The WP Community – where is it?

[sc456a]

I’m a big fan and loyal user of WordPress, and have been for years. I have deployed it for dozens of websites and for the most part it’s been really easy to work with, but from time to time I come here seeking support. In the three years I’ve been posting requests on this forum, I’ve created 12 threads. Of those, only one has been resolved with the help of a member of this community. One. Six were never resolved and five I resolved on my own.

This is a big issue in my opinion. We rely on each other to support this software, but without a good base of moderators and skilled users it becomes difficult to recommend WordPress to clients who need to know the software is supported in some way. They need the confidence that I can give them if I know I have people to rely on to answer the odd question I may have. I can’t give them that confidence if I don’t have it myself.

Is anything being done to improve the forum? Thread subscriptions still don’t work – I’ve never gotten a notification for a reply. It doesn’t seem that anyone is tasked with following up on threads that don’t receive attention from the community. Perhaps a model like experts-exchange.com should be adopted, where moderators go through threads that haven’t received attention in a few days and post something or move them higher in the list. Maybe just a bug tracker system or some way or moving unresolved threads to a more prominent position. Something needs to be done.

I hope that we can have a reasonable dialog about this. I’m not calling anyone out, and I’m happy to have the forum – it’s a great resource – I just think there are some areas to improve upon.

[mrmist]

It doesn’t seem that anyone is tasked with following up on threads that don’t receive attention from the community. Perhaps a model like experts-exchange.com should be adopted, where moderators go through threads that haven’t received attention in a few days and post something or move them higher in the list

If you prefer experts exchange, then use that. We’re talking a completely differnt operating model here, though. With the volume of new posts every day it simply makes no sense for anyone to bump up older ones.

[sc456a]

mrmist: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/this-forum-4

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

MrMist has learned a lot in the last 2 years (like why the req/feedback is there AND why we also have trac – Sometimes a req can be easily discussed and bandied about BEFORE trac is needed. Sometimes it’s not needed at all.)

It’s not a perfect system, but it’s what we have 🙂 If WP wants to hire someone to troll the forums, pluck the reqs/feedback, and kick ’em to trac for the users, that;s up to them. Most of us mods are volunteers. We don’t even get cool swag.

[mrmist]

Heh. Nice thread of mine to link to. I still find this particular sub-forum a bit random in its intent, but that’s kinda apropos of nothing.

[sc456a]

I’m glad that we can agree that it’s not perfect, and I hope that with that we can also agree that we can find ways to improve it.

It sounds like a major issue is the lack of incentives for community members to step up and provide support for other users. I’d think cool swag would be the least WP could do!

What are some other things that could help incentivize support on the forums?