Also reddit forum are places where lot of tech guys hang out ipfire reddit forum have 2 years old post… nothing lately
We did not set up the Reddit for IPFire and the person who did is very unresponsive.
We must setup one and post everything there visibility will increase imo since all young generations use reddit as facebook…
I have never done anything with reddit, never even looked at anything on it, but then I am old.
I just tried to access it via my mobile and it insisted that I had to use the reddit app due to the content not having been reviewed.
Downloaded the app and immediately there was a box trying to sell me something. After installing, to be able to view the content I would have had to log in to reddit by providing my phone number and email address, which I refused to do.
Interesting enough on a PC browser you can access the IPFire reddit without needing to provide lots of personal information.
Reading through some of the posts, it basically looks like a clone of this forum with a few users asking similar questions as found on here but with not very much response to them.
From my point of view I would prefer to concentrate on the official IPFire Community forum. I just don’t have the time to also review and support a second support forum.
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I’m generally no friend of second/third/… sources.
How much effort is necessary to check these for false ( or misleading ) information?
Your project already supports broad co-working of users:
- development is open source, everybody can produce corrections and improvements of the system
- every user can ask and answer in our community
- every registered user can improve the documentation aka wiki
For efficiency it is IMO mandatory that these channels are hosted by the project’s infrastructure.
For public ‘advertising’, I think it is sufficient that IPFire is cited in List of router and firewall distributions - Wikipedia
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After all, I think an experienced technician looking for a good firewall doesn’t look much at social media, but at sites like the one reported. It’s easy to find false information on the net. Better to rely on professional sources 
.
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BTW:
Distrowatch will be updated soon. I’ve contacted them. The problem is/was, they relied on IPFire’s RSS feed.
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How does Distrowatch count their page hit rankings on the right side of their main page? Is it page hits to this page?
I think it would help (maybe only a little?) if Michael wrote a blog post asking IPFire users to visit the page periodically and write an honest review of IPFire while they’re there. Only 9 reviews so far. I plan on writing one when I get a chance. Maybe if we can move the OS up their list it will provide more exposure and potentially more users.
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I am not an expert on DistroWatch. So could I write a review there too? Spontaneously talking about how I got to know IPFire? Does one have to use a form of “suitable tones” or can one write openly like a normal review?
I just wrote one. No personal information required, speak openly and freely. They do moderate the reviews before posting but as long as you are honest and professional, it should get posted without issues.
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Okay. As is the case with all the reviews. I honestly can say that I have discovered a very good free firewall, professional and easy to use for everyone. I can invite people to check out the forum, saying that experts and users always give the best answers and all members are diligent to respond. And maybe also mention the invitation for donation, which helps to continue with the project for the future. What do you guys think? Can I publish this review. Is English mandatory? Or can I write the review in my original language?
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I don’t use social media in most forms. I do have several mailing lists I follow as well as various forum and website accounts. I’m not a fan of Discord. Some of my favorite IT news site is https://www.theregister.com and my favorite Linux site is actually https://www.phoronix.com
I also think we need to write a performance test article comparing ipfire to various other distros examples like this
https://blog.kroy.io/2019/11/21/battle-of-the-bare-metal-routers/
People love performance test
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I did not know this was a real thing.
https://www.sophos.com/en-us/free-tools/sophos-xg-firewall-home-edition
Competition?
I have used the hpme edition locks down ram usage to 6gb ,the web gui is counter intuitive confusing
A while back, I wrote a brief review of what I discovered using Sophos XG. From a package point of view, it’s not very well maintained, but I haven’t checked it since.
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I think we must be active in this reddit forum as most people ask network/firewall questions here. because the people who come to this forum are only hardcore users of ipfire ,but window shoppers usually visit reddit forums and then when they are impressed by people reviews visit official forum…
https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeNetworking/
examples
https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeNetworking/comments/17475jj/ipfire_multiple_access_points/
https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeNetworking/comments/n1iqwy/sophos_home_license_or_ipfire_or_opnsense/
I see that IPFIre is now at the top of Distrowatch’s homepage for a day or so. That is good. I don’t see any other reviews written besides mine (most recent at the top). I encourage users seeing this to spend 5 minutes writing a review here:
Maybe it won’t help a lot, but it should at least help a little with providing more exposure to IPFire.
I have searched YouTube for IPFire and found a few users who have reviewed it recently. Quality of the videos varies. Perhaps if the team reviewed these videos and found one or two that they felt was representative, they could somehow use them. Either link to them, or ask the authors for permission to use them on the IPFire site.
What was talked about earlier was You Tube IPFire How To videos, not You Tube reviews of IPFire.
If good You Tube Videos of IPFire How Tos are found then they can be highlighted in this forum or maybe better added into the appropriate location in the documentation.
This really needs forum users to step up and support on this type of topic. The developers need to focus on the updates, on IPFire3, on the roadmap issues, on the package updates and Core Update releases and on IPFire bugs.
There are currently 431 open bugs in the IPFire bugzilla. Not all of these can be supported by IPFire users as some are related to the website or to infrastructure issues. However the bugs related to IPFire-2.x can also be picked up by IPFire community users. There are quite a few that have an assignee of
Assigned to nobody - feel free to grab it and work on it
Feel free to take ownership of some of those bugs and figure out what the root cause issue is and submit a patch to fix it.
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