If you’ve been reading the Community blog, you’ll already know: AskFedora has moved to Discourse! Read on for more information about this exciting platform.
Discourse? Why Discourse?
The new AskFedora is a Discourse instance hosted by Discourse, similar to discussion.fedoraproject.org. However, where discussion.fedoraproject.org is meant for development discussion within the community, AskFedora is meant for end-user troubleshooting.
The Discourse platform focuses on conversations. Not only can you ask questions and receive answers, you can have complete dialogues with others. This is especially fitting since troubleshooting includes lots of bits that are neither questions nor answers. Instead, there are lots of suggestions, ideas, thoughts, comments, musings, none of which necessarily are the one true answer, but all of which are required steps that together lead us to the solution.
Apart from this fresh take on discussions, Discourse comes with a full set of features that make interacting with each other very easy.
Login using your Fedora account
Users accounts on the new AskFedora are managed by the Fedora account system only. A Fedora account gives you access to all of the infrastructure used by the Fedora community. This includes:
This decision was made mainly to combat the spam and security issues previously encountered with the various social media login services.
So, unlike the current Askbot setup where you could login using different social media services, you will need to create a Fedora Account to use the new Discourse based instance. Luckily, creating a Fedora Account is very easy!
- Go to https://admin.fedoraproject.org/accounts/user/new
- Choose a username, enter your name, and a valid e-mail address, a security question.
- Do the “captcha” to confirm that you are indeed a human, and confirm that you are older than 13 years of age.
That’s it! You now have a Fedora account.
Get started!
If you are using the platform for the first time, you should start with the “New users! Start here!” category. Here, we’ve put short summaries on how to use the platform effectively. This includes information on how to use Discourse, its many features that make it a great platform, notes on how to ask and respond to queries, subscribing and unsubscribing from categories, and lots more.
For the convenience of the global Fedora community, these summaries are available in all the languages that the community supports. So, please do take a minute to go over these introductory posts.
Discuss, learn, teach, have fun!
Please login, ask and discuss your queries and help each other out. As always, suggestions and feedback are always welcome. You can post these in the “Site feedback” category.
As a last note, please do remember to “be excellent to each other.” The Fedora Code of Conduct applies to all of us!
Acknowledgements
The Fedora community does everything together, so many volunteers joined forces and gave their resources to make this possible. We are most grateful to the Askbot developers who have hosted AskFedora till now, the Discourse team for hosting it now, and all the community members who helped set it up, and everyone that helps keep the Fedora community ticking along!
jackorp
It’s nice to have it there, but most of the still relevant articles, for example, one about making pptp vpn work required certain firewall change is no longer there.
Ankur Sinha "FranciscoD"
Please ask a new question, and you will receive a new, up to date answer 🙂
More information here https://ask.fedoraproject.org/t/faq-moving-to-discourse/795?u=franciscod
Kevin Hill
If I try to set up a Fedora Account, there is a check box for “Name Check Override”. What is it and what are the consequences of checking or not checking the box.
Thanks.
Ankur Sinha "FranciscoD"
You can leave it unselected. The system checks if your username is valid, and selecting that box disables the check. I’m not entirely sure what the checks are, at the moment.
rtillet
The new AskFedora is a Discourse instance hosted by Discourse only in english language?
Ankur Sinha "FranciscoD"
No, you can change the language of the interface in your profile preferences once you login. The community currently supports a few languages too, with a separate category for each.
Please read the introductory posts here for more information: https://ask.fedoraproject.org/c/start-here
rtillet
Ankur Sinha “FranciscoD”, muito obrigado !
Pauldonovan
Could not log in as I kept getting error message, no help option was available to point to error message and how to fix error.
Ankur Sinha "FranciscoD"
Were you able to correctly create your FAS account? If you could please tell us what it is, we could look into it.
D
What happen to all the old questions and answers?
Fooze
Wondering the same. When I search for anything and see results from askfedora, I just get a 404 when I click. Are the old questions and answers available somewhere?
Ankur Sinha "FranciscoD"
Please, have a look at https://ask.fedoraproject.org/t/faq-moving-to-discourse/795?u=franciscod for these queries.
FeRDNYC
Oh FFS, honestly?! Here, I’ll do the solid you apparently couldn’t be bothered with. It says:
“What happened to the questions and answers on the old platform?
Unfortunately, there is no straightforward way to migrate all the information from askbot to Discourse. We do not host either platform, we pay the developers for hosting. So we do not have direct access to the databases. Even if we did, the work required to process the data from askbot to move it to Discourse could not be done with the current resources of the community.”
M
Why not stackoverflow? This will make all much easier and more popular…
Samspon
The forgot password page is not rendering correctly.
Frank Emmons
I left and honest summary of how bad the Ask Fedora is now – it was never published nor responded to.
Looks like the truth hurts and they are really trying to do damage control and spin. Try to spin it all you want, this iteration was a huge miss and is not useful in the slightest.
All the old useful content gone. Any google search results that pointed to useful content now lead to nowhere useful.
Want to fix it and stop hemorrhaging users to places like stackoverflow? Restore that you had before, then actually ASK your users what could be done to improve it before making such bad choices.
If it works, don’t fix it. Instead you implemented a fix for something that was not broken.
Clément Verna
I have moderated you first comment since its tone was not appropriate to be published. You are more than welcome to comment and give your opinion but please consider that your words might be hurtful to others.