(1 hour ago)LL-user Wrote: I fully support the goal to reduce the massive waste of time on both sides by having to go back and forth only to get mostly common sense information before even being able to start working on an issue.
As the user profile offers to submit/mention this basic information, would it be possible to make the "system specs" submission with a new thread conditional, i.e. only necessary IF they are not mentioned on the profile page? If this is not possible via algorithm (IF section in profile has been filled in, THEN no "system specs" section will be shown when starting a thread), maybe a simple additional, but prominent checkbox at the beginning of the "system specs" section would do, along the lines "My system specs are listed on my profile."?
Thanks - that's a genuinely constructive suggestion, and I appreciate that you're on board with the goal. You've clearly thought about the friction, and a "specs are on my profile" checkbox or a conditional field is exactly the kind of thing that sounds like it should work. Let me explain why we're keeping specs per-thread rather than going down that road.
The core problem is that a profile is a static snapshot, the thread is a live one. People upgrade RAM, swap a GPU, change kernels, dual-boot, or distro-hop — a profile reflects whatever was true the day it was last edited, which might be a year ago. The specs that matter for diagnosing an issue are the machine as it is right now, for this problem: current kernel, current driver version, what changed just before it broke. A profile can't tell us that, and worse, it can quietly mislead us into chasing the wrong hardware.
It also doesn't survive the common case of more than one machine. Plenty of users post from a desktop one week and a laptop the next; a profile only holds one set of specs, so we'd still have to ask "is this the machine in your profile, or the other one?" - which is the exact back-and-forth we're trying to eliminate.
The checkbox idea runs into the same wall from the helper's side. "My specs are on my profile" still forces whoever's helping to click away, find the profile, and then verify it's current before trusting it - so it doesn't actually save the round-trip, it just moves it onto the volunteer. The whole point is that the thread should be self-contained: everything needed to start work is right there, both for the person answering today and for the next person who hits the same issue via search months later.
And the cost to you is genuinely small - it's a copy-paste once per thread, and your specs rarely change between posts so you can keep them handy. That tiny effort on the asker's side saves a much larger, repeated chunk of time across everyone doing the helping. That asymmetry is the whole reason we land where we do. People coming here are asked to do so little, and in return for that they get targeted, specific solutions.
So we'll be keeping it as-is - not because the suggestion lacks merit, but because a per-thread snapshot is the only version that's reliably accurate, machine-correct, and self-contained. Hope that explains the reasoning rather than just the rule.
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