If you google for "kde forums" you will get one another kde forum in the first 10 results:
http://www.kde-forum.org/
Wouldn't it make sense to shut down the other "unofficial" one? Is there really a need to have two forums dedicated to kde?

Well, unfortunately, that is not under our control. It is driven from a person outside of KDE, so we can't do much about it, even if we wanted to.
But it doesn't matter. Now all other KDE sites link to this forum, even the irc channel links to this forum. And this forum is truly community driven as you maybe can see from 2(!) days being online.
And as long as the user finds the answers he needs, i am personally okay with other forums like kde-forum.

klerfayt wrote:Wouldn't it make sense to shut down the other "unofficial" one? Is there really a need to have two forums dedicated to kde?

I believe in evolution: let the stronger one survive. I think we're doing a great thing here (and I'm not alone: we had almost 1000 users register in 2 days). But history will tell...

And then again: there are multiple mediaplayers, multiple webbrowsers, multiple office suites, etc. We may very well be able to co-exist.

Maybe it could be possible to have a shared search or something, no idea how that would work though (Google? Move both to the same database server?).

There are more forums offered in other languages e.g. forum-kde.de
Many of them have only low traffic or much spam, thats why some nice guys from kde community started this one.

Hosting of different forums on the same server is not possible. Why?
Nearly every forum engine uses different scripting language, database type or database scheme.
You would have to talk to many persons and spend a lot (!) of work to migrate content from different forums to this one.

I you google about "kde forum" we are listed on #4.
Wait some days ...

Cheers

Mark Ziegler wrote:Hosting of different forums on the same server is not possible. Why?
Nearly every forum engine uses different scripting language, database type or database scheme.

- Language means nothing to the database server.
- Using different database software would be a problem.
- Database scheme is a simple coding change/addition to get read-only searching of both sites.

I am not suggesting merging them, but instead just a simple "Search results for [Other site]" that produces links to the other forum. It's possible to do it with Google, but it is nicer if it's more integrated.

@Zarin: Your suggestions all presume that we have even some amount of control on kde-forum.org in the first place. If we did, we wouldn't be in this situation. (Or maybe we would, for a whole different reason. But that would be another story).

This is the same situation with wiki.kde.org and userbase.kde.org actually, though that situation is a bit more "drastic" since wiki.kde.org uses the kde domain.

In any case, it's always a tough move when you have to somewhat decide to start something that appears opposed to something that already exists, something that some people have probably worked hard on. But I trust that the decision was reached after all other possible solutions have been considered and exhausted.

I believe the more the merrier and will simply make use of both to expand my KDE horizons.

mae wrote:I believe the more the merrier and will simply make use of both to expand my KDE horizons.

I disagree, I think multiple forums just dilutes the resource a forum offers. Hopefully if this one is the official forum linked from kde then most traffic will start coming here.

Weren't there always forums attached to the kde site though:undecided: I am sure I looked before but the forums just looked a bit quiet.

I think the problem with 'kde' forums is most people probably go to forums for their distro mostly. I think these forums could be popular if they establish sub forums for kde apps and become the place people come to for support in actually using the apps rather than getting their system to work.

Weren't there always forums attached to the kde site though. I am sure I looked before but the forums just looked a bit quiet.

There was. kde-forum.org was linked to, because it was the only (English) forum available at that time dedicated to KDE (and not distro-specific).

I think the problem with 'kde' forums is most people probably go to forums for their distro mostly.

That's true not only about forums, but IRC, wikis, mailing lists. One would think it would be redundant. But judging from the amount of traffic in KDE mailing lists and IRC, that isn't the case.

In any case, these dedicated KDE resources are really meant for KDE users, regardless of distro. Of course there would be some amount of overlap, but we'll deal with those as they come. This doesn't really duplicate efforts but offers a place of convergence and a launching pad to other resources, including distro-specific ones.

bailout wrote:I think multiple forums just dilutes the resource a forum offers.

I think you have a point here, the information is somewhat scattered currently.

But I think KDE is working on that: the KDE docs have always been online, UserBase has been around for a while, and now there is forum.kde.org. I think these 3 resources should be able to give all the information a user needs, and I agree any additional resources could make things confusing.

But you'll understand that we don't have any control over those other resources.
On the one hand, KDE is such a great product that everyone would like to have a KDE forum, even if it is just to generate some traffic.
And on the other hand, users will probably check their distro's site first, if they need information. Users are more likely to be Ubuntu or Fedora or Gentoo users than KDE users, even when they are KDE users...
And then there are some applications who decided they don't want to host their forums here, because their forums are succesful as they are. That's their right.

So I agree with you that all KDE info should be on the 3 sites I mentioned, but we just can't control the actions of others (and even if we could, we wouldn't want to: we're all about being free, we're not in the controlling business...).

So this is something we leave up to you, the users: ask your distro to link here in stead of running their own KDE subforums. If they get enough requests, they will.

bailout wrote:I think these forums could be popular if they establish sub forums for kde apps and become the place people come to for support in actually using the apps rather than getting their system to work.

As I've mentioned [post=9279]elsewhere[/post], that's what we're trying to do.
And asking in 3 places won't get you any closer...

Jucato wrote:

Weren't there always forums attached to the kde site though. I am sure I looked before but the forums just looked a bit quiet.

There was. kde-forum.org was linked to, because it was the only (English) forum available at that time dedicated to KDE (and not distro-specific).

I thought the forums got an upgrade, but then I couldn't find my username anymore and googled it and saw the other forums where still up and running. Nice to know this is the official forum.

Hm, I hung around the other forum a bit but cannot say that it was well frequented...

Let's hope that this one gets more of a community feel to it