notthatugly

The fact that this thread has been posted in Support rather than Ideas serves to illustrate that the Ideas forum has reached the end of its natural life. It might have worked if it had been actively read and maintained, but basically it’s the same problem as with Codex: a couple of releases down the line much of the initial content is no longer relevant, but it hangs around regardless. There wasn’t any official feedback or reponse to most of the ideas so I have to doubt whether anyone important bothered reading them. I don’t think many people seriously believed the Ideas forum had any influence over the direction of the software, but Automattic could probably have done a better job of pretending it did.

Trying to tempt people back into the IRC channel is a dead end; like trac, it’s really offputting for non-geeks, and if people used to frequent it but stopped, there are obviously good reasons (I’d guess a lack of moderators, again). You’d be better off with Twitter, at least it’s trendy. Or another P2 install on wordpress.com, which would be easier to keep under control.

Your big problem here is that even though you’re trying to present this as opening up the development process and making it easier for people to suggest things, any attempt to consolidate your communication channels is going to look like you’re doing the opposite and closing things down. The existing lists and forums may serve no useful purpose, but scrapping them is worse from a public relations point of view than having them and ignoring them.

Just because you can access it now doesn’t mean everyone else on the internet can, or that they could two hours ago when this thread started.

(For the record, I always used to feel guilty about redirecting .org users here when they posted on the .com forums, because I was aware of the kind of reception people who don’t even know what host they’re using were likely to get. I know that others are still doing it, though.)

It continues to baffle me why people are so content to accept the wordpress sites as being Matt’s personal fiefdom rather than resources for the entire community. It seems to me to jar horribly with the open source rhetoric they use the rest of the time. But then I suppose it’s a fact, and useless to kick against.

The ‘community’ is not lacking for places to locate themes, nor for places to display them.

So why bother with wordpress.net at all? Once Matt’s reduced it to a collection of 500 Kubrick clones with unimpeachable licensing, it’s going to become an irrelevance anyway. His time would surely be more usefully spent implementing some of the stuff from the ideas forum for 2.3 and improving wordpress.com than pursuing these holy wars against themers.

You’ve contacted the theme designer, I assume?

Looks OK to me on IE7 except for the error message from your anti-IE plugin.

If technically possible, it might be a good idea to let users add tags to themes, the way we tag threads here, as well as getting theme authors to tag their themes when they submit them. Wisdom of crowds and that.