I am very grateful to the community developers who create and support a number of the Dockers I use daily.  I wanted to float a suggestion that might be helpful both to the people like me who use them and the developers.

 

Currently each Docker has a support thread, but I am wondering if an individual forum area for each might be more useful for both users and (hopefully) the developers.

 

As it is, some support threads are hundreds of pages long which makes it hard to find information.  If each Docker-specific forum could have individual threads. that might help people find information that the developers have already provided to others.

 

For example, I use the linuxserver.io Plex docker, and that support page is 237 pages long as I write this, and there are a variety of different issues discussed in that single thread that would be more accessible in individual ones.

 

I hope that makes sense.  Obviously if the community developers think this would not be helpful, I'm not going to second guess everyone who is so graciously donating their time, but I thought this might be something that could be helpful to everyone.

 

Kevin

2688 forum sections would be kind of impractical. Searching within threads works quite well.

 

Wish there weren't threads for "all of a maintainer's containers" though.

Edited March 1, 20251 yr by Kilrah

I have had this thought for some time now and was just about to write something along those lines.

 

If you're a plugin or container developer contributing to the community, I think it would be fitting for the developer to be provided with a subforum where they can create a sub-subforum for each plugin/container they author and manage. This would keep all posts in the respecting forums on point.

 

As it stands, an author could have more than one item they manage and trying to follow one specific item amongst a single massive stream of back-and-forth conversations is confusing and exhausting. I have found myself, on many occasions, skipping using the UR forum entirely and searching through Google instead. More often than not, I find answers or solutions NOT on the UR forums but elsewhere, mainly due to the sheer number of unrelated posts and noise one has to weed through here.

 

Regarding the '2688 forum sections' being 'impractical.' That is called organization. Each author looks after their own forum's content. Organized this way, nobody would need to go through all 2688 posts to find what they are specifically looking for, but as it stands, people DO need to weed through 100-200 non-relevant posts to find just the next step when trying to fix their problems. Organizing makes things easier to find, not harder.

 

+1 for cleaning up the forum structure

Edited March 17, 20251 yr by aglyons

This has come up a couple of times over the years, and ultimately, it remains in the template maintainer's prerogative and to how to organize things and basically impossible to enforce

 

99% of the questions regarding containers are actually not about the template itself, but about the application within the container, and those questions may actually be more suited towards the app's specific support venue (eg: project pages). 

8 minutes ago, Squid said:

This has come up a couple of times over the years, and ultimately, it remains in the template maintainer's prerogative and to how to organize things and basically impossible to enforce

 

99% of the questions regarding containers are actually not about the template itself, but about the application within the container, and those questions may actually be more suited towards the app's specific support venue (eg: project pages). 

 

True, most questions are about the app, not the template. But being a public forum, it's not just about the author answering questions about their template. A lot of the community jumps in and helps out. I jsut posted in the Docker Compose plugin thread and as always, I try to go though the posts that were already there to see if my issue had already been discussed. But there are over 40 pages of posts with conversations all merged together in one big mess. In order to find if anyone had already run into the issue and solved it one would have to go through each page, read the start of each post and then try to piece together the thread, which gets broken up with other posts about other things.

 

I don't see why having subforums for each author, which in turn has multiple subforums for each item they manage, is such a problem. I've seen public forums that are way bigger than what was proffered as a reason to not go there.

 

Impossible to enforce is also not true. Limetech sets the rules by which plugins are authored and are accepted into the CA. Why should this be any different?

 

Just because something has always been done a certain way doesn't mean it is the right way or should continue.

Edited March 17, 20251 yr by aglyons

6 hours ago, aglyons said:

don't see why having subforums for each author, which in turn has multiple subforums for each item they manage, is such a problem. I've seen public forums that are way bigger than what was proffered as a reason to not go there.

Have you looked at how many threads there already are  for each container/plugin?  Your approach would add hundreds of sub-forums which would make the whole forum unwieldy.

 

23 hours ago, itimpi said:

Have you looked at how many threads there already are  for each container/plugin?  Your approach would add hundreds of sub-forums which would make the whole forum unwieldy.

I think people are confused as to what I am taking about and what I think others have tried to point out.

 

As it is now, each plugin/template has a single thread where everyone replies with every issue. It's a massive headache to find anything and then track the relevant conversation amongst all the other chatter. What I am suggesting is instead of the plug-in/template being a thread, make that a subforum so that separate posts can be made inside. Each post then has it's own topic and it's easier to find things and keep things on topic.

 

This is not creating thousands of subforums.

1 minute ago, aglyons said:

 

I think people are confused as to what I am taking about and what I think others have tried to point out.

 

As it is now, each plugin/template has a single thread where everyone replies with every issue. It's a massive headache to find anything and then track the relevant conversation amongst all the other chatter. What I am suggesting is instead of the plug-in/template being a thread, make that a subforum so that separate posts can be made inside. Each post then has it's own topic and it's easier to find things and keep things on topic.

 

This is not creating thousands of subforums.

There are hundreds (maybe even thousands) of support threads so your approach would mean a similar number of sub-forums

Also need to consider that nearly none of the Dockers on CA are directly from anyone associated with Limetech, but rather from community members.  And many aren't even community members, but some developer who threw together a docker template, put it up on CA, and haven't been seen since.

 

It is only from the goodness of the heart of some developers to even offer support for the dockers they have offered.  Some are truly awesome community members here who give hours of their life daily to Unraid support.  Others (even well known names) post up things, that over time don't age well, but are never seen to support or ask questions.

 

It is the choice by each contributor how they wish to support their work - a single thread for each docker, a single thread for all of the dockers they provide, support on a different site entirely (such as Github), or no support at all.  If you mandate "This is how you have to do it..." you will likely end up with many more choosing no support at all.

 

Let us be thankful for the work they give us for free, and even more thankful when offering their assistance.

Edited March 18, 20251 yr by ConnerVT
speeling

On 3/17/2025 at 1:38 PM, aglyons said:

Impossible to enforce is also not true. Limetech sets the rules by which plugins are authored and are accepted into the CA. Why should this be any different?

 

As a note, I would love if there was a separate support thread for each container.  But, even if that were the case, a lot of the problems is that postings with issues / questions etc have a tendency to not happen within the designated thread in the first place, and that is completely out of LT's hands.  (The only "control" is that regular forum users are unable to create any thread of their own within the Docker Containers section - Only devs are allowed to do that).

 

The dropdowns on the container have the "Support" link listed for this very reason.   FWIW, when clicking the drop down, from top to bottom is actually the "preferred" support venue by the author. (As an aside, you also inadvertently found a bug because when checking this, "Discord" is not getting listed - And when it's present it takes priority over the forum)

 

Speaking as someone who on any given day gets roughly 100+ notifications from the forum, I can certainly understand why maintainers would prefer a single thread (again, not that I agree with it).  It does make their job easier.