-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Peter Flodin wrote:

On 12/10/05, Michael K. Dolan Jr. wrote:

...

Is there an "official" OpenSuse web forum (like forums.gentoo.org)?

No.

Depends what you mean with "official". The only thing "official" could mean is "hosted on opensuse.org". This is a *community* effort. It's us. Novell wants to avoid reinventing the wheel when existing SUSE community apparels already exist. This is particularely true for forums. When you read the "Communicate" page on the opensuse.org wiki: http://www.opensuse.org/Communicate#Web_Forums you can see that we already have a few of them. It's very important not to discard or duplicate what a few committed people have already created before the "openSUSE move". That would be like showing them the finger in the middle of your hand. We should embrace and extend, not replace or duplicate.

After a discussion here earlier, we were informed that the topic would be raised at an internal openSUSE meeting, and the result reported back to the list.

Now when 10.0 is out of the way, I hope this can be given some attention, as the way I see it, everyday we don't have a forum, we lose an opportunity to capture end-users in our community.

We'll probably have to wait two more weeks to get stuff done, as a few key people in the SUSE 10.0 / openSUSE teams are currently on holidays, now that 10.0 is out (at least AJ and Sonja are). cheers - -- -o) Pascal Bleser http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/ /\\ _\_v FOSDEM 2006 -- 25+26 February 2006 in Brussels -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.0 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFDTOgFr3NMWliFcXcRAtPJAKCHVDrF+JEUixLOtrUDWFrn0b2ckQCglHZ6 All05ArnsDPi2ev0jnWsyxY= =fGAu -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

On 12/10/05, Pascal Bleser wrote: ............That would be like showing them the finger in the middle of your hand.

...

We should embrace and extend, not replace or duplicate. .....

So the issue is still around & still hasnt been solved .. ha - what a surprise. But I agree with below opinion .. one big forum is better than many small ones where questions & answers & rescources are scattered all over the web ... e.g. linuxquestions.org wouldnt be as great (my opinion) if each forum had its own website .. there wouldnt be any communication & coordination between things. Fact is a wiki is not a mailinglist is not a forum. There are reasons for each to xist ... but of course we have to try to not duplicate efforts in order to make it as painless as possible ... blah blah blah .. . --- Peter Flodin wrote: there

is an argument that an openSUSE web forum is justified ............ You have to break some eggs to make an omelette. A single openSUSE forum, will be a bigger gain, than the possible loss of several existing and fragmented SUSE forums. ........... you may not agree...

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:-) -> "GMail's spell checker has "penises" as a suggested correction for "openSUSE"...it must be talking about the mailing list :-)" ___________________________________________________________ How much free photo storage do you get? Store your holiday snaps for FREE with Yahoo! Photos http://uk.photos.yahoo.com

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On Thu, Oct 13, 2005 at 2:56 am, in message <20051012135608.GA15279@penne>, houghi@houghi.org wrote: On Wed, Oct 12, 2005 at 11:27:24PM +1000, Peter Flodin wrote: You have to break some eggs to make an omelette. A single openSUSE forum, will be a bigger gain, than the possible loss of several existing and fragmented SUSE forums. Needless to say, that last sentence is my opinion, and you may not agree...

I think there is a real demand for a forum. A lot of people are more at ease with a forum. Wether or not it will become just another formum with the rest or a replacement for those that are already out there, I don't know. If several larger forums start pointing to the openSUSE forms, then yes. If those other forums rather be on their own, they could start competing. Will it becvome a singel openSUSE forum? I doubt it. It will however be a sign that openSUSE is truely open and listens to the demands of its comuity.

It is not because I myself will not join such a web- forum, that I do not see that others might be interested in using such a thing.

I would join it and really think we need one. The Novell web based email forum is IMHO not really what a forum is. A forum will create a very loyal user community helping others with SUSE specific issues. And we can have private forum for packagers and others ..... A forum is a must. We had this dicsussion before and are waiting for an answer from Chrisoph ....... let's see when AJ is back ..... Andreas

I agree; embrace, extend, but couldn't we also pull everyone together? We could do something like integrate forums, aggregate RSS feeds... It would be nice if the OpenSuse community could elect webmasters or delegates to create these types of interactions... On Wed, 2005-10-12 at 12:40 +0200, Pascal Bleser wrote:

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Peter Flodin wrote:

...

On 12/10/05, Michael K. Dolan Jr. wrote:

...

Is there an "official" OpenSuse web forum (like forums.gentoo.org)?

No.

Depends what you mean with "official". The only thing "official" could mean is "hosted on opensuse.org". This is a *community* effort. It's us.

Novell wants to avoid reinventing the wheel when existing SUSE community apparels already exist. This is particularely true for forums. When you read the "Communicate" page on the opensuse.org wiki:

http://www.opensuse.org/Communicate#Web_Forums

you can see that we already have a few of them.

It's very important not to discard or duplicate what a few committed people have already created before the "openSUSE move". That would be like showing them the finger in the middle of your hand. We should embrace and extend, not replace or duplicate.

...

After a discussion here earlier, we were informed that the topic would be raised at an internal openSUSE meeting, and the result reported back to the list.

Now when 10.0 is out of the way, I hope this can be given some attention, as the way I see it, everyday we don't have a forum, we lose an opportunity to capture end-users in our community.

We'll probably have to wait two more weeks to get stuff done, as a few key people in the SUSE 10.0 / openSUSE teams are currently on holidays, now that 10.0 is out (at least AJ and Sonja are).

cheers - -- -o) Pascal Bleser http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/ /\\ _\_v FOSDEM 2006 -- 25+26 February 2006 in Brussels -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.0 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQFDTOgFr3NMWliFcXcRAtPJAKCHVDrF+JEUixLOtrUDWFrn0b2ckQCglHZ6 All05ArnsDPi2ev0jnWsyxY= =fGAu -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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On Wed, Oct 12, 2005 at 06:54:57PM +0200, Christoph Thiel wrote:

To give you an update on this: We discussed "web forums" and agreed to not make any existing forum the "official openSUSE forum" for the time being. This decision was based on the fact that the Novell forums team is preparing to launch a revised/improved version of their offerings (at http://support.novell.com/) later this year. We haven't seen a recent version of the software they are using yet, but are waiting to get a preview in early November. As soon as we get the chance to examine the new Novell support forums we will reconsider the whole forum topic.

Thanks for the feedback. houghi -- Quote correct (NL) http://www.briachons.org/art/quote/ Zitiere richtig (DE) http://www.afaik.de/usenet/faq/zitieren Quote correctly (EN) http://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html

On 13/10/05, Johannes Kastl wrote:

How about the language? Will there be one forum, or will it be split in several language-forums, one german, one french, one...? Is this a stupid idea? Or a good one?

If there are different language wikis (coming soon) I see no reason not to have different language forums. Especially for discussing localisation issues, but also for general community support in the user's native language. I would hope that eventually any language can be supported by the wiki and forum, given enough interest and committed community individuals to make it happen, similar to creating a new language at wikipedia.org http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Create_a_new_language_in_Wikipedia Pflodo

Howzit Folks? As a relatively new convert to Linux (about 2 years ago), one of the most time consuming and frustrating problems is trying to find relevant information when fixing problems/idiosyncracies in software. Granted, a lot of this is due to a lack of knowledge/experience of linux but googling and sifting through 100s if not 1000s of pages is a pain in the proverbial %^#&. I think it would be a good idea to try and condense this knowledge/experience/help. Why not use the existing forums at http://forums.suselinuxsupport.de instead of further fragmenting the SUSE knowledge/reference base? Just my 2 bits worth. Cheers Bruce On Wednesday 12 October 2005 19:37, Johannes Kastl wrote: On 10/12/2005 6:54 PM Christoph Thiel wrote: [Novell forum activities] One thought that comes to my mind. How about the language? Will there be one forum, or will it be split in several language-forums, one german, one french, one...? Is this a stupid idea? Or a good one? Im not sure how I think about it. There is a good german forum (linux-club.de) that is mainly devoted to SUSE, and I think there are several others in other languages. But they are not the official SUSE-Forums. OJ

On Fri, 14 Oct 2005, Peter Flodin wrote:

...

Why not use the existing forums at http://forums.suselinuxsupport.de instead of further fragmenting the SUSE knowledge/reference base?

That's what we first suggested, but it turned out that there is quite a lot of demand to create a central / official forum at openSUSE.org. This is not meant to rule out any existing forum in any way!

Some things about the official openSUSE forums, that I think are required: 1. They should be at opensuse.org. (this doesn't rule out an external forum, as it could be like http://betterdesktop.opensuse.org/ which redirects.)

Right.

2. Same look and feel as openSUSE.org (again doesn't rule out an external forum).

Yes, that's on our list.

3. It should use the same user database as the wiki & bugzilla (ie Novell ID integration), this would rule out an external forum.

Correct ;)

Personally I think a new forum at opensuse.org would be a unifying experience rather than a fragmenting one.

That will hopefully be the case. Regards Christoph

On Fri, Oct 14, 2005 at 02:25:51PM +0200, jdd wrote:

however there can be news (better to go to the original post of an unfollowed thread)

Oh yes, please. Even a email to news would already be great. That way people who like email can use that and those who want news can use that. Should be doable with moderated newsgroups, so only subscribers can post and everybody can read. houghi -- Quote correct (NL) http://www.briachons.org/art/quote/ Zitiere richtig (DE) http://www.afaik.de/usenet/faq/zitieren Quote correctly (EN) http://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html

On Fri, 14 Oct 2005, Michael K. Dolan Jr. wrote:

Why not "federate" forums... synchronize user bases, threads and start from there. If you post in one, it's replicated everywhere. That will bring everyone in...

No chance! This would just cause a synchronization nightmare and a lot of frustration.

Regardless as with any community that has formed a large, growing base opensuse.org needs to have an official forum. I however would argue it should be community controlled. Maybe the forum admins/owners of the other sites could take over forums.opensuse.org??

For now we decided to wait for the improved Novell Forums - which is not to say it will be impossible to have the community control it (in terms of advanced access / moderation rights for specific forums). Regards Christoph

On Sat, 15 Oct 2005, Kenneth Aar wrote:

Christoph Thiel wrote:

...

For now we decided to wait for the improved Novell Forums - which is not to say it will be impossible to have the community control it (in terms of advanced access / moderation rights for specific forums).

I think that moderators of other forums should be offered the opportunity to be moderators on the new opensuse forum.

Yes, that's what I was saying!

I also think that old threads and post should be imported from the different forums that already exist. With a cut off set to 01.10.2006?

Again, something like that is a very complex thing to do / set up... Regards Christoph