Deactivating connect.opensuse.org

Our community portal, reachable via https://connect.opensuse.org, accompanied our community now since 2010. A long, long time. Especially, if you compare it with Facebook (which started in 2006) or LinkedIn (who became an international company in 2010).

While Facebook and LinkedIn are meanwhile multi-billion dollar markets, our community portal is meanwhile mainly used to organize the openSUSE members and being a “contact point” for members, who provide their profiles to help others to contact them.

Over 20,000 actively registered users and 100 groups might give an idea about the diversity and agility of the openSUSE community. From artists to musicians over to local user groups and groups for all the different window managers and their lovers. Everyone found a place here in the openSUSE universe.

But time flies by quickly - and especially the technology sector never stands still. Today, we need to announce the final shut down of our community portal. The reason is simple: while we asked multiple times for help and someone who wants to actively maintain and administrate the service, nobody stepped up. As we can not secure the application any longer without big time investments, we decided to shut it down and let it rest in peace instead.

By doing this, we apologize for the trouble that this decision might cause to some people. We tried our best to support you over all the years by running the service as long as possible. But if nobody steps up and wants to take over the work any longer, it’s better to say ‘good bye’ instead to wait until the Hackers of the world share the data of our users.

An era comes to an end. A nice one, indeed. But it also means that there might be a new era on the horizon. Some new tools that have a maintainer and someone who takes care of them.

Look at our Forums, our Wikis, Mailing Lists or the new Matrix service. We will not stop to support you, we will do our best to keep you and your data secure.

The plan for membership management and applications to take place using Pagure.

Remember to have a lot of fun!

Lars - in the name of the openSUSE heroes -