Welcome to LxH Multi-Distro Linux Support Forum and Community

LxH 2006 -2010

LxH  started out as a small community forum hosted at Forumer in 2006, then went to it’s own Godaddy server in 2007. A year later it was moved to ICDSoft where it remains today. It has had 3 domain names, but has settled on the LxH name, even though home and work-based firewall filters sometimes block the site for having the word “Hardcore” in the title. (I should have thought that one through a little better).

Why Create Yet Another Linux Support Forum?

We are/were all members of larger Linux distro support forums, and noticed that as forums become bigger, the community becomes more impersonal. Larger communities need stricter moderation, more rules and therefore more control. A smaller community needs practically no (people) moderation, only (site) administration. As we aren’t the public image for a company, we don’t have to censor what people post, and therefore the discussions are more “real life”, and permit free speech to a certain extent. See the Forum Rules to get an idea of what is and isn’t permitted.

Forum Software

The forum has almost exclusively been run on the SMF forum script, apart from a short-lived experiment with PhPBB in 2007. There have been various designs, layouts and ideas, but basically has now gone with the easier route of having WordPress as a Frontpage due to it’s flexibility and custom plugins.

I tried various SMF portals, Joomla, Drupal cms’s, but none seemed to provide what we were looking for.  I even looked at vBulletin as an option until I realized that using proprietary forum software would be pretty hypocritical for a Linux/Foss based forum. Planet was also recently added to keep everybody updated with LxH members’ and friends’ blogs.

Statistics

LxH currently has over 16,000 Posts in over 2,000 Topics by over 150 active Members. The Member List is “spring cleaned” regularly and any zero posters, or members who haven’t logged in for a while get removed. Many forums leave all members intact to look “busy”, I prefer to keep things clean. It’s quality, not quantity that counts. Whatsmore, LxH is /home for a few “hardcore” friends and was never meant to be the size of Ubuntu Forums for example. LxH Distro-Tests, Howto Guides and Articles regularly attract over 200,000 hits per month.

Other LxH Founded Sites

We set up and manage: Dreamlinux Forums, Fossunet (Facebook for Foss/Linux users), Linux Gaming News, Conky Hardcore!, LxH Clan Wars (A Travian style MORPG).

Our Personal LxH blogs

We also have LxH Planet which is regularly updated with blog posts from the lxh community and friends of ours.

richs-lxh, resa, djsroknrol, palemoon, ch@d

The Future

Who knows? People come and go, ideas come up, there are highs and lulls. LxH could be here in 10 years time, it could be closed down in 6 months. It’s a very small place on a very large internet. But for the moment, we are here, and you are very welcome to join in.