Hi, We briefly discussed the topic "official openSUSE forums" in yesterday's openSUSE IRC meeting. You can find the meeting minutes and the IRC log at http://www.opensuse.org/2006-01-24-status-meeting . (The forum discussion starts at timestamp 19:08 in the logs ;-).) It was decided to take the discussion back to this list, as the potential target group for a web forum is unlikely to participate in IRC meetings. We hope to catch some of you here, and gather opinions from all the others who couldn't attend the meeting as well. The first question is: do we need/want an official openSUSE web forum? Why? What would you expect from it, compared to the existing SUSE community forums? Let me summarize some background information to the question. - We do not want to take resources away from the distribution itself or the work on the build service to set up and maintain a web forum, as we don't see it as a high priority for the openSUSE project at the moment. If you don't agree, we would like to hear your feedback now. - When we started the openSUSE project, we wanted to honor the existing SUSE community. This means that we would like to integrate them into the openSUSE project if and as much as desired, and that we don't want to create competition to existing community projects. - We were offered to use a new forum solution provided by another Novell department. However, at the moment we do not know when this solution would be available. It would also be most likely a closed source solution. On the plus side, there is an existing user community already answering support questions (as on all the other forums linked from the opensuse.org wiki). Possible solutions right now would be: - Do not change anything. We link to established web forums in the SUSE community from the "Communicate" page in the wiki. Everybody looking for a forum should find one to their taste. None of them is "the" official openSUSE forum. - Create a new forum running on an open source web forum software and name it the official one. This can be hosted either at Novell or elsewhere, accessible through forums.opensuse.org. (This would be a competing project as described above.) - "Bless" one of the existing community forums to be the official one. - Wait for the new software for the Novell support forums and use them. Which solution would you prefer (including those not in my list)? I know I'm asking quite a complex question here ;-) Thanks for your feedback, Sonja -- Sonja Krause-Harder (skh@suse.de) Research & Development SUSE Linux Products GmbH