openSUSE Forums FAQ

By having an openSUSE Account (also known as a SUSE ID), you agree to the following Terms and Conditions:

* The openSUSE Legal Documents, which outline the rules which govern the activities, content, and software available on all openSUSE web offerings, including these forums.
* The SUSE Privacy Policy, which outlines SUSE's obligations to your account information and its privacy.

openSUSE Forums Terms

By using your openSUSE Account (also known as a SUSE ID) to post on the openSUSE Forums (through web browser, NNTP client, or otherwise), you agree to the documents above, but also to the following openSUSE Forums Terms and Conditions. These forum specific terms supercede any similar terms outlined in the openSUSE Legal Documents or SUSE Privacy Policy. Members may not create or use accounts for deceptive purposes including but not limited to: circumventing the T&C, rejoining the community after being banned or blocked, circumventing staff actions or directions, or posting as different persons

Privacy

Your e-mail address is kept private and is used to send you forum notifications and e-mails from openSUSE Forums staff.

Private member account information (your username, password, e-mail address, or otherwise) will not be disclosed by staff members on the forum or to any third party without your consent or due process of law. However, the openSUSE Forums staff cannot be held responsible for any unauthorized access to our server. Logging in or visting the forums while logged in to openSUSE or SUSE services automatically creates your account on our forum server. The openSUSE Forums staff will remove your member account on the forums server upon request. To request this, contact a staff member privately, or e-mail forums@opensuse-forums.org for assistance.

openSUSE Forums uses cookies to store information on your local computer. These cookies do not contain any tracking information or personal data, and only serve to enhance your use of the forums.

Board Content

Neither SUSE/openSUSE nor the staff of openSUSE Forums is responsible for any of the content posted within the openSUSE forums. With the exception of Forum Announcements, all posts represent the views and opinions of the Member who posted it and are not the official views of the openSUSE Forums. Neither SUSE/openSUSE nor the openSUSE Forums staff vouch for or warrant the accuracy, completeness, legality, or usefulness of any post content and are not responsible for consequences resulting from use of the information in forum posts.

This Board is intended primarily as a technical support facility for openSUSE users. Global Moderators set policy on the appropriateness of posted material. Forum Staff advise Members of the appropriateness of posted material (including technical merit) here and Members are expected to abide by that guidance. In recognition of the diversity of backgrounds of the Members and in the interests of community harmony, religious or political comment is not allowed. Messages personally attacking, calling names, or otherwise harassing or being condescending (viz. anti-social behavior) to another forum Member or any ethnic or religious group will be deleted. Offensive and/or vulgar language is not appropriate for openSUSE sponsored forums. Violation of these terms may result in being suspended or banned from forum participation.

Any Member who feels that a posted message is objectionable is encouraged to contact the openSUSE Forums staff immediately by e-mail, private message, or by using the "Report Post" button on every post. If staff determine that removal is appropriate, openSUSE Forums staff will make every effort to remove objectionable content within a reasonable time frame..

Thread/Post Ownership

All data stored in the forum databases (including all posts and polls) are the property of the openSUSE Forums. The administrators have the right to maintain, in their original form, all posts made in the forums as a historical record of forum activity. openSUSE Forums staff have the right to remove, edit, move, or close any topic at any time according to forum and staff policy.

Advertising/Spam

Members who wish to post advertisements for any kind of good or service (free, paid, digital, or otherwise) must contact the openSUSE Forums staff for approval. Posted advertisements that have not received staff approval, whether or not an approval request has been made, will be removed and the member may be banned.

The staff of the openSUSE Forums reserve the right to determine what content is and is not acceptable under this policy. All staff decisions are final.

Signatures

Signatures may contain up to 256 characters (including spaces) at the forums' default font size and one image. All images must be under 100 pixels wide by 40 pixels high. Links to external sites shall not contravene the clause on Advertising/Spam. Members in violation of this rule will be given an opportunity to adjust their signature within guidelines. If the appropriate action is not taken within 2 days, the signature will be removed by staff. Only trusted users are allowed to create/use signatures. Trusted user status is obtained automatically based on time in membership and number of posts.

Cross-Posting

The openSUSE Forums staff do not allow "cross posting", where a user posts the same or a similar thread in more than one forum. The thread that was posted in the least-relevant forum will be removed. The openSUSE staff may combine the threads if both threads have responses.

Contacting Staff

Staff may be contacted for any reason using the forums' private messaging (PM). However, staff members will not provide private openSUSE Linux help; all Linux help requests must be posted in the appropriate forum. For details on openSUSE Forums staff, please visit the staff information page by clicking the "View Forum Leaders" link at the bottom of the main page.

First, let's be clear that your suggestions are VERY welcome and often suggestions help us improve the forums. There are a lot of very good suggestions that don't get implemented however, and this is an attempt at an explanation as to why.

We've chosen to implement vBulletin (http) and Typhoon (NNTP) software for these forums. Most of the suggestions received are for the web interface so would impact vBulletin. You also need to know that the servers reside in the Novell Data Center which has many benefits such as fail over, disaster recovery, monitoring etc. but it severely limits who has access to test and implement changes.

vBulletin issues software updates regularly....once every one or two months. When these updates are installed, it will look at the template files (the "style" or look and feel) and if they haven't been customized, it will update them. If they have been customized, it won't update them but tell us to do them manually. One "style" is made of many template files. To update the old "openSUSE Default" style (customized) took 4-8 man hours for a relatively minor update and 36-48 hours for a major update. When we updated to vBulletin version 4, we did as little customizing of the default template for this reason. Human resource to do these updates is very limited so we want to have as little customization as we can get away with. Human resource to build and implement additional functionality into the system is almost non-existent and would cause even more work come update time.

The bottom line is if we get suggestions that are easy to implement with little to no customization we're more likely to do them than suggestions that require some development and/or require additional modifications to our templates......even if they are really, really, really, really good suggestions. Don't take it personally if we don't implement your suggestion.

In regards to our authentication system, session timeouts, etc., we use what is standard for the openSUSE project. The system is the same one used on the wiki and other login areas. It makes for a unified authentication experience across the sites.

One last thing. We seem to always get requests for us to enable a thread to be marked SOLVED like some other distro forums do. Everyone here is a volunteer and we don't have the staff to spend the time it takes determining if every thread is solved and solved correctly. One of the problems here is that things evolve so what was solved a year ago may be a totally different issue/resolution now. We like to leave all our threads open so people can add content or question the resolution at any time. Also, "Solved/Unsolved" is something that is misleading and causes users to think "hey, this problem is kinda like mine, so the solution must apply". More seasoned users know that every problem is likely to have its own nuances and differences, and a solution for one user isn't likely to be a solution for another. .

Anyway....there you have it. I hope it doesn't discourage you from making those good suggestions because sometimes we can find a good hack addition to vBulletin that we can install or otherwise find some way to do it without headaches.

The creation and/or fostering of non-English openSUSE discussion forums will generally further the concept and objectives of the openSUSE project. These guidelines will help guide the processes associated with this and will help streamline the process. If you are considering proposing a language specific forum, please read and become familiar with these requirements: Unless otherwise agreed to by the majority of forum staff, each of the following steps must be complete before non-English forums and/or forum links are created on http://forums.opensuse.org:

1. THE REQUEST/PROPOSAL
• The proposal for a new forum or a link to an existing forum should be submitted to one of the forum administrators (but not "forumsadmin")
• Any initial request received from an outside party by any member of the staff will be posted, in it's entirety if written, or summarized as thoroughly as possible, if verbal, to the rest of the forum staff staff.
• Incoming proposals will be reviewed by the staff and needs to have approval of the majority of the staff that wish to express an opinion on the proposal before any action is taken. The period for comment shall be 7 days.
• With the request, the requestee shall provide an overview as to their related technical background so as to provide confidence that this is a genuine effort to establish a foreign language forum, and that reasonable qualifications are in place for them to initiate/manage the new foreign language forum during its initial start up days
2. NEW, MERGE, or PARTNER DECISIONS
• All requests for new language forums will be considered first as creating new sub-forums at http://forums.opensuse.org
• In all cases where the non-English forum already exists, the first effort will be to merge the existing forum user base into the openSUSE forums by creating new forums here. If that is not possible or if deemed beneficial to the openSUSE project, we will discuss a possible partnership arrangement.
• In all cases, new, merge, or partner, all parties involved must agree to the following terms:
1. For new, merged, or partner forums, at least one English speaking person will be identified as a contact and liason for the indicated language forums. If the forums are hosted at OSF, this person will become a member of our staff in an appropriate role. The person identified for each language facet of the OSF forums is responsible to provide the the OSF staff, in English, every January, a short status report of their perception of the health of their non-English forum(s)in order to determine the ongoing health and viability of said forums and ensure. English is selected as a common communcation language, and the report requirement is for all openSUSE forum language groups. The report is intended to facilitate the maintenance of a regular coordination between the diverse openSUSE forum support language groups, providing an annual mutual checkpoint and a venue where non-urgent areas of discussion and commonality can be raised and progress tracked.
2. Each OSF language forum will have at least two moderators (this may include the same or different from the above contact) who will be official openSUSE forum moderator and actively moderate the indicated forums. The moderators and the assigned contact must agree to support and enforce the openSUSE terms and conditions in the indicated forums
3. All language forum links, whether new, merged, or partner will be created under our "Language Specific Forums" header, with priority given to forums hosted on our servers. All "partner" forums will be indicated by the tag "External Link"
4. If a merge is agreed to, the staff roles of pre-existing communities will keep their role in the new language specific sub forums as they line up with openSUSE forum roles, except as otherwise provided on an individual basis.
5. If a partnership is agreed to by all parties, we'll point members with the corresponding native language to the pre-existing community as our official partner by creating a link to the pre-existing community and vice versa (link at the pre-existing community to the openSUSE forums). If all requirements are agreed to during the negotiations with pre-existing communities, we'll announce the pre-existing community as our official partner.
6. If the behavior of staff or partner is found not to be compatible with the Guiding Principles of the openSUSE community and/or our terms and conditions in the long term, the OS Forum staff will decide on a course of action.
7. The final decision on forum specific language support will be made by the current openSUSE forums staff.
8. If the above conditions are met, the forum technical administrator will work with the necessary people and implement.

Yes, this sounds like a bunch of stuffed shirt corporate mumbo-jumbo we need to do our due diligence ensure the ongoing viability of any forum we add here.

Because various forum languages are encoded differently, you may want to set your default language to something other than English which is the overall forum default. To do this, go to the header and click on:
-Settings
--My Settings
---My Account
----General Settings
-----Forum Language (at the bottom of the page)

Before posting, think about what you are posting and who will be reading it. Do you really want your complete configuration listed? How about your email or postal address?
--------
Unfortunately, an open NNTP forum structure such as ours is available to the world and there are people out there who do mine email addresses and other data from our forums and other such forums/newsgroups on the internet. An email address is an integral part of an NNTP header. Short of creating a closed system (which wouldn't be 100% effective) we can't prevent such data mining from our forums. If you use the web interface, your email address is disguised automatically on both the HTTP and NNTP interface. If you use the NNTP interface, you should take a few precautions and there are a few simple things you can do to reduce your risk. First, many NNTP users disguise their email address by putting in obvious deterrents to email address mining. For example: If my email address were freddy.farkle@opensuse.org I could add characters which fool many email address mining bots. I could change my address to something similar to: freddy.DELETE.THIS.farkle.AND.THIS@opensuse.org. Of course, there is nothing to dictate you must use a real email address so if you prefer not to let your email address be known, you can use anything as long as it is in an email address format. Feel free to use something@something.com or even freddy.farkle@opensuse.org! :-) It probably isn't wise to product public product license information etc. or email addresses in the body of messages either. Watch the information that's in your posted configuration files!
--------
Though we don't consider it a security risk, you should be aware that by using our forums, you are allowing your IP address to be known to forum staff and other forum users.

To change your forums password, go to the SUSE Community Accounts self-service page
* From the list at the top, select whether you want to change your password or reset it in case you forgot it
* Follow the steps presented to you by the system

The openSUSE Forums doesn't use vBulletin's built in authentication mechanism, but uses SUSE Login. For security reasons SUSE Login doesn't pass a user's password to vBulletin. It does pass a user ID and email address which is stored in your vBulletin profile and used to verify your identity when you login to the forums. This is only stored once when the vBulletin account is created and because it's the verification method, it can't be automatically updated by SUSE Login. Also, the forum software as configured doesn't support a dash "-" in a user ID even though you can register one on the SUSE or openSUSE site. If, for some reason, you want to change your ID or email address, or are having any problem with your account, you need to contact us (use the CONTACT US link in the footer) so we can get your vBulletin (Forum) account synchronized with SUSE Login.

CHANGING YOUR FORUM ID:
If you find yourself with an ID that you don't want, the easiest thing for you to do is to create a new profile and login under that new ID. If you would like, you can let us know what the new ID is, and we can either merge the two IDs *OR* change the ID on the old account if you haven't logged in with the new account yet.

If you want your ID changed so you can keep the same email address (each ID requires a unique & valid email address), you should use the CONTACT US link at the bottom of any forum page and give details about why you want it changed and what you want it changed to. We can then change the user ID in the Novell Login for you and either rename your old forum account or merge it into the new one.

CHANGING EMAIL ADDRESS, PASSWORD, ETC.
For changing password, see above. For changing email address, use the CONTACT US link on the bottom of this or any page. For security reasons, the Login system doesn't pass sensitive data back and forth to the Forum software. Passwords are not stored in the forum software so you don't have to synchronize them.

EMAIL MISMATCH PROBLEMS
If you try to login to the forums and you get an "email address already exists" error, that means that the user ID you are using in Novell Login doesn't match the one existing on the forums (Two different user IDs with the same email address). This can happen if you modify your user ID on either system. Use the CONTACT US link at the bottom of any forum page and we'll get it fixed for you.

vBulletin has a mobile style that is selectable at the bottom of the forum pages. We don't set this as default for mobile users because it doesn't integrate with openSUSE login. Mobile users can go to http://forums.opensuse.org, login, then scroll to the bottom and select the mobile style.

Once you submit your post in these forums, you have 10 minutes to edit it. After 10 minutes, if you need to, you should post a reply with any corrective information. Why? Two reasons. First, the NNTP protocol doesn't support editing of posts and so edits won't transit our gateway unless done before the cron job runs the gateway to sync the messages. Second, editing a post after it has replies could invalidate those replies because the original information changed. Posting a follow up reply with additional/changed information allows any previous reply to stay in context.

The forums use SUSE Login which has a connection timeout. The forums have their own timeout. If you are idle for too long (usually over 8 hours) or you come to the forums from another location on the openSUSE site, the forum and SUSE timeout may not match up causing it to look like you are logged in, but not allowing you to post. If that happens to you, clear your browser session and start over again at the forum home page, login, and you should be on your way.

Security in your online forum experience is our goal. We use a much more robust login system than the default the forum software provides. Often, when you get a link to our forums outside our environment, you'll get an error when you click on it. You should login to the forums first (now you're secure) and then click on the link which should now take you to where you want to go.

If you are a trusted user, you can edit your profile and create a signature to use in your forum posts. Unfortunately, the signature and profile features have been used extensively by spammers to post their stuff in our forums. You have to be a forum user for a specific period of time and have posted a specific number of messages before you are considered a "trusted" user.

You can "meet" the forum staff on their openSUSE Team page. Each individual of our staff volunteers here to make our forums work optimally for everyone. It would be great if you took the time to rate their answers and/or add to their reputation if you appreciate the work they do. Look for the buttons at the bottom of messages to do this.

The best way to use images and attachments in your post is to use an external hosting site and point to your content via URL in your post. A good option is to use http://susepaste.org

To get them via RSS use the RSS button at the top of any language specific section.

If you're intrested searching just language specific forums, subscribe to the forums you want to see, go to advanced search, search for a single content type, then set it to only search subscribed forums.