Opera Turkey Talks

One of our favorite stories to come out of the Opera community in recent years is Opera Turkey. Opera's first officially supported fan site, this is a group that was started and continues to be run by a small group of dedicated volunteers. To get the full story on how it all came about, we invited Çağlar, Mağruf, Mustafa, Samet, Mehmet and İlker for a chat.

Our very own Aleksander Aas and Bruce Lawson kick up their heels with Çağlar and Mağruf in Oslo.

What inspired you to create operaturkiye.net?

Mağruf: Initially, it was a hobby to use Opera for me. Nevertheless, I noticed it was really amazing and magnificent software which includes everything someone would need. So I thought that we should promote it to the Turkish market and to Turkish users as well.

Çağlar: Opera Mini is the greatest web browser for phones in Turkey. Nokia and Java based phones are the most widely used handsets. Mini allows those users to get online.

Çağlar and Mağruf

Did you guys know each other before this project, or was it Opera Türkiye that brought you together?

Mehmet: In My Opera Turkish forums, while we were helping other people, we realized some common points in our ideas. We started to send private messages, e-mails and chat on IRC channels. After that, zahek.com (Mağruf's personal blog about Opera) was released. Then the others - greench(Çağlar Yeşilyurt), afamous(Arif Ünlü), inbuster (Mustafa Oğuz), ilker-37 (İlker Şen), and agresiff (Samet Ayan) - joined us.

Besides the website, do you do anything else to promote Opera in Turkey, like events or parties?

Mustafa: In Opera Turkiye, we hold contests and promotions on social networks like Facebook and Twitter to spread the Opera name to Turkish internet users. We are all from different cities - this makes throwing a party a bit difficult ! But personally I recommend Opera to all my friends and give them my support.

Mağruf: We also give support 7/24 to users through our help desk (www.operaturkiye.net/destek). Someone can make a ticket over that system and follow up by e-mail.

Yuxel says: Browse me!

What is your vision for Opera becoming more popular in Turkey?

Samet: When we checked detailed complaints that came from our users about website compatibility, we saw that many of the reasons go back to the fact that most web developers in Turkey only design things to work in IE. We want to increase acceptance and awareness of Opera in Turkey.

Çağlar: Apart from posts and articles on Opera Turkey, we also started working on web education. I personally am preparing localized content. To sum up, quality is the key issue. We think that the quality of the web in Turkey can be increased via Opera.