Topic: FAQ: Should I trust/follow the advice I get in this forum?

[cactus]

I am very in discord with this system. I know I have a lot of good "Advices given" in spanish forum and here too.
Sorry for discuss here and not in bug tracker because I only want to clarify the situation.

I think you should add this to the bugtracker as you raise a new argument here, that is not taken into account in the bugtracker.

I believe there is a possibility to give certain users permission to moderate their votes as well, but I have no idea what the opinion on this is from the core-dev team.

[imcintyre]

I have a suggestion. If you post a problem here and it gets solved, go back and edit the title to include

(Solved)

at the end. This would have a couple of good results.

When I am looking to solve my own problem and am Searching the forums, I will look at the (Solved) items first as I know that there is a positive outcome.

When I click on the

Show unread posts since last visit

, I won't look at the ones that are solved. Not that I am much use at solving, but this might help people who are.

My $0.02

[cactus]

I have a suggestion. If you post a problem here and it gets solved, go back and edit the title to include  at the end. This would have a couple of good results.

A good suggestion, but the only problem is that you are only able to edit your original posts for as long as seven days I believe...

[imcintyre]

I just checked an old post of mine and you're right, there is some time limit on edits. Too bad.

[erroneus]

The developers have brought it to my attention that a lot of advice that is being given in this forum is bad.  As you may have noticed, we are trying out different ways of implementing a good/bad advice rating system.  We haven't decided if that will stay or not, but I think one thing we are lacking are some recommendations to users of SME Server as to what sort of advice is genrally good, and what is not. 

Things that are generally good to do:

• Report problems when you first find them to the bug tracker at http://bugs.contribs.org after searching there to see if the same problem has been reported already.  But remember that the purpose of the bug tracker is to diagnose and fix the problem in an updated version of SME Server.  You should be prepared to provide detailed information, be patient, and provide follow up when asked by the developers who will try to reproduce and fix the bug.

Things that are generally bad to do: 
(If someone recommend you do one of these things, perhaps you should not follow, or at least question, their advice)

• Don't do things from the command line that you can do from the server manager
• Don't install gcc or any other *-devel rpms on your server.
• Don't install contribs that are not in one of the repositories on mirrors.contribs.org and don't have a category in the bug tracker.  If they are not there, ask the developer of the contrib why that is.
• Don't do anything that includes an instruction with something like 'rpm -Uvh --force ???' or 'rpm -Uvh --nodeps ???'.  Not a wise thing to do 99% of the time.
• Don't upgrade the version of php, mysql, apache, perl or any other packages that are included in SME Server.  Very bad - don't do this!  Don't enable the 'centosplus' or any other 3rd party repository which includes these packages.

Please add your comments, or if you have moderator access, please just edit this posting directly with your additions.  Developers and the support team - please add some comments.

Thanks,

I agree with most of these basic ideas.  The more people stray from the mainstream, the more likely unpredictable and non-reproducible results will be.  Making changes as indicated in the "don't" section will essentially push your installation outside of the realm of supportable.

With that said, I think some modifications are desirable even when it breaks the rules of support.  (Though personally, I think it would be much better to build such mods as a VM that communicates with the SME server in some way through a network based API type of thing or something.)  A ranking/rating/moderation system should probably score the advice based on how severely and which of these rules have been broken.  By enumerating the rule breakage and indicating what the specific risks are, people can make a more informed decision on whether or not to try it.