Ask Ubuntu reaches new milestone: 100,000 questions!

Today, Ask Ubuntu crossed a major milestone in the history of the site. Yes, there are now over 100,000 questions asked on Ask Ubuntu.

This would be our 100,000th question:

What Unity Lenses and Scopes are available to add?

_{*Funnily enough, this question is actually a duplicate of another question already asked.}

Here’s a rough graphical representation of how Ask Ubuntu has fared since its launch in terms of questions asked:

Clearly, there are still tons of questions that are unanswered. To be accurate, there are about 25,000 questions yet to be answered. Unfortunately, bringing this number down cannot be achieved without help from people like you. If you think you have what it takes, please consider taking a look at our list of unanswered questions and answering them as you see fit.

Ask Ubuntu community moderator election is now underway!

We are having community moderator elections for the year 2013 in order to accommodate the growing community at Ask Ubuntu. The elected moderators from this year’s election will complement the current moderators, as is the policy with Stack Exchange network of sites.

Ask Ubuntu had some tremendous growth in the year 2012 and the stats only prove that:

• Over 50,000 questions,
• 60,000 more users and
• more than tripling the daily traffic to 217k visits/day.

If you are one of those nice blokes (like the current set of moderators ) and is willing to help make Ask Ubuntu an even better place, please do consider nominating yourself for the upcoming moderator elections. The nomination phase runs for the next 7 days followed by the voting on the nominees. Do note that the nominees are required to have at least 300 reputation. Anyone with over 150 reputation will be part of the electorate and can vote on the nominees during the election phase.

People interested in discussing the election or any of the nominations, please consider joining the chat room for Ask Ubuntu elections.

Or, we can always use some help with answering the questions. Here’s a good place to start.

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UPDATE:

Ask Ubuntu moderator election 2013 is now over and the following community members have been elected as moderators:

• jokerdino
• Rolandixor
• Luis Alvarado

Ask Ubuntu update for November 2012

Data dumps
Ask Ubuntu, as part of the Stack Exchange network of sites, licenses all the user contributed data by CC BY-SA 3.0 license. As part of the licensing, the data are made public by data dumps every quarterly. Starting this month, however, the data dumps would be made available every week.

This makes it much easier to keep track of interesting data queries and Jorge Castro shares some of them here. If you could spare some time, go through some of the data queries and flag the questions and review the posts and what not. It would help us improve our currently flailing answered rate.

Self-learners
We have users who run into a problem and then eventually find a solution on their own and then come back to document the solution themselves. As an attempt to reward such users by reviewing and upvoting quality answers from them, Jorge Castro blogs about how to “hat tip” to them.

Top contributors
Following are the top five contributors who have accrued the most reputation points in the month of November.

Hottest questions
Some of the hottest questions for the month of November:

• What is the command line equivalent of copying a file to clipboard?
• Why limit the number of open files and Running processes in Linux?
• How do I throttle a command in a terminal window?

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Ask Ubuntu update for October 2012

12.10 release
As most of us know, 12.10 was released earlier this month. As always, we have users running into issues and questions that are in need of some love and if you can spare some time to help some of the users, that would be greatly appreciated. Here’s the link to the latest 12.10 questions asked on the site. Do remember to answer the given question with adequate explanation. Pretty screenshots when and where necessary would be a nice addition!

Ask Ubuntu’s second birthday

It might come as a pleasant surprise to many as Ask Ubuntu celebrated its second birthday earlier this month. Having been launched to the public on October 10, 2010 along with the release of Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat, the site has since seen significant growth keeping in tandem with the rising popularity of Ubuntu across the world.

New milestone: 100,000 answers
Second birthday notwithstanding, Ask Ubuntu clocked yet another milestone of 100,000 answers this October. With over 70,000 questions and 80,000 users, Ask Ubuntu is fast growing into the go-to place for all your questions about Ubuntu ranging from the recent Ubuntu Nexus project and application development to the juju charms and the general troubleshooting.

Ask Ubuntu session in UDS
We have a separate session in UDS-R to discuss the continued Ask Ubuntu integration and other Ask Ubuntu related tasks. The session is scheduled to be on November 1st in the evening and everyone who has a keen interest in Ask Ubuntu is invited to attend either physically (if you happen to be in Copenhagen, Denmark) or remotely through IRC. Given that the current scheduled time is subject to changes, you are advised to keep an eye on the UDS-R schedule.

StackIRC – IRC bot that posts questions from Stack Exchange sites
We are glad to announce that our wonderful community member George Edison has written an IRC bot that posts questions of a particular tag in IRC channels. The bot is already running in IRC channels #juju, #ubuntu-community-team and #ubuntu-app-devel with plans to cover more channels in the near future.

You can also set up your own bot if you are interested in tracking specific tags in Ask Ubuntu or other Stack Exchange sites in IRC. Instructions for setting up and using the bot can be found here:
https://github.com/nathan-osman/StackIRC

Top contributors
Following are the top five contributors who have accrued the most reputation points in the month of October.

Hottest questions
Some of the hottest questions for the month of October:

• What are the differences between sudo, su, visudo, chroot and gksu?
• How can I instruct Nautilus to pre-generate PDF thumbnails?
• Find directories that DON’T contain a file

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Ask Ubuntu update for September 2012

Marco Ceppi’s interview with OSS Watch
Marco Ceppi, one of the community moderators of Ask Ubuntu, was interviewed by Mark Johnson for OSS watch. Marco Ceppi explains the target of the site are “those people who have a problem, go to a search engine, then click a link and expect a fix.” Marco also notes that there were resistance to Ask Ubuntu initially but the general Ubuntu community has fully accepted Ask Ubuntu for what it brings to the table.

Top contributors
Following are the top five contributors who have accrued the most reputation points in the month of September.

Hottest questions
Some of the hottest questions for the month of September:

• How to get an email notification when an USB storage device is inserted?
• What is the purpose of the -9 option in the kill command?
• How do I lock the screen from the terminal?
• What is the equivalent of the “tracert” DOS command?

Wikipedia page
The Wikipedia article for Ask Ubuntu has been updated to include the updated Alexa page rank as well as the number of users and questions on the site. As it is on Wikipedia, if you think the article could be improved upon, feel free to edit it and add more information as you see fits. We are always looking for more help.

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If you are looking to help, the featured questions should be a good place to start. If you are interested in the site, you can sign up for the newsletter and you will be kept informed of quality questions and answers every week.

In case you are struck and is looking for help on how to use the site, feel free to ask your doubts on the Ask Ubuntu meta or join us in the chat*.

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Why I think Jorge Castro is actually a bot!

Time and again, someone starts to wonder if Jorge Castro is a human or really a robot disguised as one. With the amount of things he does in Ask Ubuntu, I think it is only fair that someone wonders the true nature of him. With the need and curiosity to dig out the truth behind the greatest mystery of all time in Ask Ubuntu, I set out to collect some hard hitting facts about some of his activities in Ask Ubuntu.

Of the 161860 posts that are on Ask Ubuntu, Jorge Castro has managed to edit a staggering 14605 of them and vote on a good 18588 posts. If you can’t comprehend that, here’s the deal in a much simpler way: Jorge edited 9.02% of all posts on Ask Ubuntu and vote on 11.48% posts.

Pretty graph of Jorge Castro’s roller coaster reputation:

Now, if you are wondering why the reputation seems to have stopped after a while, it is because Jorge Castro has turned into a true altruist, giving away his hard-earned (!) reputation as bounties. He has given away nearly half of what he has earned overall, to the point that he now has given away more than what he has currently. A staggering 191 offered bounties for a lump sum of 22,550 reputation.

Here’s the not so full set of stats about Jorge Castro (it took a good couple of minutes to populate the data):

Statistics for Jorge Castro (235):
- Reputation: 21761 ⚫ 36 ⚫ 168 ⚫ 340
- Member of askubuntu.com since Thu Jul 29 19:07:34 2010
- Last activity on Tue Sep 25 22:29:36 2012
- 20818 views of profile page

- Asked 109 questions
- Answered 735 questions (336 accepted answers, 45.71%)
- Commented 2682 times (received 919 'great comment' votes)
- The average comment received 0.34 votes (min: 0, max: 8)

- Voted on 17696 posts (16764 upvotes, 932 downvotes)
- Edited 15709 entries (13213 without re-tagging)

- Total votes received: +5457
- Received 5475 up-votes (1362 on questions, 4113 on answers)
- Received 18 down-votes (2 on questions, 16 on answers)
- Average score 6.47 (12.48 on questions, 5.57 on answers)

- Views of questions: 385218 (min/avg/max: 29, 3534.11, 52034)
- Views of answers: 1809185 (min/avg/max: 15, 2461.48, 212807)

- Reputation from questions: 7012
- Reputation from answers: 46138
- Average reputation per day: 27

Without needing to say, I think Jorge Castro is indeed a bot.

_{By the way, we are in the midst of getting askjorge.com aliased to askubuntu.com.}

Ask Ubuntu update for August 2012

Earlier this month, one of our community moderators Marco Ceppi was asking for feedback on how Ask Ubuntu is working for most of the users. The feedback received has been generally positive, suggesting that Ask Ubuntu has been nice and helpful for the general public. Not possible without the kind contributors. Here’s a flower for your generosity:

Top contributors
Following are the top five contributors who have accrued the most reputation points in the month of August.

And this month’s special mention goes to msPeachy for helping the site by improving the posts with her edits:

Hottest questions
Some of the hottest questions for the month of August:

• Is “laptop-mode-tools” still relevant for 12.04 and the 3.x kernels?
• Why isn’t VLC the default Video player?
• How to prevent my screen from dimming when watching YouTube?

New review system
The new beta review system that has been doing the rounds in other Stack Exchange sites has finally landed in Ask Ubuntu. It promises to make reviewing the posts less painful than ever before. One caveat though: You need at least 2000 reputation to review at the moment.

Ask Ubuntu on Trello
If you already didn’t know, Ask Ubuntu has a Trello board. For those of you who use Trello board to organize your team workflow and want to follow or chip in with the administrative work, feel free to join the Trello board and contribute or collaborate as you see fits.

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If you are looking to help, the featured questions should be a good place to start. If you are interested in the site, you can sign up for the newsletter and you will be kept informed of quality questions and answers every week.

In case you are struck and is looking for help on how to use the site, feel free to ask your doubts on the Ask Ubuntu meta or join us in the chat*.

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Ask Ubuntu update for July 2012

Ever since the 12.04 release, Ask Ubuntu has done beyond pulling its own weight. With the site receiving almost 180 questions and about 138,000 visits every day, it might be surprising to see the high level of quality maintained in most of the posts but all thanks should go to the community and the moderators who are working tirelessly to get everything in order.

Highlights of this month:

Hottest questions
Some of the hottest questions for the month of July:

• How can I undo the last cd command?
• Why is swap being used even though I have plenty of free RAM?
• How are packages actually installed via apt-get install?

Ask Ubuntu on Google Plus
Ask Ubuntu has a fan page on Google +. People who are active on Google + can circle us there and receive regular updates on interesting and useful content on the site. A circle containing all of our splendid community moderators has been created and shared as well. Feel free to circle them and show your support and appreciation. Another circle containing the top users of Ask Ubuntu is in the works and will be shared shortly once we have finished forming the circle.

Second year anniversary
It’s been two years since Ask Ubuntu first entered the private beta on 28-7-2010. The first question to be asked on the website was George Edison’s How to get the “Your battery is broken” message to go away? Since that remarkable day, over 60,000 questions and 85,000 answers have been posted on the site, making Ask Ubuntu one of the most useful repository of collective knowledge regarding Ubuntu. Join us as we celebrate an important milestone in the history of Ask Ubuntu as we continually transform the site into a great source of information for millions of Ubuntu users across the world.

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If you are looking to help, the featured questions should be a good place to start. If you are interested in the site, you can sign up for the newsletter and you will be kept informed of quality questions and answers every week.

In case you are struck and is looking for help on how to use the site, feel free to ask your doubts on the Ask Ubuntu meta or join us in the chat*.

_{*Requires 20 reputation to participate in the chat.}

Ask Ubuntu update for June 2012

After the 12.04 release madness, the site’s traffic has gone down a bit. Nonetheless, we are still getting a considerable number of quality questions and answers every day. Lots of things are happening behind the scenes in Ask Ubuntu. Of which the following are noteworthy

Hottest questions
Some of the hottest questions for the month of June:

• What is the best way of testing Ubuntu on my computer?
• How do I use pm-suspend-hybrid by default instead of pm-suspend?
• How can I get octal file permissions from command line?
• Python script: How do I execute a sudo-command without needing a password?
• How does this [t]ricky bracket expression in grep work?

Ask Ubuntu on Twitter
Most regular users of Ask Ubuntu would have already known that Ask Ubuntu is on Twitter. Until recently, this account was using the handle @stackubuntu. Now that we have the Twitter handle @askubuntu, Ask Ubuntu account on Twitter has been renamed to @askubuntu. This Twitter account tweets interesting questions and answers, questions that are bountied and important community discussions. So, if you are on Twitter, please do follow @askubuntu and keep yourselves up to date with the interesting content in our site.

Ubuntu Accomplishments System
Ask Ubuntu badges are now available as opportunities in Ubuntu Accomplishments system. Work has been put in to sufficiently document several of the badges but we still have considerable number of badges to be documented. If you are interested in documenting them, check the list of badges that are already completed and finish off those that are not.

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If you are looking to help, the featured questions should be a good place to start. If you are interested in the site, you can sign up for the newsletter and you will be kept informed of quality questions and answers every week.

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Ask Ubuntu update for May 2012

This month has been fantastic for Ask Ubuntu. With the 12.04 released just a month ago, Ask Ubuntu has been pretty active for the past couple of weeks. There has been a large influx of new users trying to get their questions answered and considerable number of users joining Ask Ubuntu to help out stranded users as well.

Hottest questions
Some of the hottest questions for the month of May:

• How to understand the Ubuntu file system layout?
• How do I add a DNS server via resolv.conf?
• Promoting an app in the Ubuntu software-center through a ratings and reviews API
• Is Seagate’s new “FAST Factor Boot” technology compatible with Ubuntu?

50,000 questions!
Earlier today, we just reached yet another milestone of 50,000 questions. With almost 55,000 registered users, Ask Ubuntu has been growing from strength to strength since it was launched in October 2010.

Deeper integration with the IRC community
With plans to get Ask Ubuntu integrated with the rest of the community, preliminary steps towards that have already been kickstarted. Community member Amith KK has implemented a preliminary bot setup that posts links to the questions that have specific tags. His bot twobottux is currently serving #ubuntu-community-team, #juju and #application-development. If you are interested in having this bot in your room, please do let us know.

If you are looking to help, the featured questions should be a good place to start. If you are interested in the site and want to be informed of some of the good questions and answers, you can sign up for the newsletter.

In case you are struck and is looking for help on how to use the site, feel free to ask your doubts on the Ask Ubuntu meta or join us in the chat*.

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