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Our goal is 200 million users of Ubuntu in 4 years
- Mark Shuttleworth (2011)

What does the Ask Ubuntu community do to prepare for such an increase in users? probably less experienced users beginning to ask questions here.

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Right now we're the number 4 site in the network in users, traffic behind Stack Overflow, Super User, and Server Fault; and number 3 in the network for questions per day. To all accounts we're already quite large and see an increase of new and experienced users everyday. A great role model for us, at Ask Ubuntu, is the Stack Overflow site which sees over 4.1 million users every day.

Traffic increases aren't much of an issue for us, Stack Exchange knows what they're doing, and can grow to meet the needs of the site. Our community has grown significantly in the last two years, where it now largely moderates itself via trusted users. As the site grows so will the community, for every 5 new users asking questions for the first time we've got an expert* to answer them. New users rise quickly through the ranks and the barrier for joining the group of community members who moderate the site everyday is quite low.

While I welcome the challenge of supporting that many users, only a fraction of those users will actually use Ask Ubuntu. When they start coming in we'll be ready to welcome and help them as we have been ready since our public beta :)

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    How would you specifically define "expert"?
    – nanofarad
    Sep 16, 2012 at 12:05
  • An AskUbuntu Expert for me is any person that has a particular knowledge about a part or whole of Ubuntu and can correctly answer a question, satisfying the OP and maybe others that also see the question/answer. Does not have to be an Ubuntu Developer, MOTD or anything that deep, it can be a freelancer like myself or anybody that has spent a lot of time working in/at/with/on/loving Ubuntu. Sep 27, 2012 at 23:04
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    Adding to what Marco mentions, for what I can see, AskUbuntu is already prepared for that many users since most questions are already answered, this would lower the amount of new questions that could appear on new versions of Ubuntu. A better preparation would be for a "Help Lense" that can search in Askubuntu for keywords and show them in dash for anybody using Ubuntu that has problems. It would help new users solve their problems right in Ubuntu. Sep 27, 2012 at 23:10

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