Calling OS teams

[KDE forum administrators]

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ABSTRACT:
Looking for more cooperation between KDE Community Forums and OS teams.

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FULL MESSAGE:

Hello all,

We're hoping to get in touch with members of the kde at freebsd, kde at mac, 
kde at solaris, kde at windows and other OS-specific teams.

We would like to make a few suggestions that could be of benefit to us 
all. These suggestions concern SVN/CVS commit messages, sending forum 
posts to IRC channels, sending forum posts to Jabber accounts, hosting 
private, restricted forums for your team, and linking to subforums at 
forum.kde.org.


While KDE gains popularity, it gets less 'nerdy'.
Altough we all agree this is a good thing, we must also be aware of the 
fact that new ways of communicating must be investigated: many of the 
new users (and even some of the old ones) may prefer other channels of 
communication than IRC or mailing lists.

The KDE Community Forums [1] try to fill a gap here.
We are aware of the fact that developers (usually) prefer IRC and 
mailing lists. We are also aware of the fact that many users don't.
This is why we developed (and will continue to develop) a few ways to 
bring these ways of communication together.

On top of that, forums have a few advantages over IRC and mailing lists:
- everybody knows how to use a forum, unlike IRC or mailing lists
- messages posted to a forum are saved and searchable
- forums are moderated
- forums bring people in different timezones together
- forums look more attractive; this may not be important to developers, 
but it is to users
- our forum centralizes knowledge about many applications and platforms 
into 1 location

The KDE Community Forums have no intention to replace IRC or mailing 
lists; we try to complement them.

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SVN/CVS commit messages.

You've probably noticed that commits to the KDE SVN repository are 
posted to our forum; these are commits to the official KDE trunk. 
However, we imagine all OS specific teams have SVN or CVS repositories 
of their own. We would like to invite you to contact us to have commit 
messages for your repositories posted to our board as well; those 
messages would be posted to a (OS specific) subforum of the Commits 
forum at KDE Community Forums [2].
Since our forum can generate RSS and Atom feeds for each forum [3], an 
additional advantage may be that users can read commit messages in their 
news reader.

If you are a member of one of the forementioned teams, and you are 
interested in posting commit messages to KDE Community Forums, contact 
us at admin at forum.kde.org.

-----
Forum posts to IRC.

Developers prefer to communicate on IRC; users prefer to communicate at 
forums. For this reason we developed a way to have new threads to 
specified (sub)forums at KDE Community Forums to be posted to specified 
IRC channels [4]. With this, a development/porting team can keep track 
of posts to our forum without having to visit KDE Community Forums (and 
obviously this is also possible for posts to the Commits forum we 
mentioned above).

If you are a member of one of the forementioned teams, and you are 
interested in having new threads to one or more forums sent to an IRC 
channel, contact us at skreamer at forum.kde.org or join #kde-forum at 
irc.kde.org.

-----
Forum posts to Jabber.

JabberBot is a plugin for MyBB (the forum software) we developed to sent 
new posts to Jabber accounts [5].

If you are interested in having new posts to certain forums be sent to 
your Jabber account:
- log in at forum.kde.org
- click the link UserCP in the top-left of the page
- in the menu, select 'Edit profile'
- fill in your Jabber ID
- hit the 'Save' button
- in the menu, select 'Change settings'
- check 'Enable Jabber notifications for subscriptions'
- hit the 'Save' button
- subscribe to the forums you wish to receive notifications about (there 
is a Subscribe link at the top of each thread listing)

-----
Private, restricted forums.

KDE Community Forums would like to offer you the opportunity to host 
your own private, restricted forums to be used by your team. These 
forums would be invisible and inaccessible to people who are not members 
of your team. This would give you as a team a central location to store 
reminders, to hold discussions you would like to save for the future, 
and to have discussions with members who are hard to reach, for example 
because they are in different timezones.

If you are a member of one of the forementioned teams, and you are 
interested in hosting your private, restricted forums at KDE Community 
Forums, contact us at admin at forum.kde.org.

-----
Linking to 'your' forum.

You've probably noticed that KDE Community Forums have forums for all 
OSs KDE is ported to (or at least for all OSs that have a *.kde.org 
subdomain). It would be appreciated if you would link to these forums 
from the homepage of your project. The correct links would be:

- FreeBSD:
   http://forum.kde.org/freebsd-f-62.html
- Mac:
   http://forum.kde.org/mac-f-60.html
- Solaris:
   http://forum.kde.org/solaris-f-61.html
- Windows:
   http://forum.kde.org/windows-f-59.html

If you would like to display new posts to 'your' forum at your website, 
please check out our RSS and Atom feed generator [3].

If you are a member of a team that ports KDE to an OS not in the above 
list, and you are interested in having a forum for KDE at your_OS, contact 
us at admin at forum.kde.org.

-----

If you have any other suggestions that could be of benefit to you and/or 
us, please contact us.

Sincerely,
   The KDE Community Forums team


[1] http://forum.kde.org
[2] http://forum.kde.org/commits-f-30.html
[3] http://forum.kde.org/misc.php?action=syndication
[4] 
http://forum.kde.org/skreamer-brings-forum-kde-org-to-irc-channels-t-29872.html
[5] http://forum.kde.org/new-plugin-jabberbot-t-10106.html


-- 
forum.kde.org
Communicate.


administrator team:
   admin at forum.kde.org

moderator team:
   mods at forum.kde.org

IRC bot team:
   skreamer at forum.kde.org

news suggestions:
   news at forum.kde.org