my proposition: maintain a separate version of firefox 'with noscript addon' in the community section of the forum
That really does seem to be the best solution. I admire donald's enthusiasm and I also admire fanthom's attention to minimizing the iso size.
dismayed by the 3% member base voting about
The voting turnout may reflect only 0.3% of the total users. How few bother to even register a forum account? Although it seems reasonable to expect that sooner or later (probably sooner) every user would find a motivation/reason to post in the forum... FWIW, that's not what I've observed throughout the past several years in monitoring the forums of various distros. A year back, when we pondered the lack of SalineOS forum activity (in contrast to its continual 1000+ sourceforge downloads per month stats) I heard "guess everyone is just happy with it as is. It just works, so users feel no need to post questions, or suggestions, to the forum"... but I suspected that discrepancy reflected a lack of stickiness (user downloads, tries, immediately decides "this is not for me" and moves on). The same conversation, and my same inference, arose recently regarding the refracta distro. Similar, but probably even more extreme, is the apparent "lack of participation" among antix users. Thousands of downloads per month, yet only about a dozen active forum participants. Specific to antix, during web searches I've encountered many "in Spanish (Portuguese?)" links; seems those users congregate (and participate) elsewhere, not at the distro's official (documented) forum.
might indicate that many or most non-returnee first-timers and newbie try-outs of Porteus may've been put off by the scripts and cheatsheet thingies and the time/date issues and relatively scant software offerings
Same as with the pattern seen with other distros, yeah I'd chalk it up to downloads by primarily curious tirekickers. They're not necessarily intimidated by, or put off by, whatever Porteus does, or does not, contain... and if you bendoverbackwards to accommodate the requests/suggestions of the few users who do sound off in the forum, you wind up with??? I'd say vsido.org fits, as an example of where things wind up in that case. You wind up with a small community, a couple dozen passionate users (who, each, have seen one or several of their suggestions implemented)... but not necessarily a community of evangelists. Crunchbang stands as a polar opposite example: users get what they get, when they get it -- the thousands of next version suggestions/requests posted to the forums have near-zero impact on the course of the distro (or the frequency of next-version releases). Wow, it's a headscratcher to me that crunchbang is, apparently, "mainstream" and that its users are evangelistic.
mention of a possible merge-collaboration between Porteus and Refracta
What mention would that be jimwg?
Maybe jim managed read my initial post to this "bug/feedback" thread during the 5 minutes betweeen when I first posted, then decided to bite my tongue and edited, redacting most of it?
or maybe the prospect of mergers (er, mix-n-match) are on jim's mind, in general:
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=160830
My first-draft is still available via google cache. Jim, what I had written was:
seems to me the Puppians would be further ahead by embracing refracta or antix
and that's based on the impression that those Puppy+Wheezy+Porteus Puppians are needlessly attempting to reinvent the Debian/refracta packaging+remastering wheel. As a distro, refracta is bit too "stable" (stale) for my taste, but its installer and remastering/snapshotting tools are great.
I suspect most newbies are like myself and only visit the Newbie section of the forum
Good point! ...and, if most new-to-Porteus users find an answer by searching the forum (in contrast with "large, noisy" communities where lazynoobs ask the same questions repeatedly, ad nauseum) that would help explain why so few chime in.