Qt Centre Community Site Launched

Thursday, 5 January 2006  |  Numanee

Witold Wysota wrote in to inform us of the newly launched Qt Centre which is being billed as the ultimate Qt community site. With the support of Trolltech, Witold and former Qt Forum administrators, moderators and fans Axel Jaeger, Daniel Kish, Kevin Krammer, Johan Thelin, Jacek Piotrowski and Michael Goettsche have banded together to form the new site after learning that the Qt Forum as well as KDE-Forum.org had been hijacked for the purposes of boosting the Google Page Rank of unrelated external sites and have otherwise become neglected. If you had any public links to either Qt Forum or KDE-Forum.org please consider removing them or using the nofollow attribute. Let us hope that the new Qt Centre flourishes!

Comments:

pagerank - Ian Monroe - 2006-01-05

Who would of thought pagerank would cause so many unintentional problems. Wiki spamming and now this. Anyways, I've found Qt Forum to be helpful in the past, I'll forgive the en_GB spelling. ;)

Re: pagerank - AC - 2006-01-11

Heh, Don't you mean en_RestOfTheWorldThatIsNotAmerica spelling? :-)

Re: pagerank - MandrakeUser - 2006-01-11

hey, don't forget that americaIsAContinent :-)

Re: pagerank - Mark - 2006-01-11

um, technically americaIsTwoContinents ;-)

Re: pagerank - mabinogi - 2006-01-13

So is Australia ;)

how about kde-forum.org? - Patcito - 2006-01-06

are you going to abandon it too? in that case will you create a KDEcentre? or just put a kde section on QtCentre?

Re: how about kde-forum.org? - Patcito - 2006-01-06

I'm asking this because the last post on old qtforum.org says that the admin of kde-forum.org is the same that caused troubles on old qtforum.org

Re: how about kde-forum.org? - Ian Monroe - 2006-01-06

QtCentre does have a KDE forum section.

Re: how about kde-forum.org? - Martin - 2006-01-06

One forum, yes.

Hijacked? - reihal - 2006-01-06

How is this possible? What happened and who is the hijacker?

Re: Hijacked? - leeghoofd - 2006-01-06

On the bottom of this page is more explaination: http://www.qtcentre.org/

Re: Hijacked? - reihal - 2006-01-06

It doesn´t say who this "Sigma" is or why the former owner (who is that?) sold the sites. Strange going-ons.

Re: Hijacked? - Martin - 2006-01-06

Strange indeed. Why is the identity of Sigma (and everyone else involved for that matter) kept a secret? If the sites & domains were sold, those transactions must have taken place in the Real World where people usually have names?

Re: Hijacked? - I Should Be Working - 2006-01-06

What good would it do to give you the names? You can look up the DNS registration of the domains btw.

Re: Hijacked? - ac - 2006-01-06

Yes, what good would it ever do to give "you"; the public, any information whatsoever? It is pointless, I agree. Comrade Joe had it all figured out.

Re: Hijacked? - I Should Be Working - 2006-01-06

Erm? The information is public. Read the articles, the links and comments. Comprehend and think instead of spouting dogma.

Re: Hijacked? - KDE User - 2006-01-06

For the unsmart ppl, I do: http://dot.kde.org/1107647369/ -> Christian Kienle whois kde-forum.org -> Herbert Feiler Look like kde-forum.de is also suffer and is own by Mr Feiler.

Re: Hijacked? - reihal - 2006-01-07

I am more interested in what he is. He seems well financed, by himself or others? Is what he does illegal or just immoral? Herbert Feiler 95445 Bayreuth He runs quite a few websites: Linux-Web.de Gentoo-Forum KDE-Forum Slackware-Forum Linux-Onlineshop ubuntu-forum.de and have registerd gnome sites: "ich habe seit längere zeit schon die domains gnomeforum.de und gnome-forum.de registriert."

Re: Hijacked? - blacksheep - 2006-01-09

> Is what he does illegal or just immoral? IANAL, but I think that unless you can prove intent, you have no basis for a suit. And that would be extremely difficult, since they can just say that those links are just ads. Even if you found a comment from them admiting it, it'd be hard to track to them due to the anonymous nature of the internet. If you could prove intent, you might have ground for fraud. But I think that very, very much depends on the country.

Re: Hijacked? - I Should Be Working - 2006-01-06

Hijacked is maybe the wrong word. The domains were sold to someone who paid big money for them. The names of everyone involved is known.

Re: Hijacked? - superstoned - 2006-01-06

ok, but they are now used to increase the googlepagerank of several totally unrelated sites, instead of doing what they should do - be a Qt or KDE forum...

Re: Hijacked? - KDE User - 2006-01-06

You're right and even the software is slowly breaking but nobody cares. It's only there to keep up appearances.

Who can be trusted? - Martin - 2006-01-06

Now, which KDE sites can be trusted with our time and effort? Only ones owned by the KDE e.V.? Then which are those?

Who can be trusted (2) - Martin - 2006-01-06

Ironically, the new Qt Centre contains no information on who is behind the site. There isn't a single name displayed anywhere, except for the strange welcome message being signed by Witold Wysota. Who owns this thing? What "license" applies to information found on the forum and who owns the posts?

Re: Who can be trusted (2) - Ian Monroe - 2006-01-06

Whois pulls up that the domain is owned by Trolltech. I think we can trust them to not sell their stuff to pagerank spammers. ;) I'd assume the posts on the forum are owned by the posters, thats how forums are usually.

Re: Who can be trusted (2) - Witold Wysota - 2006-01-06

As for "who is behind": http://www.qtcentre.org/forum/showgroups.php Moreover our names are in the commented article, you might have missed them. Besides, all people who visited QtForum know us, we used to moderate that site and our names are still there. Who owns QtCentre? Well.. we made sure none of us is able to sell it, because we don't have legal ownership to the domain name :) We spoke to both Trolltech and KDE e.V. and decided the Trolls should own the domain. BTW. You can access QtCentre through the secondary domain name, too: QtCenter.org. Axel's name is there in the whois database. What "license" applies to information found on the forum and who owns the posts? Well... according to me, the one who wrote the post, owns it -- it is called "intelectual property", right? :) And I know I'm not alone in that opinion, as we discussed the subject in our small "founding group". To be honest, I don't know where do all these suspicions come from. We have nothing to hide, I think we are "recognized" by the community, so you can't say we came from nowhere. If you have questions, PM me or anyone from the QtCentre admin team or ask your questions on QtCentre or QtForum, we'll be happy to answer them to the best of our knowledge.

Re: Who can be trusted (2) - BeS - 2006-01-06

<i>>Well... according to me, the one who wrote the post, owns it -- it is called "intelectual property", right? :)</i> Wrong, it's called copyright.

Re: Who can be trusted (2) - Witold Wysota - 2006-01-06

Right :) My mistake, and I shouldn't have made _that one_...

Re: Who can be trusted (2) - Martin - 2006-01-07

I was not one bit suspicious myself in fact. I was merely concluding from the preceding debacle that one should know the answer to these questions before investing one's time in any online community. It was an implicit, though admittedly provocative, suggestion that the answers to those questions be made more prominent on the new site. Thanks for posting them here, though. As for who owns the posts it is not at all clear I think, given the unconditional copyright statement at the bottom of each page at the site.

Re: Who can be trusted (2) - Shriramana Sharma - 2006-01-09

> ask your questions on QtCentre or QtForum And these means only questions relating to the situation, 'cause at http://www.qtforum.org/post/64878/lastpost.html it has been posted: As of NOW, all of us, the moderators team (see below) will STOP ANSWERING TO QUESTIONS ON THIS FORUM/DOMAIN. Post all other questions on qtcentre.org - it's a great site.

please add jabber in profiles - Patcito - 2006-01-07

in the "Instant Messaging" section please add jabber/gtalk support please, I think you had the same request on the old qtforum back then :)