usp

Usp — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:44:01 +0000

I’m potential user and editor with years of sysop level experience with wikis, mainly Wikimedia. Obviously:) I think main issue is that it doesn’t look and feel like wiki(pedia). Building on Wikipedia conventions would help a lot to find good practices and enable any Wikipedia editor to be straight away “fluent” in Userbase. Would Userbase be worthy of external links in Wikipedia articles?

Some propositions to begin with:
Make Userbase like Wikipedia or Wikibook, in work flow, editing conventions, look and feel.
*Use Wikipedia like skin (customize monobook with kde colours) to be more familiar to those familiar with Wikipedia. It took me quite a while to even notice that its run by Mediawiki. Also current default skin (Oxygen) wastes lots of vertical space (on 1080×1920 that is > 50 %!) which bad for usability I think.
*Separate languages into sub-url’s like Wikipedia (e.g. de.userbase.kde.org) but duplicate English as the main url userbase.kde.org. Tools like “Recent changes” are easily rendered useless when all languages are in same.
*Maybe common login to wiki’s, at least user- and techbase (of course cross language).
*If breadcrumb is the way to organize content, use breadcrumb extension like in Wikibooks.
*Create “featured content” to set the “standard”
*Like wikipedia Userbase can hold material to both beginners and to very experienced.
*Make project section into wiki where to hadle wiki development in detail.

By: Mayo

Mayo — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:34:01 +0000

It’s hard to navigate. Not only wiki but whole kde.org. I mean I know what’s where and what it means etc. but it’s not a cohesive structure, not a fun to roam through. I think userbase not being what it should be is just a symptom. (Is all this because of svn? I mean all apps in a humongous bulb and related pages having their own well defined places but these two don’t really connect?)

Integrate all those something.kde.org together, but make all apps stand out more on each own.

Please, think about it.

By: Stuart Jarvis

Stuart Jarvis — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:23:42 +0000

Because I can use Google instead And a Google search for $issue often doesn’t have a userbase page near the top (probably because not many people are aware of it – chicken/egg).

The one time I remember using userbase is migrating to SC4.4 and having akonadi issues. The error dialog that came up had a link to the relevant page on userbase and the info there was good.

So, how about adding userbase links for a given application to error dialogs more and also adding a link to the application userbase page under the help menu?

The Arch wiki is great, but as a Fedora user I don’t often think of it. However, Arch wiki pages show up all the time in Google search results because the info is so good.

By: bderenorcaine

bderenorcaine — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:28:38 +0000

I agree with some of the earlier comments – it does not look like a wiki, but rather like an official site, it is not advertised anywhere and the useful stuff seems pretty much hidden behind that starting page