On Wednesday 25 January 2006 09:25, Sonja Krause-Harder wrote: .<snip>
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?
I think so. The communicate page does give all the users a way to find and participate in forums, mailing lists, etc, thats true... but I believe a more directly accessible forum through opensuse.org would be easier and preferable. I would also like to note suseforums.net, my preferred suse forum, has been down for several days now with a note of "Account Suspended". I'm not sure whats going on, and I'm sure the admins are working towards a solution... but theres no other place to go for information about suseforums.net but suseforums.net. Atleast with an opensuse.org forum, any issues would be known and posted about on the wiki.
- 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.
I agree and disagree. I believe that the efforts dedicated to the distribution should continue as such (and many thanks in regards to the high quality releases :) ), but I feel that a forum should be a reasonably high priority. Many can't keep up with mailing lists and such, and just need a simple place for thread-style answers to their questions. Also, resolving problems in the forum, and being on the same site as the wiki, would encourage people answering questions to post a final explanation and solution on the wiki. I think this will greatly help the HCL, etc, etc on the site.
- 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.
Understandable, but I personally think a single, official forum as part of opensuse.org helps the community by having a unified resource center.
- 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).
I think the F/LOSS route would be the best way to go...
- 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.)
This gets my vote... Joseph M. Gaffney aka CuCullin