What happened with the Drupal.org Community Tools Team?

Thank you for the reply.

Edit: So I've sat on this for a little bit before making my full response.

Every few months, someone brings up the idea of moving full support over to Stack Overflow. Until now, I've strongly resisted this, as I think it would be embarrassing that the main Drupal site, literally brimming with Drupal developers, wouldn't be able to develop whatever functionality would bring the Drupal forums up to whatever standard we want/need.

Last year, I went on a mission, trying to develop functionality for the forums. I had a full roadmap of things that I felt needed to be done, and if no one else was going to do it, I would. But I quickly hit the bureaucratic wall. It took months and months to get small bits of code that I wrote to even get acknowledged for existing. One simple change I made, showing forum descriptions on the forum create page, sat for four months before I finally got fed up and made a comment that got someone to look at it. So I gave up on development. It was disheartening, trying to improve something I care about, only to have it ignored because the people who needed to check it don't care enough about the forums to do so in anything that could even exaggeratedly be called a timely manner.

I thought the Community Tools team was a great thing - finally we'd have someone focused on moving the forums forward. I waited for months to start seeing some changes. Finally I wondered what was happening, and after asking around, I found that the team was disbanded (which led to this thread).

Now, with tvn's announcement, I see that the forums are, as usual, down at the bottom of the priority list. I don't know when they will get attended to, but it doesn't sound like it's going to be any time soon.

These forums are sadly behind the times. We have:
1) A spam problem
2) A lack of people to deal with the spam problem (it sits there for hours on the weekends)
3) No notification system
4) Unapproved posts that take up to 4 weeks to be approved
5) No way of promoting good posts, and demoting low-quality posts
6) No ajax posting
7) A lousy spam reporting system
8) No ajax spam reporting
9) Almost no other ajax functionality
10) No inline-message editing

And these are just a few off the top of my head. The problem is, it's almost impossible for people who are committed to the forum to deal with these issues, and the Drupal organization doesn't use the forums, and doesn't really seem to care about them either. We get the occasional announcement, and that's about it. This isn't fair to those of us who have been committed to them, both the people helping, and the people looking for help.

So I personally am putting my backing behind closing the Drupal forums, and using Stack Overflow as the primary source of Drupal support. It's become clear to me that the Drupal organization has a bureaucracy issue, combined with a lack of interest in the forums, that has essentially allowed them to linger into obsolescence. It pains me to say this, after years of trying to support people literally every day on these forums, but if we are going to provide quality support for people who need help, we need a platform that wasn't outdated 10 years ago. It's sad, but if we are not going to use the forums as an example to show what can be done with Drupal, then we should stop allowing them to be an embarrassment.

So my question is, how do I petition the Drupal organization to make this move? And who else is with me? Let's move Drupal support into the current age, instead of hanging out in 2003.

Edit 2: Or if you're not with me, then please give your thoughts on what we need to improve here. And if you have any ideas on how can we get past this bureaucratic nightmare and move our forums up to this decade I'd love to hear them too. I'm not entirely sold on moving to Stack Overflow. But I am sick of the pathetic excuse for a forum that we currently have. Let's get some conversation happening, because right now nothing is being done, nothing is being said, and no support is being given.

Thanks for your comments John.

Hi Holly

Thank you for taking the time to get involved in this. I'd like to respond to a few of your comments.

Drupal is so big, and D.O is just huge. We have a relatively tiny number of staff who can focus on it, and a volunteer bas that is AWESOME but spread too thin.

The problem here is threefold. The first is that the volunteer base, is spread thin (as you have said), the second is that almost none of them use the forum, and therefore it is very low on their priority list, and the third is that the barrier to contributing in their stead, is near insurmountable.

I accepted a few years ago that the people who work on Drupal.org were not going to do much for the forums. So I as I mentioned in an earlier post, I decided to take care of it myself. What initially got me was that when I asked how to report spam, the process was a huge barrier to actually doing it - users had to find and go to the webmaster's queue, then post a new thread there. I couldn't understand how the people who were maintaining the forum would care so little about spam, as to not have a method of reporting it filled with such a barrier. But I don't like to be that guy who just complains, without providing a solution. And since I know how to develop for Drupal, I decided to do something fairly simple - add a link to nodes and comments that would link to the webmaster's queue, with the appropriate fields already filled out, so the user could just click submit. A two-click process to report spam, removing a large part of the barrier to doing so.

However, upon making that decision, I ran into the following barriers on developing for Drupal.org

1. There was no documentation anywhere on how to do it.
2. Someone mentioned a module that contained all the DO enhancements (I don't recall what it was called). So I downloaded that, and made my modifications.
3. Upon submitting it, I was told that this was the incorrect method, and that I needed a Drupal.org staging environment. So I applied for and received one, then re-did all the work I had already done.
4. I created my patch, and submitted it. And waited. And waited. And waited. Then I started bumping it, and the infrastructure team got angry because I kept bumping the thread (I believe you may have even come into that thread to clean things up).
5. Finally after months, my patch was approved and installed.

Even after that frustrating process, I decided to try to continue. I created some more patches, and submitted them. As I mentioned in an earlier post in this thread, one of the simple ones sat for four months without getting acknowledged whatsoever. And that was for something really simple - I had ideas for much, much more complex functionality, but with a response time of 4 months, any iterations would have taken years to get through before any functionality could be implemented. Others patches I made sat for even longer, and as far as I know, are still sitting there. I created a patch for ajax forum replies. We still don't have ajax forum replies. And I left it in a nearly completed state. It needed some work, but I gave up, and no one else ever bothered to even pick it up and try to complete it.

So as you can see, it's basically impossible for people who aren't part of the inner circle to contribute, and those who are part of the inner circle don't contribute. Which has led to this stale forum that was outdated a decade ago.

That said - I know that whatever bits of gain forums gets from this process, they won't be super significant.

And this is the problem.

Jay - you have been a great contributor to Drupal.org and we've probably committed more of your patches than anyone else recently. If we're not getting to anything in particular, please let me know.

First off, I gave up on the process. My development server was shut down months ago (maybe even a year). It was a soul-destroying process. I was trying to do something, because no one else would, and I faced barrier after barrier, followed by being completely ignored.

And going on to my contributions, let's look at the last five improvements to the Drupal forums that I can remember (there may have been others that I am just not remembering or haven't seen/noticed):

1. New user roles
2. Showing forum descriptions on the 'Forum Topic' create page
3. Removing the 'Create new topic' thread from the forum top page, and having the new topic link on each forum automatically fill the forum name with that forum when creating a new topic
4. Report spam link
5. BUeditor (WYSIWYG) added to the forum create page.

#1 in the list wasn't really forum specific, though it did tie in with the forum significantly
#2, #3, #4 were all submissions by myself
#5 was about three years ago

You can see that if you take my contributions out of there, almost nothing has been done with the forum for years.

This is why I think we have the following options:

1. Close the forum, and redirect users to Stack Overflow
2. Remove the bureaucracy for regular users in getting improvements added to the forum
3. Have the inner-circle commit to focusing more on the forum, even if they don't care about it
4. Leave it as-is.

#1 is not a great option, as Stack Overflow often has lots of attitude, is not as welcoming to newbies, and we lose all control whatsoever over Drupal support. On the plus side, they actually care about their infrastructure, and it's a nice interface, with lots of quality features, that make it easy to find what you need to know when you need to know it.

#2 and #3 require some sort of effort from the inner-circle.

#4 is the path to apathy, and frankly, is an embarrassment to the Drupal community - that a community of people who are focused on developing with Drupal cannot even make a forum beyond was was available at the turn of the century.

Hence my frustration.

I admire you, Jaypan, for having done so much in terms of new patches for d.o. I hope you will not give up.

Thank you, I appreciate that. To be honest, this is likely my last effort before I do give up. But I want to make sure I've exhausted all possible avenues before I get to that point. I appreciate your comment about this being a community, but a community needs support from it's leaders to function. If we can't get that support, then it's not a community that I want to be a part of anymore.

Please note that we have continued the conversation here: https://www.drupal.org/node/2536122