Linux
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Can we get a Linux section?
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There are no "sections" for technologies. Only broad topics. Lessons learned from other communities. If you have sections for each thing you get problems like overlaps (is a question about Ubuntu go under Linux, Software, Operating Systems, Debian, Ubuntu, Systems Administration, Canonical, etc.) and makes it so that posting is much harder, organization takes a lot of overhead and readers can't find what they are looking for.
Instead we have tags. Every post gets tagged with up to seven topics that apply to it. This is far superior to having sections and is a few decades newer as a taxonomic practice after years of taxonomy research in IT. You have a "section" for Linux by going to the tag itself.
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Linux is, by far, the most popular tag in ML as it is, partially because Linux is an umbrella topic for so many things (Ubuntu, RHEL, CentOS, Suse, Debian, Arch, Vyatta, VyOS, Android, etc.) And because Linux news is much more active than nearly anything else in the industry. So it gets a lot of conversational activity.
The hard "sections" were carefully chosen to be "non-overlapping" categories where ALL technology threads go in one place, all news in another (this is the hardest to denote category), all "time wasting" fluff goes in the Water Closet, all advertising (free stuff for anyone) goes in self promotion, all job postings have a place, etc. In theory, these are all very clear and no one should realistically ever wonder which one to use when. But nearly any discussion on Linux could also go somewhere else. If you are comparing Linux and Windows, does it go in a Windows or a Linux group? Or somewhere else entirely?
It is a lot like how Sharepoint completely changed how we store files compared to old style filesystem hierarchies. No longer do we use folder after folder to dig down into carefully organized, and impossible to find, hierarchies but instead we tag or describe the data and search for it using the power of databases to do the heavy lifting allowing us to get shifting "views" of the data instead. This way, a conversation that to you is about Linux shows up one way to you but a that same thread might show up as "security" to someone interested in a different aspect of the conversation and might be "ubununtu" to someone else. And a four person might see it as "system administration."
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To improve tagging I just increased the length of tags from 18 to 24 characters and increased the tags per thread from seven to nine. Hopefully this will make the tagging even more useful.
Also, while anyone can make a tag, the tagging is curated. If a tag is a bad one (a judgement call) it is removed.
An example of this was that people were using misspelled or "nickname" tags for CloudatCost. We ended up with "tag sprawl" where one person was calling it by its name, others by CAC, C@C, Cloud@Cost, etc. This doesn't work for tags (or anything.) We had to make sure all cases were tagged as "CloudatCost" and that all other tags that were just misspellings were removed. That way tagging that one thing uses only a single tag spot and using that tag link provided the correct results instead of needing to use four or five different tags to get one pool of discussions.
Same would go for any incorrect term, misspelling or accidental tag. If someone accidentally put Lunix instead of Linux, we would manually fix that so that the tags still work correctly.
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Can we get a windows sections because we all know it's superior to Linux and no one but a fool would use linux outside of a home desktop. You should never used it in SMB or Enterprise especially for email servers. Exchange is the only Enterprise email server, and if you use another one you are doing email wrong /Sarcasm If you've seen topics on linux recently you know what I'm referring to.
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Yup, seen those!
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@thecreativeone91 said:
Can we get a windows sections because we all know it's superior to Linux and no one but a fool would use linux outside of a home desktop. You should never used it in SMB or Enterprise especially for email servers. Exchange is the only Enterprise email server, and if you use another one you are doing email wrong /Sarcasm If you've seen topics on linux recently you know what I'm referring to.
Sarcasm spill, aisle 3
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I've seem that type of cupcake before, more commonly in the gaming world.
They make wild generalisations about topics they don't quite understand, in the hopes if impressing the old guard who write them off as n00bs
