New OpenOffice.org Support Forum Open for Business

In March of this year, a small band of adventurers put together the idea of an independent support forum for English-speakers that was truly free, even free of possible loss of key people (including our gallant adventurers). The progress of this adventure was steady and marked by all sorts of drama and heartrending happenstance.

Unaware of the struggle we were embarking upon, we started into the development of an actual organization, rather than an organic collection of people with similar needs and varying levels of

expertise. Our first issue was organizational. The “old” forum was failing and there was concern that the company hosting the forum might pull the server and use it for some other purpose, causing untold loss of useful answers for OpenOffice.org users. The forum had been overwhelmed by spam, and the moderators were fighting the good fight to delete spam posts. Moderators could not delete spam users, and the database was overburdened with thousands of imitation users. Only an administrator could remove these ab-users, and there was only one individual with administrative rights and (possibly worse) that user was the only one who could update the forum software or the web server’s operating system. The one administrator was also the only one who could add new moderators, so as the forum grew, the moderators were taxed more and more by their duties with no real hope of reinforcements. This situation was frustrating to the moderators, who (mostly) suffered in silence and worked tirelessly to answer questions, and weed out spammers. The new organization is still finding itself, but there are now more admin users, and server admins and so more moderators can be added as needed.

The second issue was “where will the new site be hosted.” After several months of discussion, it was agreed that we would take Sun’s offer of a server dedicated to the forum on their Hamburg Germany NOC. This seems an easy choice, but we were restricted in our choices of server because we were strongly attached to the idea of keeping the support forum “non-commercial.” The offer by Sun was the best solution, though Sun is unabashedly a commercial enterprise, because OpenOffice.org is still a Sun Corporation project at heart. Sun has a vested interest in keeping the OpenOffice.org community strong and helping us to grow. Of the hosting situations we surveyed, Sun’s was the most robust.

The third issue to address was the one of software choice. A forum is a software application, and we were strongly in favour of using an open source application, as it fit with our decision to support open-source OpenOffice.org and the OASIS document standard. We chose phpBB after several tense weeks of testing and research on our separate servers of seven or ten forums and portal systems.

So now, it brings me great pleasure to announce the new OpenOffice.org User Services Group, please join me in welcoming the fledgeling forum. http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/