After several weeks of testing, we are ready to make the cutover to our new developer forums beginning November 5th! We're excited about this, because the new forums are part of our continuing evolution to better serve our passionate developer community. Some key features of the new forums that you will immediately notice:

• One sign-on for DevZone and Forums
• Tag-based forums (similar to StackOverflow.com)
• Easy mechanisms to share discussions with your friends (RSS, Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
• Quickly find questions people have so you can bring your own experience to the forums
• Get email notifications when discussions have new entries
• Maintain a dashboard of discussions that specifically interest you
• Quickly identify when NVIDIA employees respond to discussions

What's Changing?

The first thing that people notice is that the forums are no longer hierarchical in organization. In the old forums, if you had a question related to debugging CUDA code using Parallel Nsight, you had to choose between posting in the CUDA forums or in the Parallel Nsight forums, possibly missing out on the chance of getting the right community expert to see your question. Tag-based forums don't have that limitation. Instead, they are organized around coarse-grained topics, called Categories, or fine-grained topics, called Tags. This allows you to tag your questions with several tags that are relevant to your topic, making it easier for NVIDIA engineers and community experts to find your question in several ways.

Find More, See More

We've also done two key things to visually flag discussions:

• Discussions you have started or have participated in have a light grey background.
• Discussions that are questions move through a three stage Q&A process, first showing status as a "Question", then as "Replied", and finally as "Answered." This lets you quickly determine if the answer you're looking for it available.

Share With Your Friends

We have also expanded how you can share discussions with your peers by offering Facebook and Twitter "quick links", as well as the ability to subscribe to/bookmark discussions that interest you. Don't use Facebook or Twitter, but want to share on Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, etc? We've got that too! (Even a link for you Evernote addicts!)

Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud

Alas, with these changes, our old forums will be coming to a close and moving into an archive state. They'll still be available to read anytime, and your links/bookmarks to discussions on the old forums will still work. We will also be incorporating old forums discussions into search hits, so all that awesome knowledge won't be lost. However, you will no longer be able to post on the old forums.

Developer-related discussions on forums.nvidia.com (the CUDA GPU Computing forums) will also be closed down, but not immediately.

For those of you with logins on the old forums, but NOT on the current Developer Zone site, please keep in mind that you must create a new Developer Zone account, as the old forum logins won't work. You can always make an account by visiting http://developer.nvidia.com and clicking on "New Account" at the very top right of the screen, or just go here http://developer.stage.nvidia.com/user/register and start the process. We do apologize for this inconvenience, but we promise we'll only do it this once!

Forums With Benefits!

A less-visible benefit of these forums is how it helps NVIDIA engineers help our developer community more efficiently. These new forums grant moderators and NVIDIA Employees special mechanisms to notify internal teams, and the new forum system offers more metrics to help NVIDIA managers understand trouble points with new products and tools. All in all, this means that you, our developer community, get more NVIDIA love, and who can argue with that?

For more details on how to use the forums, visit http://forums.developer.nvidia.com/discussion/81/welcome-to-the-new-nvidia-developer-forum