One of the most important aspects of any open source community is its support system — the ways new users and developers get help, and the ways experienced users and developers are able to contribute support.

The openSUSE community has several avenues of support — including IRC, mailing lists, and several Web forums. While our Web forums — suseforums.net, suselinuxsupport.de, and the forums that are hosted at forums.novell.com — provide great avenues of support, it would be much more optimal if users could look to a single forum site.

The good news is, that’s exactly what we’re working towards.

Here’s the official announcement:

In order to provide a better service to the existing openSUSE Community and to our new users, we’re pleased to announce that suseforums.net, suselinuxsupport.de and the openSUSE support forums at forums.novell.com (the three largest English-speaking, dedicated SUSE forums) are joining forces to merge into the new official openSUSE Forums at forums.opensuse.org.

Behind the scenes, a project team consisting of Novell employees, openSUSE Community members, and existing forums’ staff have been working on this project since the beginning of 2008. The new infrastructure will be hosted by Novell to ensure the highest possible quality of service.

Current plans are to migrate the existing active members of suseforums.net and suselinuxsupport.de into the official openSUSE Forums, simultaneously implementing Single Sign On for the whole openSUSE Community. We hope to make the transition as seamless as possible, and will go live Spring 2008. More information will be posted as available.

All in all, a big gain for the whole openSUSE Community!

This is a project that was started long before I joined Novell, and has involved a lot of hard work on the parts of the respective forum owners and maintainers. (And will involve a lot of additional hard work finalizing the implementation and moving forward.) I won’t try to name all the participants, but I do want to say “thanks” to everyone who’s worked on this. (Thanks!) I know many people have dedicated a lot of their own time to making this happen, and that’s the kind of commitment that will take the openSUSE community very far.

We will continue to provide announcements as we finalize the implementation. Once the forums are live, you’ll be able to find them at forums.opensuse.org.

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