When one looks at the flavors category, one finds that every single sub-category description includes a note about not being for technical support. Maybe this is a holdover from the days when the entire Ubuntu Discourse was not for technical support.
However, since that has changed, I have to wonder if these shouldn’t change, too? Or is the expectation that all support requests go to the support category?
If the latter, I think that’s probably a bad idea as many flavor-specific support requests are exactly that and really need someone with specific experience to help efficiently.
Assuming that we can support flavor-specific support requests here, I think that Lubuntu would like to move from a self-hosted Discourse instance to carving out a place here. That, in fact, is the only thing that has really motivated having the separate instance.
The idea was that eventually, once those flavor subcategories could get their own subcategories (needs a newer version of Discourse that is still in testing), that they could create a “Help & Support” category of their own. However, with the new “Help & Support” category from the Forums merger, that has all changed.
I don’t have a good answer to this, because, essentially, one could carve-out Flavors subcategories within “Help & Suppport” and be done at this point, but I’m not entirely sure as I’m no longer in the loop on any of this. In fact, I’ve been kept out of the loop on a great deal of things that haven’t directly involved Ubuntu Studio or Edubuntu. Granted, I’m currently recovering from surgery, so I’ve been laying a low profile for the past week or so, but all of this started even before that.
We’re still working out the implementation of the Help & Support section and it’s very likely to change and adapt as we go. We’re also still aiming to enable the 3 level categories on the Discourse and allow for flavors to have their own Support category within. Our platform team is looking into enabling it in the future, but we didn’t want it to be a blocker to enabling support generally and performing some general site improvements.
At this current moment, folks looking for flavor support can certainly put in a support request and tag it accordingly. If you folks have some ideas or thoughts, please do let us know!
The purpose of that page, as you can see, is to steer support seekers toward a useful destination. It’s early days, and I’m sure the steering can be improved a lot (improvements welcome).
The Lubuntu Team gets to decide where the ‘Lubuntu’ link on that page leads to.
I see no policy or infrastructure blockers to Lubuntu support requests on Ubuntu Discourse. When one shows up in the Support and Help category, it may get snapped up by the newly-migrated UbuntuForums gurus. They are hungry to help.
If you want a Lubuntu subcategory for your team’s purposes, go right ahead and make one. If you want to stick with the existing Lubuntu tag within the Flavor category, that’s a smart option too.
Why don’t you drop by one of the Forums Migration Sync Meetings on Thursdays? There seems a lot of overlap with their process. It might help to identify the pain points and turn your vision into a plan. I will PM you the invite.
So tl;dr what I’m hearing is there are lots of options and we could migrate one way or another, too. That’s great. I’ll discuss more with the team. Thanks for the help, folks.