The openSUSE forums move from vBulletin to Discourse
Maybe you have read this announcement in openSUSE forums and asked yourself what this will mean for the way you use the forums. Even more when you may not understand, or only vaguely understand, what the words vBulletin and Discourse mean.
You will understand that the website forums.opensuse.org runs software that handles not only the interface with you, but also stores and manages the threads with the posts, and the user administration of the forum members. The software package used is named vBulletin. It is a commercial package and as such brings considerable costs.
Because all software that stays alive will move to new versions, this is also the case with vBulletin. That will mean that all of the adaptions that were made in the openSUSE instance had to be converted to the new version. At such a moment, it is time to look if a different solution might be better. We will not burden you with all the details, but the result is that vBulletin will be replaced by a different and open-source (which fits into the openSUSE product approach: Discourse.