What has gone wrong with the Ubuntu Forums?
I am convinced that the unreasonableness and arrogance of the present moderators on the Ubuntu Forums is doing serious damage to the reputation of the Ubuntu Linux distribution. Many potential Ubuntu users are surely put off by the petty and niggling attitude of those running the forum, which is preventing much useful information from reaching Ubuntu users.
Let me give an example, but before I do and to help you understand where I am coming from, here is a little bit about me: I have been using Linux since 1998 and, because I like to help people, started a blog to help Linux users shortly thereafter. After I started using Ubuntu I started a blog with useful tips and detailing my experiences with the distro. You can see it here https://steveyoung.wordpress.com/. Recently I have developed two Android applications that are both entirely free, one https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.microwavemaps.germanarticleUS has over 860 users (5500 downloads) and a rating of 4 stars and the other https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.microwavemaps.germanarticleplus has 130 users (660 downloads) and a rating of 3.3 stars. I am telling you this to show that I am a reasonable man who likes to help others.
Now to my example. I joined the Ubuntu Forum in August 2006, nearly ten years ago, and have never had a warning or infraction in all that time. Suddenly, on May 4th I received 11 infraction points (Reason: Insulted Other Member(s)), 10 of which will never expire. This means, officially, that all of my posts have to be moderated before being published. However, in actual fact, of the last two posts I made which contained a solution for the Bumblebee/nVidia problem in 16.04, and nothing else except a comment in the second post that the first hadn’t been published yet, one was published after five weeks delay and the other one has still not been published yet over two months later. Update:I recently tried another post which has not been published after two weeks.
What did I do to deserve this after never having had a single issue on the forum before? Well, I was posting to the thread 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) Known bugs and work-a-rounds where I posted two comments containing information on problems in 16.04 and workarounds for these problems. Someone complained that the Software Center was not able to install third party packages such as Chrome or Skype. I offered the information that one could use dpkg in the command line. I also offered in the same post the opinion that “But that’s not the point, a LTS shouldn’t have such issues! And if it does they should be quickly recognised and fixed.”. QIII responded with “Please keep your posts strictly to known issues and work-arounds. This thread is intended neither for editorials nor for critiques. You are welcome to make those posts elsewhere in appropriate sub-forums.” I thought this was a bit rich coming from someone who, unlike myself, hadn’t posted a single workaround in that thread.
I was getting very frustrated with the nVidia problem because I was booting into a black screen and having to sort it out every time I switched my computer on (I’ve found a solution now and this was what I was trying to post two months ago) so I posted a question about the point of the thread. QIII replied that “This thread is for just what it says: known bugs and work-arounds. This forum is populated by users such as yourself. For bugs to be brought to the attention of Ubuntu developers (who don’t hang out here) they must be reported. The Ubuntu Forums do not act as a bug report mechanism.” I replied to another user giving a link to the weeks old bug report for the nVidia problem and then I did something I shouldn’t have done. I let QIII’s comments get to me and asked “To QIII, do you ever contribute anything useful?” After my post failed after half an hour to appear I reposted it. I was unaware that I had been given an infraction I’m afraid as I set up my account ten years ago and have never had to worry about such things in all that time. You can read the actual post here but you have to be logged in to the forum.
I wrote to howefield, who gave me the infraction points, and to the “contact us” link using the “Ubuntu Forums Contact Us Form” explaining the above. Below are the replies I got from the moderators. Notice how Hugh Walker (howefield) feels he can call me a “drama queen” whilst at the same time banning me for insulting his friend for asking if he ever contributes anything useful:
On Fri, May 06, 2016 at 08:19:42PM +0200, Stephen Young wrote:
Am 06.05.2016 um 20:01 schrieb Hugh Walker:Have you really gone 10 years without reading the Code of Conduct ?Yes. And this is the first time I've ever broken the rules contained therein. Amazing isn't it? (It's not really!) I guess it's goodbye then, if the forum has become so insecure with itself that you can be banned for making such a comment to a precious moderator.
Such a drama queen, however as you wish.
Goodbye and good luck,
Likewise.
Hello,
In your previous emails, you waved a goodbye, so goodbye it was.
No need to repost in the Resolution Center what all the admins have already read from the FC mailing list.
Just for your information, as you already have had an answer and decided to leave, I see no point approving the RC post you just made.
Regards,
b.
—
bapoumba
Forums Council member.
————————————————————————–
Hello, I am a long time Ubuntu user and would rather be able to keep on using the the forum. Surely you can understand that. I have not decided to leave, I am being forced out. This is the first time I have ever broke the rules in ten years and I certainly wouldn't do it again. But don't you see the double standards here? I am issued with 11 points for insulting a member yet howefield can call me a "drama queen" with impunity, simply because I asked to allowed to continue to contribute to the forum. RC posts are readable for the normal user not just the administrators, so your point about not needing to post it because the admins have already read it is invalid. The forum doesn't belong to the admins only! Please at least approve the RC post so that forum members other than the top table should are aware of how you are treating a long-standing forum user. Please be aware that I will use whatever means are at my disposal to make this public even if you refuse to publish my account of what happened. Regards, Stephen Young.
We have already discussed your problem here on the mailing list, there is no need to take it any further, either here or on the Forums. If you had actually paid attention to the pm's you were sent, none of this would have been needed, but since you decided to ignore the first warning and repost your comment about QIII, our decision stands. As far as making your argument public, go ahead, we have nothing to hide, in the end, you will still be on moderation. Regards cariboo
Ubuntu 11.04. Wrong keyboard keeps reappearing as default
When I installed Ubuntu 11.04 on my laptop there was a problem with selecting a keyboard other than USA. If I selected any other keyboard the installation hung for minutes, so eventually I accepted the USA keyboard thinking I would change it later. Everything installed so I went to System Settings and chose Keyboard in the Control Center and under the Layout tab I removed the USA keyboard and added a German one.
However after every reboot the USA keyboard was back and worse still was default, so I had to keep switching back to German. Removing the USA only resulted in it reappearing after a reboot.
Eventually I found the answer. Go to /etc/default/keyboard and change the line XKBLAYOUT="us" to your desired keyboard and re-boot.
XKBMODEL="pc105"
#XKBLAYOUT="us"
XKBLAYOUT="de"
XKBVARIANT=""
XKBOPTIONS=""
No wireless networks with Easynote laptop and Ubuntu 11.04
I assume that all of these laptops use the broadcom wireless adapter but to check open a terminal and type:
sudo lshw -C network
The ethernet and wireless interface information will be shown.
If you indeed have a broadcom interface connect to the internet via an ethernet cable and open the Synaptic Packet Manager and install b43-fwcutter then firmware-b43-installer or open a terminal and type:
sudo apt-get install b43-fwcutter
sudo apt-get install firmware-b43-installer
Remove the the ethernet cable and restart Ubuntu and the wireless network should be available.
Packard Bell Easynote HR11 and Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal
I recently bought a laptop and installed Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal on it. As usual I will blog about any issues as and when they arise.
The laptop I bought is a Packard Bell Easynote HR11 and the first thing I did was to reduce the Windows partion. To do this I used the partition manager in windows 7 rather than risk using GParted with a Windows partition. I don’t know if this is necessary but I thought it was better to be safe than sorry and the tool is available for free in the Windows 7 anyway. A good Howto on shrinking the Windows partition is here
After shrinking the Windows partition I changed the BIOS boot order to make the DVD boot first and then inserted the Ubuntu 11.04 DVD and booted the laptop via the DVD.
From the menu I chose “install Ubuntu” and the installation started. There was a problem with choosing a keyboard during the installation and the installation hung if I chose anything other than a USA keyboard, so in the end I accepted the USA keyboard and the installation completed successfully. This keyboard issue was still giving me problems for a while after installation but I fixed it like this. After removing the DVD and re-booting I got the Grub menu with both Ubuntu 11.04 and Windows 7 as options plus some emergency recovery options. Ubuntu is the default and will run if you press enter or wait for 10 seconds.
My first disappointment was that the new desktop Unity didn’t start but instead I got Gnome. The reason for this lies in the Nvidia Optimus technology which switches from the Intel to the Nvidia GPU when more graphics power is required. I have managed to fix this problem for now but I still see room for improvement. You can read the blog about this here.
The second problem was the fact that the WLAN wasn’t working. I have blogged about how I solved this problem here.
XAMPP in Ubuntu. “/opt/lampp/bin/mysql.server: 84: source: not found.”
I am having a problem installing XAMPP because I have an Apache server already running, I will give details of how I get around this after I have fixed it. Meanwhile every time I started XAMPP with sudo /opt/lampp/lampp restart I got the following warning:
/opt/lampp/bin/mysql.server: 84: source: not found.
It turns out to be the old dash/bash problem that I wrote about over 3 years ago here
The solution is to change #!/bin/sh to #!/bin/bash in /opt/lampp/bin/mysql.server using Gedit sudo gedit /opt/lampp/bin/mysql.server
Working Mailserver. Postfix, Fetchmail, Procmail, Dovecot with Ubuntu 10.04
Thus is an update to my original mail server configuration post here and my update for 9.10 here
After upgrading the server to Lucid Lynx I couldn’t download my emails, Thunderbird gave the warning that it couldn’t connect to the server. After reading the logs I found that Dovecot no longer understood the line in etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf reading:
ssl_disable = yes
I commented the line out and everything seems to be ok.
There is a bug report here
Copy a PHPBB3 forum to a new server
I am moving all of my services from an old server to a new one. Moving the PHPBB3 forum was easy once I figured it out. Here’s how to do it.
1) On the old server make a copy of the forum database, for instance using phpMyAdmin-Export. Also make a copy of config.php from YOUR_WEBPAGE/phpbb3 (usually /var/www/phpbb3).
2) On the new server install PHPBB3 via synaptic or apt.
3) Make the forum available to the webserver by entering sudo ln -s /usr/share/phpbb3/www /var/www/phpbb and restarting Apache with sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart.
4) Check that PHPBB3 is installed correctly by opening a browser and going to /localhost/phpbb3. To login use “admin” for both username and password.
5) Using phpMyAdmin or command line import the database that you saved in step 1).
6) In /var/www/phpbb3 rename the file config.php to configOrig.php and copy the config.php from the old server into the directory.
7) Reload /localhost/phpbb3 and your old forum should be there.
Steve's Ubuntu Weblog 