The "How am I doing?" thread (read OP first!)

The purpose of this thread i to allow other users to request how well they’re contributing to the community. Anyone can contribute often, but if those contributions aren’t doing much, then nobody may say anything about it and those people may never know if their contributions are actually being effective.

The guidelines for this thread are as follows;

• The only new replies not directed to a specific user should be How am I doing? or some variant thereof
• Answers to this question must be unbiased
  (No You’re doing as good / better / worse than this other user)
• Answers to this question must be polite
• Answers should only be replies to other users, please
  (This is to easily track what the answer was for)
• All positions for or against other users should be concise and to-the-point

This is a positive criticism and user evaluation thread. By that vein, there should be no responses that intend to psychologically harm others, either et al or to a specific user.

If you feel you need to, link in work. If you need input about a specific piece, ask about the piece, and not about yourself; It’s still about you, but How am I doing? should be reserved for your work collectively, as well your community conduct. If you wish to ask expressly about your conduct, the question should be How am I acting? or some variant thereof.

This thread is intended to field answers to these above questions, so that suggestions, improvements and other criticism are moved away from other threads. Considering this is a public forum, sensitive issues should be avoided as often as possible. Thanks for reading, and I suppose there’s only one thing left to ask…

How am I doing?

Hi @tiox,

I understand the sentiment behind what you are saying but I personally don’t think it will benefit the community in general as even if someone is putting a lot of effort into the forum; people may not read the threads/posts and simply miss all the good the person is putting into the community, furthermore, you may well end up alienating people if someone writes something about them that although well intended; could be misconstrued!.

So!, “How am I doing”?.

About comments of the thread
If there’s nothing else, this could get some less “Popular” people’s stuff read so their work could be recognized. The alienation is something I never considered, mainly because this community has a good userbase already, and troll responses would be rather obvious when everybody else provides positive criticism.

We’re here to build one another up, not break each other down. Further, since this thread might not directly improve the community by leaps and bounds (moreso, prove how good we already are), I shoved this into “Uncategorized” for that very reason. There can be a lot of good that comes from this if everybody plays nice, but hey, if it doesn’t it can be buried.

About you
You seem rather helpful in replying to other people’s posts, and you always put up a good attitude. I’ve never seen anything but positivity and encouragement from you; Certainly a good example to follow, and one I hope I’m following well myself.

You are also doing fine but we are just two people, there are many others on the forum that deserve praise but I’m not on this forum to win any medals; I’m here doing what is in my nature and that is helping others which gives me personal satisfaction and I am sure you are likewise inclined!. .D

I’m not quite certain EXACTLY your intent …

I have a personal goal to learn more about UM & how folks use it. I subscribe to the tenant 99% of the folks asking for help actually do have an issue to solve and post here for help!

How am I doing? might best be discerned if folks receiving help or guidance marked the post solved and made a reply comment.

Much of my personal reward comes from not knowing a solution to a post and subsequently researching to find a plausible solution.

You are doing great Brandon! @tiox

How am I doing?

I haven’t been a member here for very long so forgive me if I’m stepping beyond my path by adding my comment here. Quite honestly, when checking under the “latest” sub-category of the forum, as I do from time to time during the course of the day… I see either a “P”, “T” or Wolfman’s Tux avatar next to nearly every post. So in that respect, the help being offered by the three of you above, is an easily gauged metric by anyone. Having said that, not all of us have an equatable amount of time to commit being here and although I know it’s not the intent of the OP but a thread of this nature has the feel of an employment performance review or property assessment by the council.

Technically speaking, there should be a fair degree of performance review to ensure users are not lacking in their capability to explain a topic of their choosing. The property assessment thing, while as you said, not intended has some validity because people come here for answers. How valuable this place is in the Linux community isn’t in how many questions are asked, it’s how many questions are answered, and moreso, how many questions are answered without being asked in the first place.

That, at least I believe is why I write all the guides I had so far. Not only are they personal experiences of mine, but they’re useful to other people, and they didn’t even have to ask for it; they could just search “compiz” or “nemo” for my extensive guides on installing and configuring said software, and they’re unique compilations that never existed before, which adds considerable value to not just the system when people use them, but also to the forum, because of the reliable information that can bring more eyes through references.

That’s also part of the reason why I am very considerate of my information sources; I compile stuff together. I fully recognize I’m not good enough to compile software myself. To some degree, that makes me an open-source babby. But I dare not discredit the efforts of others, whose work I used without requesting permission if it means I can put the information together in a way specific to this OS, and keeping people on this forum without “Stealing clicks” from other places. While I had not openly encouraged it, visit my sources! Validate me! Tell me if I goofed somewhere and offer some kind suggestions for improvement. I need that to keep my information valuable between major versions.

It wasn’t my intention to criticize your efforts to help others, Tiox and I apologize if I’ve upset you in any way. I was simply offering an opinion upon whether there’s cause for an open metric to (what essentially keeps a running tally) upon how demonstrative our contributions are here. I’m sorry but I don’t see the importance of such a mechanism and can actually see it becoming divisive. It is after all, a Linux forum, a “community” and hobby for most. Not the Critical Care Dept. of a hospital.

[quote=“tiox, post:7, topic:6020”]
Technically speaking, there should be a fair degree of performance review to ensure users are not lacking in their capability to explain a topic of their choosing.
[/quote]I’m a strong believer in self policing which, in my short time here as an active participant, this community deserves high marks. If someone actually does post damaging instructions the community at large has a responsibility to:

1-correct it
2-pm the the offender
3-flag post for an admin
4-pm the op

any or all

I couldn’t give a toss about back-patting and I certainly don’t need it for myself. The “like” buttons are more than sufficient in my opinion. It’s all a bit counter productive anyway and starts up group-ism. Do what you can to help on whatever terms you are able, gratefully receive the help of others and then just get on with stuff.

Each give according to their means. Each receive according to their needs. Nothing else to say.

That’s it, in my book.

IMO the question should be…

How is our community doing?

Yes. that is exactly the question

I would like to see more folks using the solved check - it would help others searching for appropriate pointers

I think you got it in a nutshell @stevecook172001!.

What I would like to see is:

1: who is online (always nice to see if someone you are friendly with is there!).

2: visible user stats to basically see what each user has done in terms of posts and general activity on the forum.

and number 3 would be what I think @tiox is really trying to put across is the number of likes shown beside the “Like” button and that way; everyone can see how much love an individual has received!.

Sorry to further derail the @tiox's original intentions for this topic - Just adding how I like how @system works around here.

Yep, the intentions behind Discourse encourages users to be part of a community, not an old age forum. Members earn their trust by being awarded badges and their appreciation from likes given and recieved.

You can click on any members name and see their Summary tab to see how they are doing. There's the Users section to see who's most liked/visited/read of the week/month/year/all time too.

Stats can be cool! I guess that answers @wolfman's #2.

For #1, it's actually a heated debate whether glancing at others' online presence at once is actually useful:

Keep track of this (fairly old) request in our meta section: