I am sorry to inform you that by end of December 2012 the German community project "MandrivaUser.de" [http://mandrivauser.de] will close shop for good.
1. Reasons for closing the project
After the fork "Mageia" came to life in September 2010 almost all active members of MandrivaUser.de decided to follow this new path in 2 waves:
- most active people and supporters of the Mandriva distribution (packagers, translators, usw. ) changed right after Mageia was founded. Their reasons were similar to other people's reasons (disappointment with Mandriva, community nature of Mageia, etc.).
- the rest followed after release of Mandriva Desktop 2011.0 and first release of Mageia. Reasons were the unclear and stagnating policy of Mandriva as well as the successful launch of Mageia 1.
- there was no substantial stream of new Mandriva users, as is customary after a new release. Quite to the contrary we experienced a last wave of emigrants due to the lack of acception of the new Mandriva release.
The consequences were discussed in public (first in September 2011, then in September 2012), resulting in an almost unanimous decision to close the project end of this year.
2. Why is this relevant for Mageia users?
The direct impact is that with the project MandrivaUser.de the Mageia mirror of our server will close down as well. A couple of days (around Christmas) I will erase this mirror from the list of Mageia mirrors (or will notify Mageia sysadmins if I have no permission to do that).
A less direct relation may be the closing of the German wiki and the picture gallery. If anybody is interested in the contents of these 2 sections, go and get what you want before it's closed.
On behalf of all members of MandrivaUser.de and from the bottom of my heart I want to express my thanks for your support and friendship over all those years.
Wolfgang Bornath (wobo)
Founder & Admin of MandrivaUser.de