Community, without much enthusiam I read this thread which is packed with inappropriate attacks and dis-respect. I wonder what we're trying to achieve as a community here. May someone tell me? From my perspective, and I have a pretty good insight into the forums as you may assume, the forums administration shouldn't be a target of frustration and un-deliberated comments about their contribution to the openSUSE Project. Having a bit more of a REAL insight into the forums, I have to outline that bashing the forums for being a incompetent accumulation of in-efficiency and deny them of being interested in collaboartion simply doesn't hold true. First of all, it's inappropriate to cite soapbox forums discussion, because they have nothing to do with competency but cover everything from current events to bananas. Second of all, while reading this particular thread, Jim Henderson, our well-respected forums admin, is that particular discussion participant that actually is accessible and tries to collaborate. I can't see this from the other side of the fence, sorry. It's anyway unfortunate that we need to talk about fences here. We're community and we have the very same goal in mind. We're not in war with each other. I hope so at least. To remain on topic, I take the time to explain something pretty straightforward to the audience: The forums are a VERY important part of the community as it's the communication medium that is to be seen as the "low hanging fruit". Unbelievable for nerds maybe, but most of the population doesn't even know what a mailing list actually is. That said, Jim Henderson correctly outlined that a pool of contributors is recruited out of a pool of users and thus it's imho ridiculous and btw harmful to the Project's Goals to bash the forums in that regard just for the reason to obscure the REAL reason we fail in growing our community (yes Gentlemen, that's our problem): The real reason from my perspective is the climate and thinking behind statements like: "So they either will start touse communication channels that are used by the rest of the world to provide their input or their input will get lost within all that mess that currently makes up those "forums"." Putting forums in double quotes? Do I need to tell you more about reasons of separation within the community? I know that I won't make friends by sending this but IMO we should think about solving the issues we have and the solution is simple. You, developers/experienced users, need to participate in the forums if you're serious with growing Community. You need to be accessible to proposals out of the "enemies'" headquarters. The forums administartion often asked for mailing list/forums integration without any responses, we set up NNTP for people not aligned to a web interface etc etc. What have you done? This isn't a forums issue and the reason that the forums are divided from the rest is to search for outside the forums not inside. There are communities able to solve these issues as they focus on the lowest entry border - look at Ubuntu. Why do you think their community is growing? As they are bashing their lowest hanging fruit medium? Obviously not! They are friendly (internally and especially to the outside) and that's the area we fail. We have brilliant developers and tools in place to rock the world but we're too silly to utilize those and this honestly is discouraging. Why don't you get started really reflecting where our issues are and start solving it by changing your minds. That way we may achieve what we all want to achieve, as a team, across communication media! My proposal would be to sit together and bring issues to the table and think about resolving those, e.g. with a mailing list/forums integration. Even more important is to understand that forums are needed and it's impossible to align forum users to mailing lists. Get your ass to the forums (sorry!) and interact with the community of 45.000+ users out there. Teach them and lower the border into our community. Is that that difficult. Sorry but if you tell me it actually is, I'm not that sure if you're really serious with the goal in recruitinmg contributors and if I'm not completely out of discussion that's our common goal, isn't it? Respectfully, R -- Rupert Horstkötter open-slx Community Manager openSUSE Board Member http://open-slx.com/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org