Hello all,
My name is Terry Ellison and I am the lead community administrator and
maintainer for the OOo user forums (user.services.openoffice.org). I
was one of the core of community members which set up the forums in
October 2007, and before that I was active on the alternative (English)
oooforums.org. I am also a moderator on the VirtualBox.org forums and a
member of the QA team on phpBB (the forum application used to implement
the forums). My contributions to the OOo development itself are small
(I fixed a couple of memory leaks in the Basic RTS and understand the
code base of this subsystem). I had 30 years service with EDS (now part
of HP) rising through system development, technical mangement to
eventually operations CTO for Europe, before retiring early because of
illness (ME/CFS which I am slowly recovering from)
What I would like to discuss here is what we do with the forums. In the
four years since their creation, we have added another 8 language forums
to the original English one: French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Hungarian,
Japanese, Chinese and Vietnamese. Across all forums we have some 75,000
registered members, who have created 300,000 posts on 78,000 topics. We
have also gone through 5 phpBB version upgrades.
However, the main use of the forums is not by the posting members, but
by guest users who browse these topics to find answers to their OOo
problems and the search engines which index the forum content. We get
roughly 200,000 page requests / day (that is web pages -- the images,
CSS, etc. add ~4 x in terms of Apache requests).
I and the rest of the OOo community activists believe that this content
and facility provides a valuable service to the wider OOo user
community, so we are keen to see its continuity and seamless transfer to
part of the Apache.org project.
The technical aspects are a little detailed, but this was my
professional area, so these aren't a risk if I am allowed to support
this. I'll leave these to further discussion and the appropriate cwiki
page. The main issues seem to be of approvals, support, infrastructure
resource allocation, since the technology set used by the forums is
phpBB + OOo-specific customisation, and this is a new service for the
current infrastructure team even though it runs on a standard LAMP stack.
The purpose of the note is to raise this issue with the wider community
and to provide a vehicle for discussing any related queries.
Regards
Terry Ellison
- An introduction and a discussion about the OpenOffice U... TerryE
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