I’m happy to announce that GNOME Forums are up and running: http://forums.worldofgnome.org !!
If you have questions or comments about GNOME, please, come and talk about them, and lets see where we can find some common ground and provide some reference to what our users *actually* like, want and need in an operating system generally and a gui specifically. There are couple of basic sub-forums but as we grow I fully expect to add new ones, primarily on an as-needed/wanted basis. Suggestions are welcome!!
Also, please keep in mind, I’m new to this gig, so expect some hiccups and rough spots as we figure things out. Finally, once again, if you’re interested in helping out, please let me know.
Todo en Tiempo 
November 21, 2012 at 12:38 pm
I registered (waited for the forums) already. But did’t receive and email till now (two hours ago). Any idea what is wrong?
November 21, 2012 at 12:40 pm
try logging in and clicking on ‘resend notification’
Also, if your having problems registering, comment with your nick and I can activate you 🙂
November 21, 2012 at 12:40 pm
Hi, thanks, finally we have gnome forum.
Subforum suggestion : under HELP >> Workspace, Internet, Multimedia, System, ………..
I think extensions is a big part of Gnome3, so maybe some subforum about extension will be nice.
and screenshot subforum will be nice.
reference : forum.kde.org
November 21, 2012 at 7:18 pm
Why not forums.gnome.org ? GNOME forums already existed on third party websites. I assumed this time we would have had some official stuff, hopefully able to handle localized versions…
For example, french forums are on http://fr.gnomesupport.org/forums/
BTW, who is running worldofgnome ? If already found decent news there, but not-that-good too.
November 21, 2012 at 7:35 pm
There are a couple of reasons for the forums to be on worldognome.org.
1) Time. Worldofgnome.org has allowed us to get forums up and running now, rather than in several weeks or months, as would/will be required to get them on forums.gnome.org.
2) Proving ground. GNOME has never had anything resembling ‘official’ forums before, and we’re able to change things and work out the kinks in the system as it were.
I do hope to eventually convince GNOME to allow us to move these forums to forums.gnome.org. Hopefully though, in the mean time we can start to grow a community where users and contributors can come together to make GNOME better than ever.
November 21, 2012 at 11:28 pm
> “I do hope to eventually convince GNOME to allow us to move these forums to forums.gnome.org.”
And on one day, ask all users to move from one website to another?
I’m a GNOME user, but I’m a contributor in other FOSS projects (some have forums, some don’t). My experience is that forums are a place where only users go, not contributors.
You end up with users helping each other, which is a great thing in itself, but often in a misguided way: everybody will post their own how-to working around some bug or wrong behaviour, when the problem should have been reported in the first place and fixed.
And developers won’t go in the forums, because there is just too much noise, which prevents them from focusing on actually getting stuff done.
I was a heavy user of the French Fedora forums for a few years. I had one of the biggest message count at the time. I had posted several how-tos, helped many people, and was regularly asking for help, too.
And then I became a Fedora contributor, and I started understanding more about how Fedora is built, and how users can help building it.
At this moment, I started seeing how all this workaround how-tos were misguided, and I tried telling people to report bugs instead, and we would try and fix them. Or better, to join us and try to fix these bugs (the people posting the workarounds often have a deep understanding of a Linux system and would be very capable of helping to fix the problems).
9 times out of 10, I was met with “I don’t care, this fixes the problem for me”. People just didn’t care about collaborating with the project to make the whole thing better for everybody, they just wanted to brag about how smart they were for finding a workaround.
After a while, I stopped trying, and I never connected to these forums again.
To be perfectly honest, I strongly suspect that the same thing will happen with GNOME forums.
Really, as much as I appreciate what you are trying to do (improving the communication, this is a noble goal, thank you for trying something), I don’t think user forums are the right solution.
So I won’t use them. Instead I’ll go on talking to the developers on IRC, report bugs, lurk on the mailing-list and follow a couple of wiki pages and git repos.
They are not perfect communication media (especially IRC, when like me you live in the “wrong” timezone), but they work more or less for me, and I strongly suspect they work better than forums, for everybody.
November 21, 2012 at 10:38 pm
Thanks, Emily. Ever since I became more involved with GNOME I’ve found the feeling of the community a bit disparate from its appearance from the outside. It just took a while to get that ‘homey’ kind of feel from it, like I belong here in some sense.
I think the marketing and social aspect of most open source projects has been notoriously unfriendly and underdeveloped, so it would be nice to make any inroads we can. Count me in- I just hope we can convince the more seasoned contributors that this kind of interaction is beneficial, not superfluous.
November 22, 2012 at 12:31 pm
Why can’t there be forums like the Mono project has? There forums are *AWESOME*. They *UNIFY* the mail lists and for forums. The forum is the list and the list is the forum; so the community doesn’t get chopped into bits. I really do not understand why projects can’t follow that example – everyone gets what they want. Power users, etc… can use the lists interface and get forum traffic in their mail client and joe-six-pack can use the forums.