New Mageia Forums Bring Community Together
New Mageia forums were announced today as "the official portal for the Mageia community: support, distro testing reports, contributions, discussions...." Any distribution worth their salt has a forum for users to mingle with other users, developers, and managers. Forums are usually the first place anyone with a problem or suggestion goes. So, in the evolution of what promises to be a major distribution, the official unveiling of the forums is a milestone worth noting.
The Mageia forums is powered by phpBB. phpBB is a popular Open Source bulletin board application used by many projects such Gentoo, Mandriva, Debian User Forums (not an official Debian project), and MEPIS Community Forum; so you'll probably recognize the look and operation.
The Mageia forums Welcome states:
This forum is dedicated to Mageia community from end user to contributer:* community: discussions, official information and local one
* support: basic or advanced support on Mageia distributions
* contribution: report here all feedbacks about development releases, ask for help if you want to become new contributer, speak about issues about your favorite package...
Of course, all forums have rules and some are a bit more strict than others and some have rabid enforcers. But Mageia's is "coming soon." Categories they have right now under support are "Basic Support" or "Advanced Support." Basic support questions are described as " questions about getting Mageia isos and installing it, configuring your printer, using your word processor etc." while Advanced are "questions about network and automated installs, complex server configurations, kernel tuning, creating your own Mageia mirrors, and all tasks likely to be touchy even for skilled users."
Then there is the Community section for News and Announcements, General Mageia discussions, off-topic discussions, and other languages. They have also provided a section for those contributing to Mageia where users can discuss developmental releases and seek help for contributing to the project.
As things are just now ramping up, posting is still relatively light with a lot of introductions and Welcoming statements. But as Mageia ages, so will their forums.