KDE Launches User Forums

The KDE Community today launches the new KDE Forum. The new forum uses the bulletin board software MyBB offering users, developers and people interested in KDE a place to help each other, discuss KDE-related topics and exchange ideas. The KDE Forum complements KDE's UserBase, the home for KDE users as a valuable support resource.

The Forums

The forum offers a number of categories

• Forum lists announcement and has a section for providing feedback about the forum.
• In News Releases you can discuss the latest and greatest KDE news, and even follow commits to the KDE codebase in real time.
• The largest category is for Users, different KDE apps and modules are covered in the sub-forums here.
• The Operating Systems category gives those seeking to discuss platform-specific issues a place to post to.
• Want to get feedback about your code? Need to get more detailed explanations of a certain topic? The Developers section is there for you.
• The Other Languages has pointers to local KDE Forums. These forums are not part of the "KDE Forums" proper, but nevertheless a place you might find answers to your questions and like-minded people.

The KDE Forums admins have set the structure up as a starting point. Sub-communities or interesting parties can request their own subforum. The KDE Forum team is working on integrating the new KDE Forum with KDE's existing infrastructure by means of IRC bots that can announce new threads and posts on IRC channels, by briding forum posts to mailinglist messages and by offering RSS feeds.

MyBB Released as GPL

In collaboration with KDE, the developers behind MyBB have decided to release their forum software under the terms of the GPL Version 3. Chris Boulton, project manager at the MyBB Group said "The KDE forum guys have come to us with the wish to use our forum software. In this process, we needed to clear out our licensing to make it easier for the KDE community to make use of MyBB. As a result of that, we have now released the MyBB forum under the terms of the GPL. This was very well-received by the community around MyBB". Entirely in the spirit of Free Software, the KDE Forum team has already contributed a number of plugins for MyBB, supporting the decision taken by the MyBB team.

Rob la Lau, initiator and administrator of the KDE Forum adds "We've chosen MyBB as it stands out head and shoulders above other candidates we have considered to adopt for the new KDE Forums. We know that a good piece of software makes a lot of difference to the user, after all we want to create a nice place for everybody to chat about KDE and related questions."

Sebastian Kügler, member of the KDE e.V. Board of Directors explains where the new KDE Forum fits into KDE communication infrastructure, "We've come to believe that mailinglist don't cut it for all users. KDE becoming increasingly widely used should also offer a place for those that aren't familiar with the use of e-mail for such discussions. The new KDE Forum complements KDE's new end-user knowledge base Userbase that was launched last month. At the same time, we're really happy to see that after our request the MyBB team has decided to release their forum software under the terms of the GPL".

So get your account and join the discussion now.