All Questions
5,748
questions
29
votes
6
answers
423
views
Please don't flag old questions as EOL
This discussion recently popped up on Active Questions because of a new answer.
Ever since then, there have been EOL flags in the Close Vote queue for questions that were not EOL when asked; there ...
29
votes
7
answers
2k
views
Ban ChatGPT and AI-generated answers on Ask Ubuntu?
ChatGPT generated answers have been found across the Stack Exchange network and some examples have also been recently seen and removed from Ask Ubuntu. Our colleagues on Stack Overflow have put a ...
29
votes
8
answers
2k
views
2020 Moderator Election Q&A - Questionnaire
In connection with the moderator elections, we are holding a Q&A thread for the candidates. Questions collected from an earlier thread have been compiled into this one, which shall now serve as ...
29
votes
1
answer
888
views
What do we do about mirror sites?
Following searching various things for this question, I found:
http://askubuntu.greatknow.com/questions/294850/does-canonical-have-other-deals-with-companies-like-the-amazon-search-feature
which ...
29
votes
1
answer
6k
views
Please do not use links as entire answers!
I have recently noticed a trend going around, and to be perfectly honest it's pissing me off. What new users (and some experience users,) do nowadays is go to the main page, find a question that's ...
29
votes
2
answers
4k
views
Ubuntu Focal Fossa (20.04) LTS is now released, and posts about it are (generally) No Longer Offtopic
(Meant to post this yesterday but crashed hard from lack of sleep)
As of about 17:47:04 UTC on April 23, 2020, Ubuntu Focal Fossa 20.04 LTS has been officially released. The corresponding release ...
29
votes
2
answers
438
views
Plea to reviewers of First Posts & Late Answers: consider Action. And, some Actions to consider
I often get a bit frustrated when I look at the history pages of First Posts and Late Answers and see that some prolific reviewers are clicking the No Action Needed button all the time or nearly all ...
29
votes
0
answers
404
views
Tag Warning Is Now Live for "Wireless"
Following up in the discussion about http://meta.askubuntu.com/questions/14237/tag-warnings-on-ask-ubuntu, we have added a tag warning for wireless on Ask Ubuntu!
We've only added one for now because ...
29
votes
0
answers
277
views
Call out to reviewers - you CAN "skip"
I remember some reviews of suggested edits where the reviewers clearly could not understand either the post or the edit.
One of these was https://askubuntu.com/a/476746/117103 , supposedly an answer, ...
29
votes
0
answers
157
views
Could the colour of questions be changed to reflect that they have no upvoted answers?
At the moment when you look at the main page of questions there are 3 different
categories of questions differentiated by colour:
Questions with no answers:
Questions with answers but none ...
28
votes
26
answers
2k
views
Community Promotion Ads - 2013 [duplicate]
As it is December 2012, we are now going to reset our Community Promotion Ads for the new year.
What are Community Promotion Ads?
Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that ...
28
votes
29
answers
2k
views
Community Promotion Ads - 1H 2012 [duplicate]
Possible Duplicate:
Community Promotion Ads - 2013
We... may have left 1H 2011 running a whole half-year long extra. Whoops. Well, now we begin-anew the next round of Community Promotion Ads!
...
28
votes
34
answers
2k
views
Community Promotion Ads - 2014 [duplicate]
It's the time of the year again, namely it is December 2013, and so we shall now refresh our Community Promotion Ads for the new year.
What are Community Promotion Ads?
Community Promotion Ads are ...
28
votes
3
answers
370
views
Best way to end a question post
When I ask a question on Ask Ubuntu, I usually end it with some kind of request for knowledge, like "does anybody know the actual meaning of this message?". A lot of newer people end the question with ...
28
votes
8
answers
696
views
Is it smart to use threats or insulting language when asking for help?
I've seen many questions where the person asking for help, uses insults as part of their question. As examples, look at these:
How can I get your (bad word here) software to do what I (bad word here)...
28
votes
9
answers
1k
views
Google+ Fan Page Logo Competition
Because our current Google+ logo doesn't exactly fit the trademark guidelines we need a new one!
The good news is, SE have offered to give away one amazing swag package full of Stack Exchange and Ask ...
28
votes
6
answers
870
views
How can we improve the site's answered rate?
According to this our answered rate (percentage of questions with an upvoted answer) is now 76%. We took a big hit with the number of new questions for 12.04/12.10 and the difficulty of being able to ...
28
votes
2
answers
284
views
Best practices when an OP edits the answered question creating an entirely new one?
This question was triggered by Why do some files appear twice in Unity Dash?
After receiving an answer that was clearly correct, The OP drastically edited the original question creating in effect an ...
28
votes
7
answers
448
views
Are bugs necessarily off-topic?
Jorge Castro recently commented on one of my questions that it should be filed as a bug instead. And I've seen here that the general view is that questions about bugs should be considered off-topic ...
28
votes
4
answers
486
views
Should we consider unanswered questions a problem yet?
In the fashion of the discussion on meta.SO about unanswered questions on Stack Overflow
Currently, out of 120,000 odd questions, only about 70% of them are considered answered. But it wasn't this ...
28
votes
3
answers
2k
views
Video Tutorials for using the site
During our beta I created a video to kind of explain how the site works. I'd like to continue expanding on that and create other videos for the site if people want to watch to see how they work.
...
28
votes
1
answer
783
views
Let's integrate Ask Ubuntu badges with the operating system!
Jono and Marco have been working on integrating the Ask Ubuntu badges you earn here with the Ubuntu Accomplishment system.
This is basically badges, but at a higher project level, so of course we ...
28
votes
1
answer
437
views
Plea to the decentralized sense of opinion - use your vote!
Ask Ubuntu, as any other site in the Stack Exchange sites network, works with the help of a rating system. Sometimes it's hard for people to understand the importance of a single vote but votes are ...
28
votes
3
answers
657
views
Clean-Up Week - Event planning
We (your moderators) have been mulling over an idea for a good way to deal with old, unanswered and unanswerable posts. We've been in discussion with the StackExchange team and while we're a long way ...
28
votes
10
answers
442
views
What's wrong, Ask Ubuntu?: Low Voter Count
Let me preface this with a run-down of the reputation system:
Users on the site can cast up- and downvotes and accept answers on their questions, each giving or taking reputation to or from other ...
28
votes
2
answers
409
views
My time is as a moderator drawing to a close
Just a heads up: I'm considering stepping down in the near future. Obviously, I'm not around often any more, and I can't really be of any use to the site. I'm not making this decision lightly as I ...
28
votes
0
answers
722
views
Heads up: HWE changes for 16.04
See the announcement:
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/2016-November/000215.html
and subsequent pages:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/LTSEnablementStack
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/...
27
votes
4
answers
453
views
Is it ok for my reputation to be edit-based?
In this post I asked whether I should continue barraging my peers with edits. I still have one question, though. I've made around 20% of my reputation off of edits. Is this honest, or should I cut ...
27
votes
1
answer
905
views
Does Canonical pay Stack Exchange to run Ask Ubuntu
We're the only community I've seen that has an additional navigation bar at the top which contains nothing but links to an off-site company/organization website.
Does Canonical pay Stack Exchange to ...
27
votes
4
answers
856
views
Should we recommend inexperienced users to refrain from using advanced tools?
After a disagreement I had with another user in the comments to their answer recommending that the poster of the question uninstall ccsm after breaking Unity with it (after, of course, running an ...
27
votes
6
answers
4k
views
Questions that refer to using or installing ripped/pirated software
I note in the comments to this Question, that the user is using ripped software.
umm, I just copied the folder of the game to my home folder.. thats
it.. should I download the installation and ...
27
votes
5
answers
361
views
Don't vote to close if it's just a bad question -- fix it, or vote it down
Lately, I'm seeing a lot of questions in the review queue which are marked for closure due to being 'too localized', or 'not a real question'.
Some of these are marked on the same day they're asked,...
27
votes
5
answers
1k
views
Are animated GIFs of screencasts welcome at Ask Ubuntu?
Should we include a animated GIF of a screencast in our answers? Or should we post a series of screenshots instead? Or is a link to a video hosted externally preferable?
Here's an example of a ...
27
votes
1
answer
556
views
What to do with non-English questions or answers?
What should we do with questions (or answers) that are written in a non-English language?
I'm now talking about:
Problem using any docks (Cairo, AWN, Docky)
These can be downvoted, but what if the ...
27
votes
2
answers
559
views
Shouldn't Stack Exchange build a Question Wizard? (for beginning users)
Proposal to have all users under 30 reputation follow a question wizard.
Some people just don't use google and they ask questions that have been asked before or they ask unclear question, or off-...
27
votes
3
answers
252
views
Need help! What problems would be best solved by a wizard?
I've talked about a wizard to help people find existing questions and improve the quality of the ones they post if they can't find one. I've talked about this for so long without doing anything so ...
26
votes
28
answers
1k
views
Community Promotion Ads - 2015 [duplicate]
The dawn of a new year, 2015, now approaches, or has already approached, either way it means that it is now time to reset our Community Promotion Ads!
What are Community Promotion Ads?
Community ...
26
votes
9
answers
2k
views
Are there any memes on Ask Ubuntu?
Just curious. After reading about the infamous "Boat Programming" question, I wondered if anything like that has existed on Ask Ubuntu.
26
votes
8
answers
549
views
Should answers have terminal or GUI instructions?
Should we aim to provide answers that use the terminal, through shell commands, or answers that use the GUI, through pointing and clicking?
May be related to this question about our intended public
26
votes
1
answer
459
views
Dealing with a user who just won't follow the rules
I would like to open by stating this user is not abusive or rude and I am not looking to get him banned or anything like that, I write this because he could be a good contributor.
The user has ...
26
votes
2
answers
334
views
How to make small but important edits?
I ask because I just recently tried to correct a post that had a command in it - but the command was wrong. The poster had typed chwon instead of chown. Of course this means it would not work. However ...
26
votes
2
answers
302
views
Code formatting from new site design changes simply annoys me
The new background for a code sample makes that this to be difficult to distinguish towards a normal text:
Maybe for some screens it's ok, but not for the majority. Many times I have to change the ...
26
votes
1
answer
2k
views
PSA: 12.04 Launches this week, steel yourselves!
Release is this week, which means that we'll have people who are going to start asking questions here, so we need to stay on our toes, update existing questions (more below), and just generally keep ...
26
votes
1
answer
271
views
Always use full Ubuntu version numbers (if you want to specify the version)
More often than I wish I come across a post (mostly a question) which uses wrong version numbers of Ubuntu.
Examples:
Ubuntu 17 to 18 upgrade, wont log in
Ubuntu 17 and hibernate?
How to install USB-...
25
votes
5
answers
8k
views
When is it acceptable to link to LMGTFY?
I just ran across a link to LMGTFY on Ask Ubuntu. In the past, I've found it offensive when users have posted LMGTFY links for me.
When, if ever, is it acceptable to link to LMGTFY on Ask Ubuntu?
25
votes
4
answers
742
views
Are "not only Ubuntu-specific" questions on-topic?
I know this question has been asked and answered already here:
How do we tell if a question belongs here, or rather at stackoverflow/superuser?
However this topic came up recently again in a ...
25
votes
3
answers
768
views
EOL Notice: Hardy, Oneiric, Lucid (desktop) are now End of Life
This is a reminder/notice regarding now-EOL releases.
The following versions of Ubuntu and derivatives are officially end of life as of today on May 9th, 2013:
Hardy Heron (8.04, all currently-...
25
votes
2
answers
4k
views
How to run the Software Recommendation tag?
We get quite a few software-recommendation questions. I'd like to bang out an expected format for these questions to prevent them from melting into too localized or subjective trite.
What are tips ...
25
votes
1
answer
517
views
OP rejected my edit and then copy-pasted it
I suggested an edit to this answer a few days ago. The edit was approved by a moderator, but was then rejected by the OP of the answer. Which is totally fine, since my interpretation of what the OP ...
25
votes
2
answers
224
views
Please revert merging amd-graphics tag into ati
there was a post a few months ago about the tag synonym and I just got reminded of if today.
The AMD ATI merger was almost 10 years ago (in 2006) and Wikipedia says AMD stopped using the ATI brand in ...