New Qt Forum now open

After a long and hard migration, the Qt Forums are up at http://forum.qt.io

This is a quick introduction to what is new on the Qt Forum. I urge you to go and test the site yourself, that is the best way to learn.

Logging in

As with the Qt Wiki, the Qt Forum uses Qt Account for logging in. In practice this means that you need a Qt Account.

To create a Qt Account, you can go to the Qt Forum login page, click on the Qt Account check mark and get directed to the Qt Account login page. There at the bottom of the page, you will find a 'Create new account' link.

Your username from qt-project.org has been reserved for your email, so when creating a Qt Account, please use the same email as you did on qt-project.org. This way you will get your own username and have your posting history and reputation intact as you move to Qt Forum.

After creating your Qt Account, you can login to Qt Forum with it and start posting and replying to posts.

On first login the new posts box will show that everything on the site is new. Technically that is true, as everything was just migrated over. You can safely go and mark all topics as read and start your experience fresh.

Reputation and how it works

The Qt Forum replaces the points in the old qt-project.org forums with reputation.

You gain reputation when someone votes your post or reply up. There is a voting element under the title of the post with the tools for being notified of posts, favouriting a post and voting it up or down.

The votes on a post can be used to search for  the most popular answers to a question.

The points from qt-project.org were transferred to the Qt Forum with an adjustment (division by ten) to account for the different mechanism that reputation works with.

At this point, we have set the system so that points only bring you fame and at reputation 500 thread moderation rights. The exact level needs to be checked as we move along, we don't really know if 500 is a lot or little.

Going forward the points can be used to earn badges and other fun stuff.

Marking posts as solved and other tags

The 'thread tools' at the bottom of a thread let the poster or moderators 'mark a thread as solved'. This will add a 'Solved' tag to the post in the category view to help people find solved posts easily.

When you start a new post, you can add tags to it. The tags will help people find the posts that they are interested in. They also help when searching the site.

What the future holds

We just went live after a marathon migration, but already we have some things that need fixing.

First all the badges and groups from the old site need to be brought over. This takes a bit of work, but should be done by next week.

The layout of the Qt Forum needs tweaks, the top level categories should provide more hints on what they contain. And we need to work out what to do with really long category names, now the ends just fade away. Also the login page needs some text editing, as the Qt Account is our only means of logging in.

In terms of functionality, I would like for all us users to first get used to how the Qt Forum works and then start thinking on how to improve the experience.

When you get an idea about what we should really have on the forums, please come over there and post a new topic to Qt.io website category. I'll be there and we can talk how to improve the Qt Forum.