I know all of you are eager to learn about what we have been doing, so here is the current state of SQLA 2.0:

We have spent the last many months porting OSQA to use SQL Anywhere as its back end database (the port actually only took an hour or so since SA's django driver "just worked" :-) and making enhancements to it to be able to better serve our needs. Some of the changes that we have made are:

• The login authentication allows the user to use the MySybase credentials in addition to Google OpenID. (Other OpenID providers may be added later).

• Comments are "threaded" like they are in newsgroups. i.e. there is a hierarchy to the comments. You have the choice to view the comments in chronological order (similar to SQLA 1.0) or in their hierarchical order (with child comments indented slightly from their parent).

• The owner of the question, the owner of the answer, or a user with sufficient reputation can promote a comment to be an answer. When a comment is promoted to be an answer all of comments that are its children follow the entry and become a comment to the now-new-answer.

• OSQA was modified to use SQL Anywhere's full text search capability.

• OSQA was enhanced to support attachments of arbitrary content (not just images).

• The system will mark entries that have been imported from other sources (e.g. from SQLA 1.0) to indicate that those entries are covered under a different license (e.g. SQLA 1.0 content is covered under Creative Commons ShareAlike 3.0 - see Chris Kleisath's response).

• Various other minor changes: logos, styles, etc.

• ... and a few other changes (that I cannot think of at the moment).

We have been using a version of the revised OSQA software internally for quite a few months and believe it is ready to go live.... but we need to wait for Sybase IT to do some "magic" to make the site visible to the internet.

Once SQLA 2.0 is accessible to the world we will load in the SQLA 1.0 data - i.e. this site's data - and then plan to have a period of time where the user community can try it out and give us feedback. Sometime during the beta period we will announce the date for the official switch-over to occur. On that date we will take a final dump of the SQLA 1.0 data and put it into the new SQLA 2.0 database. Note: Any data entered into the SQLA 2.0 site during the beta period will be lost.

At some later time - within a few weeks to months of SQLA 2.0 going live - we plan to load the newsgroup data into SQLA 2.0 and all SQL Anywhere related newsgroups will be changed to be read-only.

• A posting will be made on all of these newsgroups prior to the switch to warn all current SQL Anywhere newsgroup users and to ask them to start using the SQLA 2.0 site instead. This posting will be made sometime after SQLA 2.0 goes live.

• When we import the newsgroup data into SQLA 2.0, each top-level question will become a question in the Q&A site and each response to the newsgroup question will become a comment to the question. Since SQLA 2.0 supports threaded comments the threadedness of the original newsgroup information will not be lost.

• Since SQLA 2.0 comments can be promoted to be an answer our hope is that over time each posting that contains a viable answer to the question will get promoted to be an answer in SQLA 2.0.

• All content that originated in the newsgroups will be owned by a special user (e.g. NTTP) and will be apropriately tagged to indicate which newsgroup it originated. The content of the entry in SQLA 2.0 will contain the original poster's name.

Note that I have not given any dates to when any of this is going to happen because at this time we don't know the answer to that part of the process. This community (and the newsgroup community) will be notified when we know this information and everyone will be invited to participate in the new SQLA 2.0 Q&A forum.

... so stay tuned!