Historically speaking the Ubuntu Forums has struggled interacting with wider areas of the community. I suppose the obvious question is why? I would like to explore this question further and hopefully present a way forward
A brief history lesson
The Ubuntu Forums were created by Ryan Troy in October 2004. The forums became a popular resource for Ubuntu and were deemed the Official Ubuntu Forums in November 2004. The forums hosting continued to be maintained and paid for by Ryan until March 2006, when Canonical graciously offered hosting for the forums. In June of 2007 the forums domain, license and assets were transferred to Canonical who is now the sole owner of the forums.
So Canonical own the forums, what does that mean?
Basically it meant that the Ubuntu Forums became the official forum for Ubuntu. The Ubuntu Forums were made “part of the family”. As part of the transfer Canonical took responsibility for server and software maintenance.
Great, so what went wrong?
To be honest I am not completely sure. I think frustration with support from Canonical has been a factor that plays on the forum staff (all volunteers) minds. Recent examples include the slowness in the implementation of a fix to database errors we were experiencing last year (which resulted in the closing of all non-support areas of the forum for nearly 1 month) and allowing the forum to fall behind in software updates, with requests for an upgrade coming from the community in November 2009.
Closing the non-support areas of the forums suddenly made the staff “the enemy”, with many of the forums community voicing their displeasure at the actions we had to take. Nobody likes taking heat for things out of their control. It is demoralising and can leave certain resentment to those who had the power to do something about it before the problem escalated.
This slowness to act resulted in some security breaches of staff accounts on the forum, with their very privacy violated. To put it lightly the forum staff felt wronged and were not at all happy with the level of support received. This security issue was known and well documented yet we were not patched against it. This was eventually resolved, but it took a breach of our privacy to get a minor software update.
Personally speaking I believe that some hostility is felt towards Canonical and this has shown with the forum staffs interaction with the wider community.To go further I think this hostility has been returned in equal measure. I would be willing to guess that the forum staff feel they have to nag to get anywhere and that the people the forum need help from are thinking “What do they want now? With that attitude I am not going to help.”
I do not believe for one moment that the staff like nagging and that the community like being nagged at either.
What am I getting at?
Mistakes have been made in the past by both parties and I don’t think either side is especially happy with how things have turned out. For what it is worth I, on behalf of the Forum staff, would like to apologise for any heated exchanges that have occurred in the past. We care about this community, put a lot of time into trying to get everything running smoothly but we get frustrated when it is perceived others aren’t helping us.
It is time to stop this infighting and work together. We all want the same thing, a fantastic product and a brilliant family friendly community that can rise to any challenge it faces.
It is time to let the past slumber, lets move forward with a clean slate and continue to make this community remarkable. I am willing to do this, are you?