Create 'Support' Section

Where does this fall in the Drupal.org content restructure?

In plain language: The proposed 'Support Section' is intended to holistically encompass all those areas where people come to Drupal.org looking for help and education.

What is the purpose of a Support section?

In particular the Support section is targeted at Newcomers and Learners to the Drupal community. Those people who are still familiarizing themselves with Drupal, and don't yet have patterns for understanding how to do things in 'The Drupal way'. It is a place to ask general advice about the right approach to thinking about problems that may be solved with Drupal.

There is also a level of support needed for the Learner -> Skilled users that becomes more about specific technical questions.

Different channels of support server different support use cases, and different user personas.

What use cases should a Support section serve?

• The main need uncovered during user research
• A place to learn about Drupal in a general way
• A place to learn 'The Drupal Way' to solve a problem - not specific technical questions, but advice on approach and modules
• A place for community discussion? (Though certain kinds of discussion may better belong in Interest Groups)
• A place to ask specific technical questions - to find the best technical answer
• Static support material? (FAQs?) (Though this is more likely to be handled via documentation - a separate section)
• Real-time support

What Channels/components can support those use cases?

• Forums
  • With some feature improvements
• Drupal Answers
• Needs integration into D.O
• IRC
• Needs to be more user-friendly - something like IRCCloud may help
• Currently static /support page
• Must chart the right paths to get users to the right channel
• What other channels are out there?

WorldFallz Proposal

• Worldfallz and the community tools team put together a proposal focused more granularly on the user stories of a forums and Q&A. - There are many good ideas here to integrate holistically into the Support section.

Next Steps

We are a few steps away from doing the holistic design process for the Support section as a whole. However, there are things we can do in the meantime. Because we have (at last) made the distinction between the use cases for the forums vs for a Q&A system such as Drupal Answers, we can:

1. Avoid mixing up our use cases for Q&A and for forums, and in fact, set aside Q&A system use cases for now. This will likely involve integration with Drupal Answers- and should be addressed as part of that holistic system.
2. Focus on forums features/pain points that can be well-scoped, and ideally, implemented with existing modules we are already using (Flag for voting-related features, for example).
   1. Start building up some child issues for the above. Especially those that capitalize on existing modules/features on D.O and can be more easily iterated upon and reviewed.