One thing we can all notice, the number of forums on the net continues to rise. I don’t see a reversal of this trend. Every new technology brings a new opportunity to establish a community. Some communities have a long life span, other have a shorter one. This is all part of the natural life cycle of the net, which is good and bad, but mostly good.

The UNIX and Linux Forums are certainly not the largest, but we are absolutely one of the oldest and better established forums. We run a very tight ship. Running a tight ship is both good and bad. Some forums don’t run a tight ship. They have a lot of gossip and a lot of chit-chat; and those forums have a much higher number of posts than we do. Our goals was never to be the biggest, or have the most people, or to have the most threads or post. Our goals have always been to be a useful knowledge repository and have a very high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).

SNR is an engineering term; but it means a lot in social and educational networks and forums. If you are looking for knowledge or a solution to a difficult problem, you don’t want to have to read a bunch of chit-chat or endless religious discussions and arguments. You want facts. At the end of the day, everyone needs to leave work and go home to friends and family. Our goals are to get you home faster and help you solve your problems at work or wherever your challenges may exist.

We seem to be doing OK. We serve 3 to 4 million pages of useful information a month to over 2 million people, just like you (and me), who want to solve a problem at work and go home to their families. We have great moderators and many strong contributors. Everyone is free to interact in the community, but only in a professional, considerate way. Our SNR is very high. In fact, our SNR is just about as high as possible; thanks to people, just like you, who follow the guidelines and our moderators who work to make sure those who forget, remember. We learn by teaching. Everyone learns from each other. Even the expert learns from the novice.

Running a tight ship means true freedom. Everyone is free to post and not be bullied, as long as they show respect to the rest of the community and follow a few simple guidelines. In order to have freedom, the rights of the individual to express themselves must not be compromised, as long as the person expressing themselves does not infringe upon the rights of others.

There are many forums and communities on the net. We don’t claim to be the best and we have no ambition to be the largest or the biggest. We simply want to insure that all people who are interested in Linux and Unix-based systems can interact with each other, at all age, skill and experience levels. We are not interested in “what distribution is better or worse”. We are interested in solving problems and helping everyone be more productive, without concern about what flavor of UNIX or Linux we happen to be using that day, week, month or year.

As always, thank you for contributing to The UNIX and Linux Forums.