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

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