This morning, the good folks over at the openSUSE project announced the official launch of the merged forums. Prior to this, English speaking openSUSE users had a bit of a confusing ride when it came to joining a support community specifically for their distro -- they had the support forums at the Novell openSUSE site, suseforums.net, and suselinuxsupport.de to choose from. The merged forums, located at forums.opensuse.org, are archived and searchable, and the new forum is open for posting (openSUSE members with an account for the wiki or bugzilla will be able to use their existing accounts on the forums, but suseforums and suselinuxsupport users will need to create new accounts).

Those who have never used openSUSE might have difficulty grasping the significance of this. It seems like a little thing, really... But the real strength of Linux (and any distro) is the knowledge and experience of the community, its experiences with different bits of hardware in different configurations. That strength is undermined when the community is divided between three sites -- even if they're three very, very good sites. If a user asks a question on one site, but the person who knows the answer is on one or two of the others (or doesn't have endless hours a day to comb forums), it is a real disadvantage to the person asking, those searching for an answer to the same problem, and ultimately the distribution in general.

The openSUSE project hopes to add more languages to the merged forums in the near future. Okay, it probably won't happen anywhere near in time for the openSUSE 11.0 release (on schedule for June 19th), but we're guessing that most people really won't mind, being much too distracted with a faster install process and a new and improved version of Zypper.

We found what could possibly be the most useful video ever on instructional video site VideoJug. Or at least, it would have been incredibly useful if someone had produced this 20 years ago and shown it to pretty much every single person who ever decided to post a message on a bulletin board, forum, or chat room.

Seeing as how this primer to internet forums is a few decades late for most folks, we can take solace in the fact that it at least looks like something that could have been produced in the 80s. And it's still funny because it's true. And if you disagree you're probably a Nazi or something.

[via Boing Boing]

ForumMatrix is a handy comparison matrix to check if you are thinking about running a public forum and aren't sure what forum software to use, or if you already do run a forum and want to switch to a different package. You can select different packages from their list and compare the details (license, features, cost, etc.) side-by-side in a easy to follow table.

If you aren't sure where to start ForumMatrix has a handy Choice Wizard that will ask you a few specific questions about what features you may be looking for. I can see this as especially helpful for people new to running a forum. It filters results down to flat versus threaded, license type/cost, storage type (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL, etc.), attachments, and more. If you still aren't sure and need advice from other users, you can also drop by their own forums and consult others on their own opinions.