The Apache OpenOffice (incubating) English Community Forum has registered its 50,000th member mid-June. However, there are still around 1,800 spam accounts, hence count of true members is still slightly under the 50,000 level. But we should reach it in August.

Note: the Y-axis for purple line (spammers) is on the right, 1/10th the scale of the values on the right.

First, the trend is in line with previous years, no unusual events noticed, not even after the AOO 3.4.0 release.

We had hints about spam increases at the end of last year, it has been confirmed from the very start of 2012!  After some months fighting fierce spam activity, we decided to moderate posts from new members (end of April). The result is now very effective: spam is definitively eradicated. Accounts are still banned in case of commercial links in user profile or disapproved users posting spams. The moderators team has welcomed new members in order to handle the new posts moderation (attention has been paid to cover different time zones).

Following Kevin Grignon's idea to list user experience feedback (see his page on the wiki), a new User Experience (UX) section has been opened to discuss ideas, enhancement requests in order to narrow the concept before putting it on the wiki.

We remind visitors that the Forum includes a wide set of tutorials in a dedicated section where they will find many useful tips, ranging from page numbering and spell check troubleshooting to ODF information or file association. It also includes several examples of databases.

More and more pointers to this Forum are given in the mailing lists. We hope it will help the Apache OpenOffice project, by leaving the lists free to progress towards the development of AOO and its future releases.

Finally, you may have noticed the new landing page for forums, especially the Custom Engine Search, that allows you to search the whole AOO website and restrain the search to the Forum and wiki for example.