What gives with this new forum?

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I don’t know why they moved to this site from suseforums.net. The graphics on this site make it harder to navigate. It doesn’t have a ‘remember your login’ option. My account wasn’t migrated from the old site, and I can’t find any of my old posts. I have to resort to putting my user name and the topic into google. It has no facility to view a list of your own posts. The search function is terrible. suseforums.net was a much better site.

Thankfully the contributors are still excellent and very helpful as always. Opensuse 11 looks great so far.

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There is a forum comments/suggestions section. If you have any suggestions to make, go there. If it’s just for rant, well it’s pointless and unreasonable imo.

This forum is the result of the mergin of suselinuxsupport, suseforum and Novell’s opensuse forum. The reason why it has been is to concentrate members from the 3 biggest forums to offer better helps and to avoid confusions among newbies.

This forum is still new (less than a month), so if it has rough edges, it’s normal. If want some specific features, post on the comments/suggestions section, I’m pretty sure that the admins will read it.

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Change is inevitable I suppose :slight_smile:

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To everyone involved in the development of this forum:

I have taken on a project recently to design a web based application, and now I have to say that I sincerely regret the comments I made here. If you spend 3 hours trying to get “that text box to go there”, or 4 days trying to get Apache web server to do what you think you have configured it to do, or 4 hours making SSL certificates and trying to get Apache to recognise them, all to make something that will have only the tiniest fraction of what is available here. It made me realise what a massive effort is required to create something like this, and can I also say “well done” to everyone involved.

/jlar

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And if one is using one of the ready-made packages for blogs, forums, whatever, that are fairly complete, it makes one realise what a great gift it is when people release their work for any to use for nothing.

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Change can be taunting in some areas… but there are also nice improvements I’ve found. Also note there are different (basic)skins you can use to speed up things.

Maybe this post can help to ease the pain a bit :wink: view your own posts - openSUSE Forums

There is also a sticky with tip & tricks : Forum Usage Tips - Updated 13 Jun 08 - openSUSE Forums

Cheers,
Wj

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As noted, this was a merge of 3 different forums, plus the addition of an NNTP service. The result has been increased expertise available to support users.

This could be your skin selection. Go to the lower left of your screen and select the “openSUSE basic” skin. I find that closest to the old, and the easiest to navigate. If you like that, you can make it your default setting by going in to your “User Control Panel” (control on the upper left).

Good point. Unfortunately, that comes with the territory of merging with the Novell site. This is a basic Novell security precaution.

We tried, but the password encryption on the old sites was simply too good. We couldn’t hack it, and hence could not merge in the old posts to match the current user accounts, but the old posts are still there in the archive area.

Hey, thats a neat way. But another way is to go to our “Search” and put your user name not under “Search by Username”, but rather under “Search by keyword”. Select the archive area. For some reason, since the password encryption prevented our importing old forum posts by usernames, they were all imported instead as guest. But you can still find your archived posts by “Search by Keyword”.

Not true. But it does require more mouse clicks. Simply go to Search and search by your user name. I do that every morning when checking for replies to my posts.

I disagree. The search function has the same functionality. I think it is more a matter of familiarity.

I also like openSUSE-11 on KDE-3.5.9. Pulseaudio is giving me a headache, not because it doesnot work, but because I don’t know how it works (and I want to help people). So I’m reading up everything I can, and eventually plan to enable it on my test PC so to teach myself some things. That may take me a few months (I’m a slow learner).

Anyway, WELCOME to the new forum. Thanks for paying us a visit, and I hope you stick around to contribute.

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Hi oldcpu,

Another enlightened post… thanks very much.

The only reason I picked up this old thread again was to express my regret for the original post.

/jlar

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No worries, we all have had our frustrations with this new merged forum. … I think all of your observations in your original post were very valid. … as noted, there were reasons/limitations associated with most of them.

I think change can be very difficult at times, … and some things are still being tuned and still being improved on this forum. We still have lots to do.

Still, I do think this new forum has a LOT of potential to help the very divided openSUSE community merge. I think it has MUCH MUCH more potential that the older 3 divided forums.

Unfortunately we have taken some casualties along the way, and I hope we will gradually heal, come back stronger, and lure our lost sheep back.

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With forums.suselinux.de I can easily google the topic I want to search using the famous xxx site:forums.suselinux.de but with suseforums.net the google search doesn’t work anymore and will dump my browser to the new OpenSUSE Forums front page. Searching the archive seems very difficult compared to using the google method.

I had planned to post a comment regarding this but it might fall in deaf ears for It maybe will be difficult to address since just moving post by moderators created some unpleasant comments from some users.

My unworthy 2 cents

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I don’t think this will fall on deaf ears. … reference the moving post issue, what really irritated me was a small number of users kept complaining about the same thing over and over and over and over … ad nasium … Its not like once was not enough. Nor is it like the solution was simple, given other things we are trying to accomplish … We do take note of the criticisms, … but some are simply not easy to solve. Plus we are volunteers. We have day jobs. We have families. And for most of us, trying to help other users with their technical problems (and not a board quirk that we are working on, but will take time) has priority. And often before we do something, we have tremendous internal discussion, and many times the issues raised by members, while very very welcome, have 90% of the time already been discussed to death internally.

So when one user becomes fixated on grinding an axe about an issue, and makes many posts (often with insulting language) then human nature on both sides tends to rise, bringing out the worst qualities in every one.

Franky, IMHO, its best simply to raise the issue once. Not grind an axe.

Anyway, reference your comment about the google search …this was discussed in the days leading up to the merge …

One of the considerations was server costs. … with the sf and sls forums closed, who was going to pay for the server costs? Note those costs were paid for by volunteers before. They would be paid for by volunteers in the future.

The issue was also raised about people who visited the old site and tried to post, only to find they could not because it was read only. That would cause a lot of frustration for those users.

After weighing various pros and cons, it was decided best to simply redirect all calls (from the old) to the new forum. As you point out, somethings that worked well before, are different now, … but the old posts are still archived, and they can still be accessed. And users who would have (had not the redirect been established) are not frustrated by the “read only”.