It took a little longer than expected, but the big day has finally arrived and the openSUSE merged forums are live! From the announcement:

The openSUSE Project is proud to announce the launch of forums.opensuse.org, a merger of the openSUSE Novell support forums, suseforums.net, and suselinuxsupport.de - the three largest English-language dedicated support forums for openSUSE. The merged forums at forums.opensuse.org will provide a single forum for the openSUSE community to find support and discuss openSUSE.

The forums went live on June 9th, a result of the combined effort between the staffs of the suseforums.net, suselinuxsupport.de, and the Novell forums. The project team has been working since early 2008 to merge the forums and provide a unified forum for all English-speaking openSUSE users. The openSUSE Project will be looking at adding other languages to the forums in the very near future.

You can read the full announcement over on news.opensuse.org, or just head over and start reading and posting on the forums. (OK, technically the forums went live yesterday but we opted for discretion as the better part of valor and held off the official announcement until we’d had a day or so to make sure everything was groovy.)

The forum merger is one of the first projects I was introduced to after starting in February. I’ve been participating in (most of) the planning calls and working with the forum staff doing real work for a few months on the tail end of this project, and I can’t say emphatically enough how much I appreciate all the hard work that has gone into this project.

From the outside, this project may seem unremarkable — a couple of groups that ran forums on a similar topic got together to do one big forum, where three existed, what’s the big deal? It is, of course, a big deal.

If I hadn’t been an inside observer, I wouldn’t have understood just how much work and merging of cultures was necessary to make this happen. It required a fair amount of technical work and coordination, which shouldn’t be underestimated, but it also required a lot of cooperation between the staff of the three forums. This project required a lot of trust between three different groups, and the willingness for each group to give up 100% control of a project in order to realize a new project that (we hope) will be more than the sum of its parts.

Looking back, I think everyone will agree that the effort was worth it — but it was a long road and everyone involved deserves a big Thank You from the community for making this happen. In particular, I want to thank Keith Kastorff, Kim Groneman, Wolfgang Koller, and Michael Loeffler for their leadership on the project. Also, a big thanks to Rupert Horstkötter, who continued to work as a project manager on this after he went back to school this semester.

Of course, the launch doesn’t mean that the forums are done. You’ll be seeing improvements and new features from the forums team — but the foundation is laid and we now have a home on the Web for openSUSE users to converse and support one another. And just in time for openSUSE 11.0, which is less than 10 days away!

As a side note, I’d like to mention that we did a short podcast a few days ago that’s being cleaned up for Open Audio — so we’ll have that up before too long, and you can listen to the forum leads in glorious stereo sound!

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