As Ubuntu gets more attention in the general media (which is a very good thing), people get more questions they'd like to get answers to. For instance, HUD is going to attract a lot of curiosity.

Questions of that kind will not be useful forever, but they can be quite important in the interim. The media, as we know, tend to not always present the absolute truths. I think it would be good if we could use AskUbuntu to answer some of those questions in order to stop the misconceptions before they become widely accepted.

I would therefore suggest using tags such as future-1204 that can be used to identify these types of questions. That way, we can easily manage them when the future becomes present.

I really don't like the notion that when users are enthusiastic about the future and comes to us in order to learn, that we turn them away by saying it's off-topic and closing the question. In fact, I think it's the opposite of what we should do. We should welcome the enthusiasts and use AskUbuntu to spread high quality information about what's going on in the development scene. That way, when a news site presents incorrect information, people can link to a question on AskUbuntu to clear it up.


We tried this when Unity launched as Mark and the rest of the DX team answered Unity questions. Instead of asking how Unity works most of the questions were hypothetical.

The problem with this is it becomes open ended and the only real answer is either "We'll know when someone writes it" or asking the community to guess what the answer is, which is what you see on other places. When those kinds of questions are allowed then we get flooded with things like "Will the panel ever support unicorns?" instead of real user questions that solve problems.

What we usually do is as we get closer to beta and past feature freeze and UI is when we start to loosen up and allow these sorts of questions, but right now things are moving to fast to be useful.

For example it makes no sense right now to answer HUD questions as it's not in the distro and not even finished, there's not many questions we can answer other than the one on how to install it and report bugs.

  • 1
    I see your point, but isn't that really a question of our own discipline? If something hasn't been decided yet, then we can explain why it hasn't. If it's not certain that it'll be stable enough for inclusion, we can say so. If there's disagreement, then we can explain what the disagreement is about. If it's a question about how something will work, then we can explain how it currently works, and be sure to explain that this is not necessarily how it will work when it's released. If there's a question about whether something will ever happen, it can be closed. – Jo-Erlend Schinstad Jan 26 '12 at 15:33
  • @Jo-ErlendSchinstad Ok, feel free to post some guidelines on how you'd like to see it done and we can let people vote on it! – Jorge Castro Jan 26 '12 at 15:35
  • Ok, should I just provide that as an answer? – Jo-Erlend Schinstad Jan 26 '12 at 15:40
  • @Jo-ErlendSchinstad Yep. – Jorge Castro Jan 26 '12 at 16:07

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