KDE Webby Stuff

Top Ten of the most viewed KDE Websites

2011-07-24T13:10:00.000+02:00

(Image originally uploaded by Steve Rhode)

Some readers might remember, some time back we talked about setting up stats for most of our KDE Websites. Yes, we did. And i thought it is time to share something of that with you, my highly interested readers ;)

Let's compile a chart of our most viewed sites.
It's no surprise, our highly dynamics sites are ranking very high. But which and how? Let's see:

10: community.kde.org (1139 unique visitors a day)
The youngest of our wikis goes to the last place in our chart. Not a big surprise, project specific documentation is done in various places these days, not only in that wiki. But at least it got into the top ten 10, nice. Improvements can be sorted out.
Some other facts:

USA ruled out Germany with a difference of over 3000 requested pages. The next follower - Great Britain - is already over 13000 requested pages below Germany.
Visits duration is 252 seconds
68.4 % directly enter community.kde.org, only about 10% come from a search engine and approximately 20% find their way from a link on another site.

9: edu.kde.org (1159 unique visitors a day)
This was a little surprise and i want to congrat the folks responsible for that. No other module specific website comes close to that value. And it even has beaten one of our global wikis. Keep up the good work!
Facts:

77.1% enter that site directly, only 5% come from a search engine and 17.7% followed a link on a different site
the visits duration is not that different than the above community.kde.org

8: blogs.kde.org (2158 unique visitors a day)
Even though the URL seems to be new the site itself is not, formerly known as kdedevelopers.org.
Facts:

Like expected from a blog aggregation the visits duration is now a bit higher: 502 seconds average
Nearly all visitors view that site through a feed reader

7: planetkde.org (2598 unique visitors a day)
Another blog aggregation platform and still, not that many visitors. At least probably not that sufficient to widely spread news.
Facts:

visits duration is a bit lower again, 309 seconds. Shorter texts maybe?
again the biggest part of the viewers use a feed reader

6: docs.kde.org (2716 unique visitors a day)
Everybody needs documentation, if one likes or not. This site's hits and the next ones will show.
Facts:

Here we have a surprise. 53.1% of the visits come from - tada! - Windows! Only 41.5% use Linux as their operating system
And also now we have way more connections from a search engine, namely 49.6%

5: techbase.kde.org (2928 unique visitors a day)
Developer documentation and tutorials. Yes, expected that this site will rank high. No need for more words.
And also, no interesting facts to tell.

4: dot.kde.org (3108 unique visitors a day)
No documentation, but an official source for news and updates. But did you expect it to be only #4?
Facts:

This is the first site in this top ten where the use of Konqueror is above Firefox with 22.6% (Firefox 22.4%)

3: userbase.kde.org (4336 unique visitors a day)
Our wiki superhero platform. Great team, always taking care to provide the best source of information, they clearly deserve that rank.
Facts:

When watching the most viewed pages, i notice there is a big demand for app pages users do worry about most, like Akonadi, Kontact, Plasma etc.

2: forum.kde.org (8018 unique visitors a day)
And that makes me a little proud, my baby enters the second rank with ease :) Parents couldn't be more proud.
Sadly no kicking facts to tell for this one.

1: www.kde.org (16215 unique visitors a day)
And this shouldn't come to you as surprise in any way. But would you have expected that number? What is your thought about that?
Facts:

356 seconds as average visits duration. Not bad. Some of the above pages are more informational and still worse than that.

Note: due to our caching system the stats may not be very exact, and also they change from hour to hour. This is meant to give a fun overview of what we provide on our web platform.

So what can we learn from that?
Basic values are more or less the same across all domains, like demographical values, browser/os usage. But overall we can say there seems to be a real need for documentation and information, either project news or general ones.
And we reach quite many people out there, probably more than some of you have expected. Now the question is how can we keep that state or even better, improve it and reach even more? I leave that question up for discussion.

Cheerio,
Ingo

KDE Wikis - Get the dust away from it

2011-06-27T13:03:00.000+02:00

Some might already have noticed, yesterday we made a long needed update to all of our wikis. Some months after it was already done for Userbase the others (Techbase and Community, the brazilian site and the wiki for akademy) now also followed.
Till now those were run on an over 2 years old mediawiki version. Many improvements have happened over this time in Mediawiki and it was time to get them into our own wikis.
Another reason was the maintenance overhead with managing 2 different mediawiki installations. This is now done and all of those share a single codebase again.

Along with that there is now a new theme in use for Techbase and Community. Some might have seen that on Userbase already. Switching between those wikis now gives a consistent look and feel. And a hidden easter egg...

But now to the bad news. The former syntax highlighting extension stopped its work due to missing maintenance and updates. So we needed to switch to a different extension for that. It is quite feature rich and fullfills what you would expect from it.
But the syntax has changed. You can read up on it here. It was evaluated if we could script the transition, but due to too many possible options and conflicts it was rejected. At least the old usage doesn't look too broken. If you want to have it a bit more beautiful, you might want to adjust it, once you stumble upon one of those code examples.

I hope overall you are happy with the update. I will be, it is much easier to maintain now. ;)

Cheerio,
Ingo

Webworld 2011 - Day 1

2011-06-03T11:23:00.002+02:00

The title is missleading, this is day 2, but i will try to summarize day 1. At least the parts the others didn't blog about yet.

But let me first talk about something else. Everybody should have noticed by now, the webworld sprint is hosted at linuxhotel.
It is an awesome hotel with pretty much anything a geek would like to have from a hotel. But to make the concept work you need to obey some basic rules. Like, there are free drinks 24/day. You just need to put the bottle back to where you got it from. Basic rules.

And that leads me to our webteam. Up to this point we were there to fix broken links, typos and maybe even be sort of creative to create a new and shiny look now and gain. Guess how hard that is with subdomains and code spread all over the place.
So we really are in need for some basic rules. We discussed it and came up with the following ones:

No new subdomains will be set up from now
Right now we have over 80 subdomains on more than 5 different servers. That is insane and doesn't add ANY value. Having less separated systems and maybe a single point of entry makes it both easier to maintain and easier for users to find the information they need.
Note, there are of course exceptions. Like, reasonably big projects might still request one. A good example for that is the new Edu site. They have a very enthusiastic team behind their website and reasonable traffic. This subdomain is worth its setup.

Subdomains need at least one person of contact/maintainer
Let me repeat, we have over 80 subdomains, each having its own codebase, images, screenshots, content etc. A maintenance nightmare for our team, which basically consists of a handful of people. Also, those sites are hosted on svn/git. Another barrier for webdevelopers who are less likely to be used to SVN/Git than app developers, but would have loved to contribute.
So each app or project wishing to run its own subdomain should also provide the manpower to care for it and update it regularly. To give you an impression, yesterday we archived some sites which were not updated since over 5 years. Having listed "news" from 2005 gives not only a bad impression of the app but also of the whole KDE.

Subdomains should have a reasonable amount of traffic
If they really give some value to the users then it indeed makes sense to have a separated domain.
For our followers, we installed a webstats system now, and will now monitor how much traffic goes through our subdomains. But if noone is really interested in a certain subdomain, why should we even provide it?
But of course, in case we will remove a subdomain, we will not remove any data. There are options to move it back to the main page of kde as subdirectory, or just putting it onto userbase (which btw is way easier to get new contributors to than php files in svn).

These are the rules. It is not that much. But it makes our life easier.

Webworld 2011 - Day 0.5

2011-06-02T13:39:00.000+02:00

Half a day over, break for some food and random bits learned so far:

- Pork is evil
- Toma is evil, too
- Farewell, Capacity
- Lucy is sooo cute
- Linuxhotel is awesome, next year same place
- Eugene still working on the logo
- Joomla is not as bad as its reputation
- I (and most others) have already a sunburn

Details about to follow later once this day is over.

Cheerio,
Ingo

Webworld 2011 - Day 0

2011-06-02T01:07:00.001+02:00

Hey folks at Randa, we have nice weather and just made a barbecue ;)

Yes, this is the day of arrival of this handful of awesome guys. The picture shows Tom Albers and Eugene Trounev trying to manage the correct height for our grill.

They did quite fine, it tasted good and we had enough to make everyone replete.

Eugene also made some adjustments to the meat i never ate before, thanks for that, quite nice.

Anyway, back to topic. This is the day of the arrival for all the attendees. It was mosty relaxing until everyone arrived.
The location is awesome. Funny geek toys everywhere, nice crazy hotel rooms sometimes, but overall, i vote for making the next webworld sprint happen at exactly the same place. Yes, i say that already after half a day.

Now, after our wonderful barbecue we also got some musical interruption, thanks to Hans Chen:

But then we decided to use the late evening to really discuss something so we have a good base for starting up tomorrow. Quite interesting discussion followed, more to come, i am sure.

It was (or is) already late, so we will continue tomorrow.
All i can say it will be a great event with some big points to make. Some will be done this weekend, some might not, but at least laid out as plan for the next months. Not much more to expect from such a small group.
Agenda follows tomorrow noon.

Some other pics:

Our grill in action

The crowd eating

Eugene working really hard on new designs (dude, our logo is still missing!)

Anyway, time to catch some sleep, day starts early. Stay tuned. And wait for the things to happen.

Cheerio,
Ingo

KDE WebWorld 2011 about to start

2011-05-28T21:37:00.000+02:00

As Stuart Jarvis already blogged lately, the KDE WebWorld Sprint is about to start next Wednesday, lasting from 1st to 5th at the awesome Linuxhotel in Essen, Germany.

For those curious, yes, KDE has indeed a bunch of people just showing their support with taking care of KDE's infrastructure. Those people will meet. Well, at least some of them. Sadly others aren't able to attend, even though i'd liked to have them around. But there are still enough people attending.
Who are those? We have some hackers, who would like to improve KDE's own php framework, called Capacity. Might even result in a full rewrite, Emil Sedgh already blogged about it.
Then we have some of support members from userbase around, our most famous wiki. They will improve the overall experience even more, also having the new translation system in mind. Speaking of which, the main hacker for this mediawiki extension will also attend and giving us more insights into the core of mediawiki.
The other wikis might as well get some improvements and finally get its loooong needed update and visual/technical improvement to also use that translation system.
Also, a sysadmin will be around. Some of you might have been aware that much in the server infrastructure has improved lately. We try to make that even better.
Lastly, a very famous KDE designer will attend. Yeah, you might guess there will be some visual improvements in our websites as well.

I won't tell any names, you will soon hear about them anyway from other blogs.

So, as you can see, our target is high, much needs to be done, but i am pretty sure the awesome location will help us motivating ourselves. This is the first sprint of this sort, and i hope it will be a success and others will follow. No, i am pretty sure about that.

And if you are around that area between 1st-5th June, you might want to stop by and look over our shoulders :)

Cheerio

CWG: We have new members!

2011-03-15T16:42:00.000+01:00

Some of you might remember, we were looking for new CWG members, as 2 seats got empty and needed to be filled with appropriate replacements.

Now, those 2 are found. Let me proudly present you Valorie Zimmerman and Tomaz Canabrava as new CWG members. Most of you know Valorie already as valuable member of the Amarok community, also always tireless to help out in various other OSS communities. Same goes for Tomaz, who did wonders not only in the brazilian KDE community.

We are pretty sure they form a great addition to the team. If you meet them, give them a hug on behalf of the rest of the CWG team to congratulate them. :)

CWG call for nominations

2011-02-27T23:50:00.000+01:00

As some of you might already have read on Lydia's blog the Community Working Group is asking you for nominations for 2 new members.

Recently 2 seats got empty, and now we are trying to give new members the opportunity to fill those. And along with that necessary step we decided to give you (the community) the chance to nominate your favourite candidate.

For those who don't even know what the CWG does, you can read up here.

So this is your chance to have some influence! You know someone who might be a good candidate and already has proven his/her ability to work inside this community? Or you think you are even able to yourself? Go and write it to us on community-wg at kde org.

The nomination period will close soon, so take some minutes, think about it and send us your suggestions. Every input is welcome and can help a lot.

Cheerio,

Ingo

KDE WebWorld 2011

2011-02-03T20:51:00.000+01:00

Yes, unbelievable, i could as well write another "how awesome" post. We decided to try to do a webworld sprint and guess what, we were accepted! So this awesome event will take place and make the KDE webspace an even better place :)
For those uninformed, this is a combination of some subteams, which all have related topics in the web. Namely the sysadmins, the docu folks, and and the webteam (for those being curious, yes, indeed, KDE has its own webteam ;) )
It will take place in germany, essen, the linuxhotel, and i am quite happy about this place, as it transports the right spirit for a sprint like this.
I am also happy that many of the attendees are newcomers, they never were to a sprint, but already showed how valuable they are. Great combination.
So i really hope (and think) this will be a great event.

See you there.

p.s.: promo folks, you are beaten in making a sprint possible ;)

Finding the unloved, 2011, part I

2011-01-31T22:27:00.000+01:00

As some of you might already have read, it was time again to find those parts of KDE which projects would need some more love. We (the CWG team) requested input from responsible parties to let us know which those projects are. Now, after 2 weeks we are now sadly announcing those, but on the other hand we are eager to see any help coming in.

So, without any particular order, those are the projects reported to us:

KDE Games

The maintainers of several games are inactive, so bug reports pile up. On the code side, KSirk should be ported to Telepathy from its own Jabber implementation to reduce code complexity. Helping hands are also desired in updating the GGZ libraries, which enable networked multiplayer games.

contact kde-games-devel@kde.org or majewsky at gmx.net

KDE WWW

php, css, html coders needed to maintain kde website infrastructure

kde-www@kde.org

Kdebase/apps/konsole

all kinds of help - The only active maintainer is just trying to plug the crashes and doesn't have as much time as he did. He needs someone who can help w/ bug reports/websites/review patches/testing/etc. No great knowledge of terminals needed for general help. However, he could use anyone who knows terminals and has time for C++ coding

konsole-devel@kde.org or kurt.hindenburg@gmail.com if you have questions

UserBase

many kinds of help - translations, updating screenshots, adding how-to info, volunteers to undertake agreed maintenance work, adopting specific pages and maintaining them.

contact annew on #kde-www or annew@kde.org

KDE on Windows

there are lots of 3rd-party dependencies missing. Also, a lot of applications need Windows-specific bits of code.

contact kde-windows@kde.org

KDE on Mac

almost the same as KDE on Windows

contact kde-mac@kde.org

KDE-Edu:

Development:: - KTouch and Kiten are unmaintained, KTouch is a priority while Kiten mlight be scheduled to disapear.
Extract KVTML editor from Kanagram and make it a lib so it could also be included in KHangMan
See if it's possible to merge KHangMan and Kanagram in one app: first think of a common UI design.
QML use in kdeedu
Promo, website: We need more promo work following Code-In submissions: link videos from each app web page, open a page on the website with promo material (logo, usage of logo, t-shirt logo, videos, flyer...)
Artwork: Lots of Oxygen icons are missing (app icons, action icons), we need a list of them.

Contact:kde-edu mailing list (kde-edu@kde.org) and annma@kde.org

Plasma

Picture Frame applet:: support for javascript PoTD providers (maybe even move current ones to js) and for adding/downloading providers with KNewStuff - Clean code.

Contact:: plasma mailing list (plasma-devel@kde.org) and annma@kde.org

KDE-Accessibility

website updates, bugfixing, testing, integration with the rest of KDE

kde-accessibility@kde.org and/or jpwhiting@kde.org, #kde-accessibility on irc

kdeutils

Mostly the same as the last call for arms: they need maintainers for applications such as KFloppy, kdf, sweeper and ktimer (or maybe those could just be removed once and for all). More hands are also needed in Ark and KGpg (dakon published a blog post some time ago about how he wasn't very motivated to work on it).

Contact the mailing list (kde-utils-devel@kde.org) or me directly (rakuco on Freenode, kubito at gmail)

If you ask me personally, this list is even too long with only one item, this is far too big. So this is your chance to get involved and get maaany kudos for helping out in one of those areas. If you think your skills could fit or if you are just interested what those tasks would involve just take the necessary step and use the contact details.
Do us a favour and let's reduce this list to zero!

Cheerio,
Ingo

News from KDE www: pastebin

2010-12-27T21:02:00.000+01:00

After a long year of changes in the kde-www land, ranging from looks to scm switches, a final last coup:

KDE is running its own pastebin service now!

What's special about it, you might want to ask. Several things.

- It is entirely written by our crazy fellow team member Sayak "did i mess up the code again" Banerjee, we have the control over the source, soon to go into git.kde.org

- It is completely ad free (my personal favourite reason for using it)

- It provides the look of the upcoming new kde www look already now, it's called Chihuahua 2.0

But let's a bit into the features.

- You can post code snippets, texts, and use syntax highlighting for a nice eye friendly code review.

- You can password protect your code snippets

- You can review previously entered code snippets

- Use RSS notification to get aware of new posts (makes it possible to integrate with an irc bot)

More interesting features are:

- Use the API to post your snippets

- Set an Url dedicated to your project and use this along with your snippets, RSS feeds or archive function, e.g. i just enter the url paste.kde.org/~www/ and welcome to the wonderful world of snippets for our www group.

That should have been all. Wish you have fun with it, use it and spread the word.

Cheerio,

Ingo

What the forums search can do for you

2010-12-12T16:24:00.001+01:00

This time i would like to write about a very underestimated feature of the KDE Community Forums, because i am pretty sure most of you don't even know what it can do for you.

Let's take a look at it first:

Yes, pretty boring. But let's see what it can do for you.
First you have the usual search options, like searching for a keyword, an author, and you can of course decide which area of the forum should be searched, or if the whole posts or only titles should be searched. Lastly you can decide the form of the output.
That is the most basic stuff you will find everywhere, still boring.

But some of you might already have noticed, we provide some additional modifications to phpBB.
First, we provide a tagging system. You can assign tags to your topics which then can be searched, either directly on the frontpage (use the tagcloud on the bottom) or in combination with keywords etc. in the search system.
Also, you can mark a certain post as the solution to your problem, which is quite handy, as you can directly jump to the solution from the topic list. But you can also nail down your search results to those topics who provide a solution.

Let's paint a scenario. I want to have a list of all topics where our insane topscorer administrator/sysadmin Ben Cooksley (bcooksley) wrote something. Result for now 9442 matches. (Soon worth a congratulation btw ;) )
Let's nail it down to the tag "system settings", as he maintains it. There we already are down to 16 entries, 46 if you use systemsettings as keyword instead of a tag. That is mostly because the tagging system is not used as much as it could be. It gets powerful in combination with the search. Consider that next time you visit a topic. Anyone registered can tag.
Anyway, we could now also nail down the above example to solved topics (4 hits) or search in certain areas.

So why could this be powerful?
Well, first, it happens quite often a topic lands in the wrong place, and those who could help won't find it or it gets overlooked. Having it nicely tagged helps to find it later.
And i don't need to tell you how much easier searching can be if there are only solved topics shown.

But this is not all. I know the lazy devs, who don't like websites or forums at all and probably miss important information due to that. Those also can be helped.
See the link in the top bar, which leads you to the rss area. And soon you will notice it is the same interface as the search page. Actually it IS the same, we separated it to make it easier to find the new rss functions.
So everything you can think of you want to search can also be outputted as rss feed. No need to open your browser to get updates, just set up your search and copy the resulting search feed url into your feed reader or irc bot (our does use it already).

Why do i even tell this? Because as you can see it can be really powerful. But to be really powerful both tools, the tagging system and the solved system need to be used more efficiently. Sidenote: Tagging a topic inside the Plasma area with "plasma" is a bit senseless ;)
So go ahead, tag threads and make users aware to mark their problems solved as soon as there is a solution!

Do us a favour and make this search system really powerful

Cheerio

A Matter of Control: The State of Input Device Support in KDE

2010-11-18T21:48:00.032+01:00

Guest Post

If you look at the various changes from KDE 3 to KDE 4, two major trends emerge: unification and abstraction. Plasma, for example, unifies the various parts of the desktop and panel. Solid provides an abstraction layer that hides the details of device management from applications, while Phonon does the same for multimedia. Akonadi does both, providing a unified system for handling PIM data and creating an abstraction layer so PIM front-ends don't need to be concerned with the source or nature of the data they display. And of course the success of KDE 4 is not due solely to these trends, it is also due to developers sitting down and ironing out the current state of the tools in KDE, where they fail, where they work, where they should be, and how we can get them there.

Overall this strategy has proved to be wildly successful. Plasma is now working (at least partially) on everything from cell phones to finance manager applications. The move from HAL to DeviceKit will be pretty much transparent to applications thanks to Solid, and the move from Xine to VLC will be similar for multimedia applications thanks to Phonon.

However, there is one area that I think has been almost—if not entirely—neglected in this process. As you can probably guess from the title, this area is input devices. To clarify, when I say “input devices”, I mean what some would call “Human Interface Devices”. This includes physical hardware like mice, keyboards, remotes, and joysticks, as well as more software-based tools like gesture recognition and speech recognition. For the most part, the state of such devices is largely the same as it was in KDE 3.5. kdelirc has been replaced with kremotecontrol, decent touch-pad support is available, and Simon may one day provide robust speech control, but otherwise not much has changed.

KDE, while on the leading edge of most aspects of computing, has not been for these devices. Some things that have been standard with pretty much every device or desktop environment for years are unsupported in KDE. Even areas where KDE is strongest, such as keyboard shortcuts, there are a number of well-known deficiencies. Attempts have been made to implement certain features, but they have been uncoordinated, inconsistent, and redundant.

In my opinion, the issues related to this aspect of KDE deserve some serious attention, especially with work in many areas of KDE 4 now focused on polish and incremental improvements. Hopefully this article, in which I list some of the problems I see and propose a solution, will get the ball rolling on this front.

I will start by summarizing my take on the state of the major classes of input devices. The details of the problems are not important, the point is to justify my conclusion that the issue exists. At the end I will propose a single solution that I think would solve many of these issues, one that I feel is based off the successes of KDE 4. Unfortunately I am not a developer, so the proposal may or may not be feasible. But at the very least I hope this will at least trigger some serious thought and discussion on the matter.

Keyboards

I would say that the keyboard is easily the class of input device for which KDE's support is strongest, one of only two classes that I would say actually has good support. That being said, there are a number of issues even here. For example, only one value is allowed for any global keyboard shortcut, and only two for local shortcuts. This makes sense for desktop users, but for laptop users who sometimes use an external multimedia keyboard, they have to decide between using their multimedia keys or having shortcuts that work while traveling. If you use Bluetooth remotes, which tend to be identified as keyboard buttons, this is an even more serious issue since the buttons on the remote may not correspond to those on your keyboard, meaning you can only use one or the other. And amongst the multimedia keys my version of x11 supports, KDE trunk currently cannot recognize 20 of them, about 13% of the total number.

Remotes

This is the other area where I think KDE support is good, although not as good as with keyboards. There are two primary problems I see with the kremotecontrol. First, it requires that the remote already be configured, not necessarily an easy task and one that generally requires fiddling with the command-line and editing text files. Second, it requires an implementation of a shortcut system completely independent from the keyboard shortcuts. This involves a separate and very different user interface to accomplish roughly the same task, and requires that either individual applications or kremotecontrol provide a second, redundant set of commands. Since remotes are nowhere near as common as keyboards, this has left kremotecontrol with far fewer applications it can control directly and far fewer commands it can issue. It is capable of mapping remote control button presses to D-Bus events, but this is very complicated and requires the target application be running.

Mice

KDE's support for mice, or lack thereof, is for me its most glaring deficiency. For a device as ubiquitous and essential as mice are, they have gotten remarkably little attention from developers. One of the more obvious limitations in KDE's mouse support is the lack of support for now almost universal back and forward buttons. You would be hard-pressed to find a mouse today, even small, budget, portable, laptop mice, that do not have these buttons. As far as I am aware every modern desktop environment supports these buttons besides KDE. Even Apple, which long resisted even the right-click, now seems to support these buttons. Many mice today, especially high-end mice, have many more buttons than this. Besides the normal three buttons+scroll, my mouse has seven extra buttons, none of which work with KDE. There is no general way to use mouse button presses or combined keyboard and mouse button presses for use as shortcuts. These sorts of things are possible to implement in KDE, rekonq supports back and forward buttons while plasma supports combined mouse/keyboard shortcuts (although only local shortcuts, not global ones), but there is no general, KDE-wide way to use these buttons, the support that does exist is only in one or two applications, and for most buttons there is no solution in KDE at all. Feature requests for better mouse button support are amongst the oldest, highest-voted, and most-duplicated wish-list items in both bugs.kde.org and the KDE brainstorm system.

Touch-Pads

KDE's touch-pad configuration has greatly improved recently from a basic configuration standpoint. However, it suffers from the same limitations as mice, namely that there is no easy way to map touch-pad events to commands. There are four corners in a standard rectangular touch-pad, but KDE only lets you map the three mouse buttons, wasting at least one corner (or more if you have a multi-touch enabled touch-pad). There are four edges, but only two ways to scroll, meaning edge actions commonly seen in other touch-pad configurations, like back/forward and volume control, are not supported. With two directions per edge and four edges that is eight commands. With circular scrolling, there are two additional directions for each edge and each corner, giving 16 additional shortcuts. With multi-touch enabled touch-pads all of those could be used for non-mouse-related tasks. That is 28 potential commands on every touch-pad. That many is probably too much for users to remember at one time, but it is a lot of untapped capability, much of it capability that has been present in pretty much every touch-pad driver in windows for at least five years.

Joysticks

Joystick support in KDE is also pretty limited. You can calibrate your joystick, it shows the current values for each button, and it shows a trace for two axes (no matter how many axes the joystick actually has). There may be some joystick controls in some games (although I wasn't able to find any, even for games where it makes sense). Ignoring games, however, many joysticks provide a half dozen or even a dozen buttons and often at least four or five axes, all of which could be put to good use as shortcuts for controlling your computer. In fact many joysticks come bundle with tools that let you do this in windows, and it is probably even more useful for game pads which are smaller, easier to handle, and often wireless.

Bluetooth

I already mentioned the issues with Bluetooth remotes and keyboards. Less-standard devices, like Nintendo Wii remotes, currently need separate software to interpret them, and they have to be mapped to other input devices like keyboard button presses in order to be used. There are some efforts to get native support for these sorts of devices, such as in Plasma Media Center, but once again these solutions are restricted to parts of KDE and thus will not help KDE as a whole.

Gestures

KDE has support for mouse gestures. However, the configuration of these gestures is difficult, relying on the custom shortcut system which then forces you to map the gestures to keyboard shortcuts or D-Bus commands.

Speech Recognition

Simon should provide speech recognition support, but since I have never been able to get it run, and it does not compile at all with Qt 4.7, there is not much I can say. I don't expect the situation to be much better than with kremotecontrol, though.

A Proposal

As I mentioned at the beginning, I think unification and abstraction have proven to be extremely successful in KDE wherever they have been applied. So the questions are, can these approaches be applied to input devices, and will this make users' and developers' lives better? I think the answer to these questions is “yes”.

KDE already has a really good D-Bus-based system for handling input events. This is the keyboard shortcut system I mentioned earlier. It makes it very easy to assign keyboard shortcuts, and automatically provides slots for keyboard shortcuts for any toolbar button or menu entry without any additional effort by developers. However, the interface would work just as well for shortcuts involving other input devices. In fact, almost identical user interface elements are used by Plasma for mouse shortcuts.

So I think the best solution would be to build off the existing keyboard shortcut system, extending it so developers can write plug-ins that provide support for additional types of input devices. The plug-ins would send events to the shortcut system in a standard format. The shortcut system would then combine the events from all the plug-ins and pass those events along to applications. Applications would just see these generic input events, they wouldn't need to know or care what sort of device sent them (although I suppose this information could be provided if it would be useful).

This approach has a number of advantages over the current implementations:

Users don't have to map input events to keyboard shortcuts
Users don't need to go searching for the right tool to configure a device
Users don't need to learn several different configuration interfaces
Developers have a consistent software interface for all devices
Application developers don't need to change anything in their applications
Developers don't need to write a custom user interface just for their device
If one developer programs support for a device the rest of KDE gets it for free
Support for shortcuts that combine two devices, like mouse+keyboard shortcuts, would happen automatically
Plug-ins would not need to be tied to physical hardware devices, so for example a program that triggers a particular event at a particular time would be easy to do without needing to worry about cron jobs or shell scripts
Joystick support for games would happen automatically (at least for buttons)
It should make it easier to keep up with changes in underlying libraries, like x11 keyboard keys
It would be easy to package and distribute plug-ins
It would be easier to support additional operating systems
Plug-ins could be loaded only when the appropriate device is connected
It could be possible to support multiple plug-ins for the same device with different features, although this may not be desirable

One objection may be that there are major differences between different input devices. For instance kremotecontrol supports profiles, which allows you to change the role of each button. However, this turns out to be a benefit of this system, rather than a drawback. It allows developers to focus all their attention solely on the things that are different about the device they are working on. Each device would still need configuration tools to configure properties that are unique to that device, but they can share configuration tools for things they have in common.

So in the case of kremotecontrol profiles, rather than having to worry about mapping the button presses in different profiles to different application events, all the developers would need to do is let the users assign whatever name they want to the buttons in each profile. The same name would be seen by the shortcut system as the same button. If you want a button to do the same thing in different profiles, give it the same name. If not, give it a different name. If you want different buttons to do the same thing, give them the same name.

However, you could even take it a step further. Being able to configure different sets of shortcuts for different situations could be very helpful, maybe even tied to activities. So the kremotecontrol developers could, if they wanted, integrate their profile system into the shortcut system as a whole. That is another advantage of this system: if there is a useful feature, all devices could benefit from it rather than just one.

There is one thing that would still need to change in the shortcut configuration, though. With all of the devices being supported in a single interface, one global shortcut and two local shortcuts per command would no longer be sufficient. Users would need to be able to set an arbitrary number of global and local shortcuts for any command. As I explained earlier, however, I think this is a worthwhile change in and of itself, so I don't consider this to be a disadvantage.

In the end, this is just an idea about how the sorts of approaches that have worked in other parts of KDE could be applied to input devices. But this is not intended to be the end of the discussion, rather I hope it is a starting point. A sprint dedicated to input devices would be ideal, but I think any sort of focused attention on this area would be of great benefit to KDE. I think that if KDE developers put their heads together and work some of their magic they could make KDE's input device support second to none, as they have done with many other areas.

by Todd

projects.kde.org got a facelift

2010-11-11T23:48:00.000+01:00

Some of you might know, i am always trying to improve the experience of our KDE websites. Last improvement was Userbase (if you don't know that yet, go and visit it!).

Now we have a new facelift. Some might have seen it, projects.kde.org is now our project management facility. But its look was a plain default redmine one.

But with some help of our artist Eugene Trounev we were able to change that. So take a look. Hope you all enjoy it and still find it usable.

Amarok & Translations

2010-08-21T19:36:00.002+02:00

First, some of you might know we are using a new mediawiki extension at Userbase, namely the Translate extension by the translatewiki folks.
It is an awesome extension making us able to translate content on- and offline via po files. Those guys are really helpful with any issue we encounter and they deserve a hug whenever you meet them ;)

Now, Mamarok and Valoriez of Amarok fame stepped up and wrote a very nice Quickstart guide for Amarok on Userbase. And in my opinion, this is a good time to take our new extension to its limits.
The guide is now marked for translation and everybody could step up and translate it to his/her native language. You only need to have a registered account at userbase and add yourself on http://userbase.kde.org/Translator_Account
Then you can be added to translators and start your work.

The reason i write this is simple. Have as many translations as possible. KDE itself has now translations for nearly 100 languages (if i didn't count wrong). And having those for userbase, too, would be just plain awesome. Or do you know any other wiki with so many languages? If so, please tell me.
Another reason is, you could give me a hard time :P
Notice the language bar above every article. Not that bad with a handful of languages. But consider it a box with links to a hundred and more languages... I would need to find a better way to display the language list. And as there is a new theme about to come it makes sense to fix it before ;)

So, put some stress on me and translate as much as you can from this quickstart guide. For guidelines you can see the sidebar links on Userbase or ask us on #kde-www (freenode).

Git needs YOU

2010-08-16T01:08:00.004+02:00

This is as a reminder of those out there who still didn't convert their account from https to ssh:

Yes, there are still many accounts left to convert, as toma already pointed out. We, the sysadmins really want to get this rolling, so go ahead and answer our invitation mail. You know who you are, you must have got it ;)

Get Involved

2010-01-13T12:37:00.001+01:00

Once i have read comics, many comics. Especially those of some superheroes. What i can remember quite well is one comic about superman. It was about a problem with our parallel world. Suddenly there were 2 earths. And Superman's problem was now to put those 2 worlds together again. To keep it short, he was actually able to handle it. Why do i want to tell this?
What we actually have are 2 different worlds.

The first one is that of a user willing to contribute but not knowing how and where. Maybe it also involves being a bit shy, maybe just not finding the right information or the right place.

The second world is the developers world. They work hard on their product and have a hard time to do it all, always waiting for a new volunteer.

Now, how could these two worlds be approached? Afterall, we want our small family called KDE grow, right? ;)
That's where "Get Involved" comes into the game.

It is an open call to users who have a special love for a certain project of KDE and would like to contribute.
All of those projects need someone looking after bugs, some promo work or maybe just talking about it. Something everyone could fullfill.
This user will be mentored to get in contact with the projects developers and keeping up with the information needed.
He/She will keep up with new features and how to work with them and probably talk about them in the various communication channels.

This is basically not new, KDE is, like any other open source project, open to every new contributor. What is new though, is to give them a real guidance on the way to it. It is especially important to give them a real list of small tasks that need to be done and point them to it.

Now, there are the klassrooms, which are seeing daylight again. But that is not enough. I see the need to have a coordinated effort to invite new contributors, be it just plain users willing to help out their favourite application or project.

Mentoring can be done on various ways. We could open a dedicated irc channel, but of course also the forums can help with that. A place where mentors and volunteers can exchange questions and ideas. It would be like the bridge between the above two worlds.

So, for any project out there, if you see a need for that, if you want some more support, give me some feedback.

What sort of help does a project need from a user?
- bug triaging (it is much easier when concentrating on just one app)
- writing documentation
- spreading news about new functions or workflows
- testing updates
- what else? (tell it to me)

KDE BugWeeks

2009-12-16T19:34:00.002+01:00

Yes, the title is weird, you probably know it as BugDay. So why did i write this? Well, after some discussion about a possible klassroom about bughunting we decided to dedicate a full new section to bughunting. Why? Bugs are everywhere, no matter which area. That is sad. But hunting them down is fun actually.
Just think of how fun it would be if you would be able to close a bunch of those bugs. And you always thought it would be that hard. But it isn't! That's why we now try to join the bugsquad team with the forum team.
That means, preparation will take place on the forums, and the final bugday (like you know it) can take place on both, the forums and irc.
You will get the help you need to set up your environment and be ready to invest bugs.
Want more info? Visit this topic.

KDE Promo Sprint - it's over now

2009-11-15T22:12:00.002+01:00

This day has come to an end now, and with the promo sprint has ended. Unfortunately, i must say. It was a great experience, nice people, and i'd really to see them again in time.

Anyway, what happened today? As there was already much talk on the topics that needed to be discussed, this day was mostly filled with actually doing some real work on it. This included code and test the new structure of the kde site navigation, testing options we have and searching for improvements. I can't go into too much detail at this point, but once it comes out, you most likely will enjoy it. Really.

At the middle of the day each team presented their work. And of course, some things still needs to be done, but it's good to be at a point where you actually see what needs to be done in a clear fashion. Now that's actually my point of view, speaking as a newcomer to the promo world.

What can i take home with me?
- A big bunch of motivation to go further with my work on the kde websites
- Clearly more motivation to also get more involved in the promo parts
- KDE clearly has great people in their community
- I hate speaking english...
- Having a good understanding of what KDE exactly is, helps a lot
- I want Jos's jacket, it's great

Probably more, but this is what comes to my mind right now, still being full with the impressions of this weekend. There were also some discussions aside from the main action that could be interesting in the feature, but time will come for that.

So, cooling down now, sleeping and then going on the 8 hour trip back home.

KDE Promo Sprint - Day 2

2009-11-14T22:07:00.002+01:00

Day 2 of the promo sprint has found an end, and it's time to sit down and write about it.
Till now, it was an awesome experience for me to finally meet some faces behind the (mostly) virtual concept of the KDE community. Overall great people and i am feeling more motivated than before to go forward and trying to help out more in the area of the KDE websites (maybe even promo itself now).
So, we are stuck to the room (or better, two of them, to do teamwork). What did we do so far?
It was already mentioned that the main issue was on rebranding KDE. And was worked out so far really seems like a good idea, from the first impression it is way better than before and can really solve some missunderstandings about KDE really is. But we need to wait for the official announcement before saying anything... so, stay tuned and watch the DOT.

Anyway, the main point why i am here is the www part of this sprint. This has some surprises to me, actually. First, i was not aware, that this area is on focus for our beloved promo crowd (at least not at this time). Second, not far ago we already tried some
enhancements to it from the forum team. And as it seems, we were just slightly to early.
There will be some major improvements on the main KDE site, most of that was discussed in the last 2 days. Again, stay tuned to see results (is this called "making your mouth wet" or something?)

Then, one important thing and one of my pet projects, was a discussion about how to introduce new contributors. Well, some maybe know about the "klassroom" project the forum had some time ago. Unfortunately this was not as regularly as it was supposed to be. Just because we went out of manpower for this.

So, this is my call to any contributor to KDE out there: Become a mentor on the forums and do a klassroom session to help out new contributors!. It doesn't matter which area it is, be it coding, artwork, translation, bughunting, webdeveloping, doc writing, etc. Whichever area you work on for KDE, think of becoming a mentor to involve possible contributors to real life subjects on your topic. Maintainer or not, doesn't matter. And it is way easier than you think. If you are interested, don't hesitate to contact me or one of the forum staff or just visit us on freenode in the channel #kde-forum. Any questions can be answered.

So far so good, bed is calling, last day is coming. Good night everyone.

1st Birthday of the KDE Community Forums

2009-10-13T00:08:00.002+02:00

As you maybe already read here, we are celebrating the ending of the first year of the KDE Community Forums.
But let me add some personal remarks.

We once started it with 2 people because we just felt the need for it rising (apart from us being just a sort of website guys). We just started from the ground and hoped it would rise to something really helpful for the users AND the developers.

Soon the first contributors showed up, willing to help out in the team. Some of them users, some of them developers. That was already great step for me. And along with the new team members there came a lot of new ideas. What could we provide, how can we improve both, the user experience in the forum AND in KDE.
First idea, klassrooms (don't discuss with me the obligatory K in it, please ;) ), they went well. But after some of them we just ran out of manpower, as also other ideas showed up.
Yes, Brainstorm. It was probably the biggest addition we ever did, as it feels for some users as a real different area (Note: as of know it just feels like it, but it isn't, for the technical interested folks).

I guess you get the other additions from the dot post. But what impressed me most over the time, that we somehow managed to have gotten aware by the developers. Over the time we contacted by developers of specific applications if they could have their own area. Hell yeah, sure you can! :) And they all also integrated well as moderators of their own area.
For those of you not knowing it, this is not taken for granted, especially for OSS forums.
So let me give a big kudo to the developers being active in the forums, although they could stick to mailinglists only.

Summary:
It was a great year with the forums, as it was with KDE, big improvements in KDE over this time, many of it even making our work as supporters easier. So, devs, keep up the good work, and so will we. ;)
But apart from that, still every volunteer welcome to do maybe a kourse, or provide some feedback, or even give us some new ideas.

Extended search in the forums

2009-10-03T14:01:00.002+02:00

Lately there have been some additions to the default search system.
First, we switched the backend to a much smoother one, so we now finally can search for common words like "plasma" again... :D

Along with that we integrated the feed system into the search. What does that mean? You can now put search results into your feedreader. Let's say you are interested in topics containing the keyword "crash" and "plasma" (to stay at the last example) you can keep updated in your feedreader about every new post or topic containing this criteria.

Now you are not tied to feeds for special forums anymore. This opens many new possibilities.
But this will not be the last change, so stay tuned.

Krita on the KDE Community Forums

2009-09-28T13:43:00.002+02:00

We can now proudly present a very own forum area dedicated to Krita.

After we included the forum for Amarok some months ago we were now contacted by the Krita team with the wish to have its own area.
Well, that makes us proud in 2 ways:
- Another app drives now its own forum with us
- The developers took interest in it

The latter is a very special point, which shows not only end users are interested in the forums, we also get attention from developers. And that makes conversation in the community much more fruitful than just a forum where users help users.

So, if you are a Krita user, and want to discuss or even share your artwork done in Krita, visit the Krita Forum.
I am sure the Krita team is happy to have your feedback.

Featured phpBB for August 2009: KDE Community Forums!

2009-08-14T22:27:00.003+02:00

This is a great honour for me and my mates in the forums team. See this:
http://www.phpbbhacks.com/features/phpbb.php
Quote for why sites are chosen:

They are the standard in which phpBBs should be measured by. The pride of phpBB.

Wow, that is far beyond my expectations.
And that reminds me of something i should have said even earlier in public:
Thanks to all the team members to form it, and also to all the users using it. The atmosphere overall is a really nice place, what else can you wish as an admin for a forum.

New Idea again...

2009-08-11T17:38:00.003+02:00

Most of you know behindkde.org. I always enjoyed reading about the persons behind KDE.
That made us think we could do something like that on the forum. And Nightrose extended this idea a bit (thanks for that).
Maybe some of you know about digg dialogg. It is a place where you can submit/vote on questions that will be asked to an important person. So it is basically a community driven interview. I really like that aspect.

So what is it technically? It is a threaded display of all possible interviews, where commenters can be voted.
We are a forum, so we have the threaded display. Also, thanks to Brainstorm we already have a voting system in place. All we would need to do is change the topic voting to a post voting.

So, if we find a KDE contributor that is willing to be interviewed we could set up a new topic in this new area and the users can post their questions to this person. After a (yet undefined) time period we close this topic and the 10-20 (?) most popular questions will be handed over to person that will be interviewed.

That's about it. Oh, i forgot, we found a possible name for this new Area: "KDialog *gearhead = new KDialog;" :D

So, my question: Users, would you like such thing on the forums? And Contributors, would be willing to get interviewed in such a way?

Please tell me your opinions.

5 years old KDE user computer abilities

2009-08-04T12:17:00.002+02:00

We just got a nice success story on the forum from user miguelbranco that i'd like to share with you. The original story can be found here.

Quote:

I’ll introduce the story a bit. About 4 to 5 years ago I really got bored of dealing with Windows so I looked for alternatives. I found Linux and I happily migrated. As I’m the only computer geek at home, out of 8 people!, I progressively moved every computer at home to Linux with KDE. The rest of my family just moved with me and eventually loved the change. This is not to say that they haven’t had issues from time to time but they can always get help from me. With Windows it was just the same, so no change here. They felt the change was for good, they found KDE easier, prettier and less intrusive. Seriously. In fact right now the only Windows installation at home it’s my sister’s dual boot that has a Vista… and it’s there because I told my sister not to deleted it, just in case she might needed it. She really hates Vista (something I don’t). She wanted to have it deleted but I insisted (I completely deleted Vista 15 days after having bought the laptop, by the way).

So, the story is that my nephew, who’s 5 y.o right now, has been using Linux and Windows since always and can explain you what’s the difference between them and how to select one or the other in GRUB’s menu…. The first day he had computer classes at school teachers simply got amazed of his computer abilities. The kid asked – Teacher, don’t you use Linux here? – as he saw XP on the screens. I don’t even think the poor teacher knew what Linux was. As you can imagine, he can’t read yet. He knows the numbers and letters and he’s just started learning how to pronounce groups of letters (Galician and Spanish have regular orthographies so one grapheme nearly always equates to one phoneme). To brief up, very basic reading skills. While still a baby we’d let him play with mouse, then with two y.o we opened a web browser and have him playing simple games at BBC kids web page and so on. Progressively I taught him to switch on and off the PC and to select the OS in the GRUB menu (he couldn’t read but knew that windows was third), I taught him how to select a user and write the password in KDM (yes, his mother has passworded login ;) ) and how to open firefox (the fox ball, he calls it) and use bookmarks (which I set up for him). I think you get ti, he knows that kind if things. Some times he even tells me – hey, look what trick I know! – and changes the virtual desktop or something alike.

But the other day I just perceive how much his “computing” skills had advanced and how pathetic some people, that has been using computers since they had been invented, seem in comparison. He switch on the laptop as always, typed in the password, and went on to launch a web browser. He basically uses the laptop for playing flash games. He launched kickoff (yes, kickoff); for some mysterious reason he ignored Firefox, which is bookmarked as a favorite, move to the ‘recently used’ tab, looked for Opera and launched it. Then, he moved to the direction bar, or whatever you call it, pressed the button that shows the recently typed web pages (that small triangle) and scrolled through the list until the found the one he likes. I’ve no clue how he recognized the domain, by the way. (Shape recognition?). The page loaded and then he clicked in a game which triggered the opening of a background tab, to where he immediately moved to happily start playing. It is not that he knows how to do all that things individually, it’s that he has discovered them through use and now uses all them routinely without doubting about what he has to do next. Oh, he said Opera was better than Firefox for games :) . Don’t ask me why.

Besides that my nephew might be brighter than the average, to my head came all that futile debated about kickoff, how bad it was, people counting clicks and so on. It suites the need of my nephew and It’s just right for most of people. My experience is that average users don’t care about learning applications names and don’t even know or care about what applications are installed. It isn’t different if the user has gone to the university or not. Most user simply don’t care about anything computer related. The question type I’ve been made the most is ‘what do I use for …?’ and ‘where do I find my….?’. Kickoff does well at helping people finding applications and folders. I might not be a perfect tool but does the job well. I have the impression that users most opposed to changes are long term users that simply don’t want things to change because if they change they have to learn a new series of habits. But new users easily adapt, especially 5 y.o KDE users :) .

Nice, isn't it?

KDE Forums - Something big is about to happen

2009-06-27T00:49:00.008+02:00

Lately there has been a lot of activity in the KDE Forums IRC channel, #kde-forum on freenode. neverendingo, one of the forum admins, also said something interesting this evening:

neverendingo: finally... nightmares from conditional html code...
neverendingo: and bubbles, i see them everywhere...

Now you might wonder, what has bubbles to do with the forum? Unfortunately I can't give you an answer, but it seems to be related to this picture that has been floating around:

One thing is for sure though: we will find out more in the not-so-distant future.

KDE Forums - News and what to expect

2009-06-17T12:30:00.002+02:00

The forum is now nearly one year old. And after some discussions in the team (and the not so far away release of KDE 4.3) we decided to do some major changes. The most obvious one will be a layout change. The old one served us very well, right, but as time goes, i would like to have a new one. And along with the really great looking AIR theme from the oxygen team i invested some time to do a new design. I can't post screenshots yet, as i have no internet connection (at an internet cafe right now) but these will follow soon. Just stay tuned ;)

Right after our major upgrade we want to introduce the "KDE Forums house kleaning day". This will also happen shortly before the 4.3 release in July.

What does this mean?
We invite every user of the forums to discuss with us
- The forum structure
Maybe you are not sure if the structure of the forum is really good enough. Suggest something else.
- Unanswered posts
Yes, unfortunately there are still posts that weren't answered. And we'd like to have an answer on nearly every question. So this is your chance to get involved and help people with their problems. The "Solved" button is there for a reason ;) .
- Topics not in the right place/already solved etc
Sometimes it happens that topics land in the wrong place. This is no big problem, but to give new users the chance to find what they need we should have them in the right place. Find these topics and give us a hint to where they should belong. Also, some topics could already be solved but aren't marked as such. Tell us. Same for the brainstorm area. Maybe some of the items are already in bugzilla, or already implemented.

The day in question will be shortly before the 4.3 release and we will announce it in time to give everybody the chance to get involved. Discussion can take part in the "Feedback" area, and also in our irc team channel at freenode, #kde-forum.

So for everybody who would like to give a helping hand, join us.

forum.kde.org release party - success?

2009-01-28T21:35:00.003+01:00

After our record attempt our 24 hours lasting thread about congratulations to the KDE 4.2 release is slowly coming to an end. Did we meet our target of 2000 posts? No... As of now we are at 370 posts... Well, we still have it open to finally come to 420 posts, that would be cool.

But let me sum up:

- When i first time entered the forum yesterday, i noticed people already trying to do posts in this particular forum... (it was ~10:00 UTC). Luckily we decided to wait with opening it till the official release announcement arrives. :)
- Unfortunately we found out that the new Dot is hosted right on the same server with us... That made us a bit worried about server load etc, since the new Dot as well as our Release Party was meant to arrive at the same time. And both are known for high traffic on such days. Well, as most of you probably saw... it put the server to it's knees. Some issues were tested out before by us: First, we really need a better caching system for the forum! Second, we also found some possible performance issues on the Dot, that also gets the server to its knees. This will be examined.
- Our normal user visit statistics were ~50 users on the forum. Since the beginning of the day it kept increasing and was already twice the normal when the release announcement came out.

So how did it go:
- Overall impressive, there really was not much need for moderation since all comments were very positive (actually i remember only one comment that was more some sort of a trolling than constructive). And I swear, we didn't cheat Wink We have logs to prove that! So developers, visit the thread and feel warmly thanked by the users.
- Some users even stated they waited the whole day just to be the first one to congratulate... Nice, i love this community!
- Although we set up the congrats thread to allow posts from guests, we noticed a slight increase in user registrations.
- But we topped it all when someone from our forum team finally wanted to "stress test" our poor server so OhReally slashdotted this event... :D That was the point where the server REALLY went on it's bloody knees... Happened to be the moment when i just restarted my DE on my main account to the shiny new release, what took me about 2 minutes. And returning to the forum showed me 200 users online... short after that 500 (~150 before being slashdotted). Finally we hit a new milestone with 651 users simultaneously online.
- Did i mention that this thread needed only 1 hour to have over 500 visits?
- Now after the day we have topped every other thread so far. Most replies (370 in 24 hours), most visits (>24 000 since it started), and user load still higher than normal. Really really nice.
- Putting that on Slashdot also gave us more than 380 comments over there.

Ok, we are far from our supposed number of 2000 posts but it was worth a try. And after it now settled down, we should again concentrate on the Klassrooms. New contributors are waiting.

I am wondering what we can do for the KDE 4.3 Release... ;)

KDE 4.2 release event

2009-01-25T17:15:00.002+01:00

Maybe everybody already heard about the shiny new 4.2 release, and maybe even more people are already using it in the RC version, like myself.

But this event needs to be celebrated even more! Unfortunately not everybody of us can attend one of the release parties all over the globe. So we, the team of the KDE forum, decided to add something to the release parties...

We believe that this release is a milestone in KDE development, so we decided to open the forum (at least in a part) to the whole world. Yes, you read it right, not even a registration is needed. We will open a thread just the day 4.2 will be released and it will be open for 24 hours. And there you can write whatever you want to write about the new release.

Of course, to overcome some sort of trolling, we will moderate very new post, but of course every constructive criticism is welcome.

NOTE: This thread will be ONLY about the 4.2 release, no talk about present releases.

And along with that we want to crack a milestone: Can it be possible to have 2000 posts in one thread in 24 hours on this forum?
We believe it is possible ;)
So please stay with us and show us it is really possible, that this release will be the most talked about release ever!

Loong day

2008-12-24T02:26:00.002+01:00

So finally LinuxIsInnovation's blog got added to Planet KDE and he also blogged about the starting of the Klassrooms and our new Developers User Group.

But this led to many work for me ;-) Every user needs to be confirmed. And every user one by one needs to be changed to have the new group badget as default on their profile. Sadly only possible in the backend, means, only admins can do that.

Now all the developers want to have this nice badget on their profile and the additional stars. I guess, "Junior Member" is not enough. :-D

Additionally, after i announced the first Kourse on the Forum, we only have one seat out of five left. So whoever still wants to attend, do it fast!

But of course, you can also watch everything happening and maybe attend to the next Kourse. Two of them are already in the queue. So stay tuned!

Klassrooms starting this weekend on the KDE Forum

2008-12-23T19:17:00.002+01:00

As the title says, this weekend we will start with our first klassroom.
Our mentor msoeken will provide a kourse about fixing 5 bugs in KSnapshot, not big ones. So it should be fairly easy to get your feets wet.

Of course you should already bring along some C++ knowledge, the rest can be discussed. Best is take a look at the Qt Docs or KDE Techbase before the kourse starts.
The number of participants is limited to 5 persons, so be sure to check out the announcement and reply to it as soon as you can, so you get subscribed to the students group.

This is just our first step into getting people to contribute to KDE. We hope this works out. Feedback is always welcome.

News from the forum

2008-12-17T17:24:00.003+01:00

Everyone driving a forum knows the problem: spammers.
Though i must say we are doing pretty good at that, we have not many problems with them.

But today night one of these showed up again. So i thought about reCaptcha II support for your forum, as Sayak has made me aware of that.
And i thought i should give it a try. Well, now it is implemented, we will see, if it slows down the spam account registration a bit more.

In other news, we now have a User forum for the nice Eigen library, see here.
This forum is moderated by one the lead developers, so you can be sure to get really nice user support.

New Subforum on forum.kde.org

2008-12-14T17:03:00.003+01:00

I have now added a new subforum on forum.kde.org. The reason behind this was that the board statistics show a big tendency into the discussions forum.
People seem to like to discuss everything around KDE. But we didn't have a place for general chit-chat discussion. So what to do?

Viola! The KDE Café is now born! (Besides that we already have that on IRC...)

But as always, we still have to honor the Code of Conduct, so we will not accept any disrespectful posts.

Nevertheless, have fun with it.

Introduction

2008-12-14T16:46:00.002+01:00

So this will be my first blog entry. So let me introduce myself.

I am one of the admins on the new KDE Forum, and obviously i am a true supporter of this Desktop Environment and set of applications.

More posts will follow.