openSUSE Lizards » Time to say Goodbye
Can someone tell me what this is about?
Edit:
Well, actually it was lizards.opensuse.org - not news. My bad! Either way, what is this about?
No idea. I asked on lizards’ comment space for the reasons, but no reply so far… Seems SUSE community is falling apart. People go away from forums, IRC, etc
Anybody having personal contacts may know the reason. Anyone?
The legendary Vir@s!decides to move on. IIRC he has been the administrator of suselinuxsupport.de from its inception and lately has had diminishing activity in the new openSUSE forums. It’s probably simply time to move on in life’s great adventure. I take this opportunity to say publicly how much I respect Wolfgang for his very significant support for SuSE Linux and openSUSE over the years and to wish him fair winds on his new journeys. He has my respect and “may the force be with him”.
And let’s not forget the significant contributions of Rupert Horstkoetter either. Rupert has also been featured as one of the People of openSUSE. Rupert served as the Project Manager of the openSUSE Forums during 2008 to the present. We know him more familiarly through his efforts as Editor of the OpenSUSE Weekly Newsletter and as a Mod of these Forums. His strengths will be sorely missed. I also wish Rupert the very best fortune and thank him so much for the efforts on our behalf.
God speed to them both.
I concur with the comments of my colleague ‘Down Under’ @swerdna. It is has been a great please to have the services/support of both these valued contributors (Wolfgang and Rupert).
Seems SUSE community is falling apart
I can’t agree with this comment.
People do move on to other things. We all live very busy lives and provide support (freely). Circumstances change and we must respect that.
Sounds like a challenge! 
Whatcha going to do about it?!
I already do a lot for SUSE. Package software, help out on here and on IRC, report bugs, occasionally write docs/wiki, etc… what else do you want me to do? I am only one voice. Do you expect me to fix all the problems by myself? 
It was not intended as an insult, and I am the last person who should be issuing such a challenge.
My apologies.
Yes, people do move on with their lives but what I’ve seen lately on here and IRC, seems to suggest that enough of them move due to support problems and dissatisfaction. How many people did we have in the past months coming here and either trolling or complaining of SUSE community hostility and the like? Even Chrysantine got so discouraged that she quit IRC and I haven’t seen her for a while. A few days ago, a user was banned because he disagreed with someone on #opensuse-chat (afaik). Then another one came to #suse and explained his dissatisfaction with the community…
lol, nooooo I didn’t take that as an insult, didn’t even cross my mind. I only said that if there are any known problems within the SUSE community, I can’t fix them all by myself so we need to work together
A lot of you make good points. Life happens and people do move on. I know for myself, life has certainly happened. Let’s just say, everything that can go wrong, has. That’s part of why y’all haven’t seen much of me in the past 2 months.
Since the unification of the forums, I have seen less and less of Vir@s. I’m sure it’s just life. A change of direction sort of thing.
Does this mean the community is disintegrating? I think That is an exaggeration to the nth degree. Vir@s will be missed, but the community will go on.
If anything, this could be a call for the community to step up. To rise and become better. The forum is strong, but could be better. IRC is strong. News is strong. I could see openSUSE Lizards needing improvement. I can also see the wiki needing improvement.
Basically we have maybe 1% of the community doing the work of 99%. We need more involvement. The problem is how to motivate people to get involved, and then stay involved.