This page is meant to give a bit of a conceptual overview of this web site and to highlight some of its differences compared to many web sites. If you were around with our old debianHELP site, that site was primarily a Q&A help forum -- basically a forum with some frills.
Content
This site may seem similar to our old site but it isn't. The focus on this site is not a forum -- the primary focus is on content.
Content is anything written/submitted by you or I or other users. Content could be an entire book or a book page. Content could be a blog entry. Content could be a story intended for the front page. Content could be an image uploaded, either into a photo gallery or a graphic used to illustrate a web page you created. And content could be you creating a new forum topic.
All of the above are examples of content and all are viewed the same way by the web site -- they're just content of different types.
Comments
Any and every piece of content can have zero, one, or more comments attached to it. This is a key point. You can comment on any book or web page just like you can comment on a forum topic or even an uploaded image/graphic.
Now bear with me, but I want to make sure you grok this point to realize the difference between this site and many others.
Since we have many different types of content and each piece of content can have conversational threads of comments attached to the content, there's no telling where conversations will pop up.
You'd expect to have meandering conversations in the comments attached to forum topics -- that's only logical.
But let's imagine you created a HOW-TO web page about recompiling your Debian kernel. You might have conversations attached to that web page. Hopefully those conversations will be focused on the topic of your page, but they could be conversations nonetheless.
Now imagine conversations attached to images or blog entries -- the old (and frankly more restrictive) idea of conversations only in the forums is blown out of the water.
Organization
With many sites seeing what is happening is easy -- you look at the forums and you look on the front page.
With debianHELP's decentralized layout and the ability to attach comments to any content, it makes the process of seeing what is happening more difficult.
To make this easier, there are two blocks on the front page:
· One displays recent new content -- any and all types of content.
· The other displays new comments -- comments attached to any and all types of content.
Since the key focus of the site is content, you'll also want to make extensive use of the site's tracker. You'll see the tracker listed above left in the menu as recent posts -- people posting new content.