Hi, Excuse my intrusion into the discussion, but if I can help answer questions, I'd be glad to.   My name is Kim Groneman and I'm in charge of the forums at http://forums.novell.com and our openSUSE forums are one of the three partners involved in this endeavor.  I've been in discussion with the folks over the other two boards and people at openSUSE for a while now and am excited this consolidation of the knowledge pool is coming together.  

 >The announcement said spring 2008. So right now they are still separate
>forums.

We're using vBulletin to build out the new openSUSE forums on a staging server, folks at openSUSE are working on skinning it, and "Vir@s" from the SUSELinuxSupport.de boards is heading up the user consolidation effort.  You should see some announcements on the various boards asking users to ensure their user ID matches their openSUSE login ID and hopefully most active users will be set by the time the integration occures.    We're shooting for the end of April baring any unforseen problems, but you know how these things are; we can't make any promises at this point.  

>It will have a Web Interface (vBulletin) and there is discussion going
>on around NNTP as well. Personally I think it should have both.

I agree, but I'm only borg unit three of three.  There are security concerns that have to be addressed and frankly, a learning curve to overcome for people that haven't experienced NNTP.  Novell doesn't run this forum consolidation project, we're only a player in this project.

You won't see much on forums.opensuse.org until it's showtime, but rest assured the work is progressing.