Push to get the Drupal Organization to update the Drupal forums

How about putting jaypan and WorldFallz in touch to see if there isn't a viable solution for forums HERE?

We (as in the community) have blocked move-to-stackoverflow efforts in the past but I am also very frustrated with the status quo and the lack of movement and perspective. There has to come a time when we give up and say frack it, let's move.

Just to make things clear, Stack Exchange sites are not forums, but Q&A sites. If we re going to just throw people on Drupal Answers (the Stack Exchange site dedicated to Drupal), we are going to get a bad effect, since Stack Exchange is more strict about which kind of questions are allowed and what is considered an answer. Being a moderator on Drupal Answers, I know well the number of users who take Stack Exchange as a forum and write a "I have the same issue; did you find a solution?" as answer or ask an opinion-based question.

Previous discussion was done in #1236290: Decide on a course of action for improving support options on Drupal.org. Is there anything new to add to what already said there?

In my opinion, it's just a matter of implementing features. For example, on Stack Exchange, spam gets flagged from users, and posts are automatically deleted when a post gets 6 spam flags; 3 moderators then can destroy the user account even when the number of flags is lower than 6. There is not issue report to manually close.
As for forum quality. that is a matter of guidelines and how much restrictive we want to be. Stack Exchange decided to be a source of knowledge, but that is also because they are a business; if they would be a forum like others, they would not be in business anymore.

I disagree that it is is not a realistic possibility. Everybody can contribute writing code since the code used by Drupal.org is open source (with the exception of the theme being used), differently from the software used to run any Stack Exchange site, which is proprietary, with the exception of little bits of code made open source. For example, try asking for being able to write [module:views] to get Views, and you will see if it gets implemented.

Stack Exchange sites are great, but the main point you need to get is that they aren't forums: Stack Exchange sites are not forums. I am using them enough to know the difference. Everybody who wants to replace a forum or a support site with a Stack Exchange site doesn't understand the difference.

Try asking for customizations for Drupal.org forums, and see if it happens.

On Drupal.org, there are still users who can write code. On Stack Exchange, only Stack Exchange developers can write code, and they would not even write code that applies for a single Stack Exchange.
That is fine, since it's their business, and they are doing great in that. Still, you cannot say forums are evil and Stack Exchange sites are angel, since you are comparing two different things. Until you don't get that point, we are going in circles.

Stack Overflow would close questions, such as about which module to use, while they would be more acceptable on Drupal Answers. On Stack Overflow, there are 394 closed Drupal questions and 15424 open Drupal questions; on Drupal answers, those numbers are 2567 and 49664. The difference is also because Drupal Answers is a little community where moderators still close blatantly off-topic questions.

Jaypan's frustrations should be taken seriously as his efforts are longstanding and he also has more than enough frustrating experience with trying to contribute code to drupal.org.

I cannot in good faith encourage people to spent hours coding solutions to very pressing problems because I know these efforts are most likely go to rot for weeks or months. This is a symptom of the fact that paid staff is now doing most of the coding work here. This is for better (d.org has improvement massively on a lot of fronts) but also for the worse because not-prioritized areas are basically left in a ditch and even if people are willing to spent time improving them the staff is the ultimate bottleneck.
We are having a problem at our hands that is not only about the forums but also about how WE do achieve things here on drupal.org. (Although this issue is only about the former of these issues)

They are different in terms of how they provide support, but they both supposedly provide support.

No, Stack Exchange sites don't provide support. Ask about a bug, and they will tell you to ask in the appropriate support site for the software you are using. They are just about building knowledge; they are not for providing support.

Hey all -

I just first want to say that I am very sorry that it is not easier to contribute to Drupal.org. It does take some time to get volunteer code reviewed and committed, and it's also really hard to get a development site set up to make contribution realistic for anyone but the most intrepid, like Jay. I know those two things are holding us back from more community contribution.

What's in the way of that? Well, the roadmap: https://www.drupal.org/roadmap. The roadmap is developed with the working groups, and sets the priorities for the site. In the last 6 months or so, the priorities have all been focused on D8 release blockers like semantic versioning, Drupal CI, and upgrading localize.d.o to D7, as well as tooling improvements around login and profiles. The working groups are resetting priorities right now. I am not sure if they are ready to share yet, but I'll see if I can get someone to hop on this thread.

More broadly, the thread is definitely in line with other issues that have been raised - how much should we try to support our own unique tooling on Drupal.org? I have been talking to a ton of open source projects this year. I can't find another one that maintains as extensive a tool set use by as many people. And, it's expensive both in terms of actual cost, but also emotionally, to maintain. If GitHub users don't like the way something works, they can submit an idea, but there is no expectation you will see that idea implemented immediately. We get dozens of feature requests each week from the community, often with the expectation that it WILL happen. That's tough. We want to give the community whatever it wants, but we can't do it all, and there's a lot of feeling of failure.

I also know that the Drupal community does not make the software the way others do. We have a unique and pointed commitment to conversation and transparency, and if maintaining our way of developing the software is important, then using another set of tooling isn't an option.

In this case, I don't think we know enough to make a recommendation yet. Before we can answer this question, I think we need to understand what it is about forums and the way our community uses them is important to preserve. We can then look at that workflow and see how it maps to StackExchange. Has anyone looked at that?

How about putting jaypan and WorldFallz in touch to see if there isn't a viable solution for forums HERE?

I've been in touch with jay already! As 2 of the handful of most active forum participants, we collaborate from time to time.

I have hesitated replying on his linked forum thread because I'm not sure how to respond. There's so much to be said I'm not sure where to begin and I don't want to be negative, insulting, or dismissive of people. I truly believe everyone who participates in drupal.org does so from the best of intentions. We just have different priories-- which becomes painfully clear in Jay's forum post.

I've been an advocate for the drupal.org forums over stackexchange for years now-- for very much the reasons outlined by kiamlaluno. Forums != stackexchange. In fact, stackexchange is overtly hostile to precisely the type of user that visits the drupal.org forums. IMO it would make a horrible and long lasting impression to provide ZERO ingress for newbies on drupal.org itself.

With that in mind, it was with great excitement I volunteered last year for the Drupal.org Community Tools Team. Long ago I had, for my own edification and enjoyment, created a POC (drupal/drupal) of what improved forums AND a separate Q&A type support system could look like. It turned out, drupal-wise, it was a rather simple thing to do. I had joined the community tools team with idea of bringing that to drupal.org.

It was decided as a group, that we should really do requirements before building anything. As a SW developer who frequently dons the hat of BA, I could understand that completely. So I drafted a complete requirements document (~ 30 pages) that captured what I built.

It was around that point, that it was decided that this would have to happen in the context of the drupal.org issue queues, which as Jay has pointed out, is almost impossible to do for even the simplest of changes. Changes of this magnitude in the issue queues would be impossibly disastrous due to analysis paralysis and bike shedding. Indeed, I think even the simple profile changes that came out of the community tools team took an extended period of time to actually come to fruition.

Then, not long after that, the community tools team was disbanded. tvn gave some of that backstory in the linked forum thread, so I won't bother to repeat it here.

Personally, I think it would be a tragedy to cede drupal.org support to an entirely separate third party. Having built it myself in course of a long holiday weekend (to prove to myself it could be done), even I was impressed by how easily drupal could accommodate such functionality. I think the only custom code I had to write was for flag access control (a shout out to webchick and eaton for their array_shift inspiration).

The idea that such an effort would take soul-sucking months of issues, bike shedding, analysis paralysis, and derailments by random users parachuting into issues at the 11th hour is beyond off-putting, to say the least.

I'm ready willing and able to continue to work on this-- I'm not so sure about working it through the issue queues however. That's no way to do business for a website like drupal.org. It's one thing for core and contrib support, its an entirely different thing for managing a project like the drupal.org website.

I really think it's beyond time to fix contributing to drupal.org. Other projects do it-- it can't be that hard to figure out. Talk about getting off the island-- we really shouldn't be reinventing the wheel for this stuff. But I haven't spoken out sooner or pushed more because I don't even know what to suggest at this point and criticism without problem solving is just noise.

Wildcard idea: Build a new forum in D8 at https://support.drupal.org

This can implement WorldFallz's POC and requirements document (see #16).

Given the risk of delays it makes sense to get the thing working and in production initially without migrating existing nodes. In that case, all we would need is to get agreement from whoever has the power to get the code onto the server, and the necessary redirects or notices on drupal.org made, and the virtualhost and DNS entry sorted out.

Best not to spend time bikeshedding about the details: if things are really moving, details can be changed later. Best not spend time bikeshedding about whether and how to migrate current content: it would be good to migrate existing content, but is not absolutely necessary. Detailed refinements, and possible migration of nodes and creation of redirects as required, can come later.

I was about to say that we should find a corporate sponsor (yeah, yeah) who pays Jaypan/WorldFallz/whoever to built a new start which can be put live quickly (yeah, yeah). No need to bikeshed a donation, no?
After that is done we can create a issue queue for feature requests and bug reports but we have an existing starting point.
Something has to happen.

It depends on getting the agreement from the powers that be to use a different sub-domain, and hence a different site. It seems to me that in everyone's interest because it promotes D8 if D8 is being used for at least part of drupal.org; and it arguably simplifies maintenance and upgrades in future, to spin off part of what is now a huge site.

The idea of paying people, which I agree would be nice if it were possible, opens up the question of just how much work it would be to build something new?

OK. Still trying to summarize what I am hearing here:

1. There is significant frustration with the "inner circle" - which I am going to loosely define as the DA staff and possibly the DSWG. That frustration stems from the fact that the staff are not going to invest resources in groups any time soon because we've had other priorities in the way, AND because we are not making it easy for people to step in and make contributions themselves. (We just have not figured out how to make developer environments easy yet, and then we have to figure out how to make community code review go faster).

2. Whatever happens, you guys do not want to put it to the issue queues for discussion because that often leads to circular conversations. The way issue queues work is opposed to making decisions and getting work done.

The Association can talk about the first set of issues and see if we can find a good work around. But the second issue is not something we get to solve on our own, and I don't think we can support a project that just tries to side-step the queues all together. For better or worse, the queues are how we get work done in this community, and it's a value that the Association can't work around. We've stumbled here in the past and are really trying to make our work more transparent and in the queues as much as possible.

In addition, I do have feelings about just setting forums up somewhere else. I want to hear more about that because I think it will be more costly (not in dollars, but in time and frustration) in the long run potentially.

But really, I confess that I have a really hard time hashing out complex ideas in the queues. I would really love to set up a call to talk through some of these ideas and hear more. I would like to have a conversation about it. I know we want to do things out in the open, so I am game to record that conversation and post it. Would that be possible?

someone with the power to move it forward has to do so. However, the people with the power to do so don't have enough resources, so they focus on the issues that appeal to them first.

I don't really appreciate that characterization. We are not doing the work that we want to do, we are doing the work that has been prioritized with the Working Groups because it is believed that the priorities are in the best interest of the project. That's why we've been focused on semantic versioning, Drupal CI, and the localize.drupal.org update, and not on forums. It feels like an insult to imply that we are we focus on what appeals to us.

As I said, I can't commit anything to this right now. First, because the priorities are not just set by the Association. More importantly, I have lots of questions that I don't think are easily answered in the queue. So I'll ask again if we can schedule a conversation and share a recording and/or notes from that conversation.

Hey Jaypan -

I totally respect your feelings about that. And like i said, I am really sorry. As for the conversation, I am the ED of the Association, so I want to have it with you and a small group of folks who have been struggling with the forums. Sounds like WorldFallz would be great to include as well at the very least.

Hey there, wearing my Drupal.org Software Working Group hat today. Our role in this is we work with the DA to help prioritize initiatives and provide recommendations for the Drupal.org roadmap, which the DA's Drupal.org tech team then executes on.

First, I'm really sorry that you've run into as many barriers as you have in attempting to improve the forums. :( The DSWG has long been pushing for a better Drupal.org contribution process for non-DA folks (it was literally our very first recommendation), but (like a lot of other important things, including forums) this ended up taking a backseat in 2015 to initiatives that unblock Drupal 8 (DrupalCI, Localize), provide a more holistic framework for the site to help guide future development (content strategy), or help "pay for the plumbing," either by adding revenue opportunities (Jobs, better org profiles) or by removing technical debt that burns up staff time (better account creation/login, events.drupal.org). The hope is that thanks to laying this necessary groundwork in 2015, in 2016 we can prioritize improvements that would be much more directly meaningful to the end-users of Drupal.org, though I can't promise Forums will make the "top 10" list this time around either. :\

I'm tagging this for DSWG because we obviously need to have a discussion around a) what can be done to better support community initiatives, such as improving the forums, that strikes a balance between not overwhelming staff and not ignoring valid contributions, and b) whether we do indeed want to simply redirect the forums to Stack Exchange (I'm not exactly sure whose call this is, but it seems like it'd probably be some combination of DA staff + DSWG, with consultation from forum admins such as yourself). I do agree that Stack Exchange is not a direct replacement for Forums, however, and I know from my CWG hat that newbies get beat up on SxE a lot, so that concern is a valid one regarding a wholesale redirection.

I'd like to suggest that if forum topics had the "follow" feature like issues it would make it a whole lot easier right away and may make it easier for new users to understand. They can then see what is happening with the issue on the tracker page and dashboard.

I do not think moving drupal forums to stack exchange is a good idea. It will dilute the sense of the drupal community.

As jay said, it may not be a fair characterization, it may not even be accurate, but it's definitely the impression left with those whose priorities differ. If the priorities are set by an 'inner circle', which they appear to be (the wider circle having been disbanded), its an easy mistaken impression to make.

That's why we've been focused on semantic versioning, Drupal CI, and the localize.drupal.org update, and not on forums.

imo this pretty much captures the major crux of the issue. Those seem very much developer priorities. Nowhere are joe/jane user, joe/jane site builder, or joe/jane newbie developer outwardly reflected in that. Isn't that a rather major gap?

Sure everyone theoretically benefits from those things. But I don't think semantic versioning will be much comfort to a new drupal developer coming to drupal.org for support for the first time and

1. spending hours buried in the docs unable to find something because they don't know the proper drupalese search terms yet
2. clicking the "Support" link, being redirected to stackexchange
3. having their question closed as 'off-topic' or 'unclear what you're asking' since they don't yet know what they don't know or know how to properly ask a question.

I guess, if you're trying to cull the wheat from the chaff in terms of future contributors, that might be one way to do it, but I'd hardly call it optimal.

Where are people NEW to drupal supposed to go for support if not drupal.org? They're going to come here... do we really want to say, "sorry, please go to stackexchange to get yelled at for not knowing what you don't know and have your questions abruptly closed with no support"?

Even something as fundamental as aiding users in finding the 'good' contrib modules is not in that list. Someone had to setup drupalmodules.com -- and that was YEARS ago. And the community member that did that was roundly and loudly criticized for doing so outside of drupal.org rather than contribute to drupal.org when it happened. And yet, here we sit years later, with the module search on drupal.org barely functional never mind project page improvements.

And yet, the project issue queues have received all sorts of much needed improvements. As a maintainer of several modules myself, I appreciate all the good work that went into the issue queues. I benefit from it every day.

And while the recent profile improvements were much needed and long over due also, they don't really stack up against providing support to the user base.

The problem is those with the ability to fix things on drupal.org are precisely not new users, new developers, or new site builders and also not interested in the forums or support outside of issue queues. The users that need these things the most are, by definition, not part of the community yet and so have no voice in priority setting.

Open source is very much about scratching your own itch. In this case, the folks with this particular itch have no ability to scratch it, while the folks that can scratch ANY itch don't suffer from this particular itch. The end result being that we have a large itchy population with no scratch in sight.

So we're relegated to begging and pleading in issues, groups, and forums-- anywhere someone might listen.

We get the resource constraints. But you have people here willing and able to do help and do something about it for free-- are we really going to turn them away?

Or as Jerry McGuire said it so succinctly, Help us help you!

Agree with the above.

The problem is related to the developer-centric tendency in Drupal (which is not wholly a bad thing, it just has a price). At least one WP company is funding staff to work on the WP support forums as well as on core dev. In Drupal it seems unlikely that would happen: funders are more likely to support development. This is easy to understand, and the question of what types of newbies the community can or should invest in supporting is a difficult one in the context of the move towards the enterprise market. Whatever one thinks about that issue, the forums are still a very major part of Drupal's shop window, and facilitating adoption (including from some newbies who are experienced non-Drupal devs.). Drupal core and contrib devs whose focus is development probably underestimate the huge part the forums play in the perception of Drupal for many newcomers, including some are are buying fairly large sites.

Those are great points about being perhaps too developer focused. I have heard that message in a couple of different contexts as well.

And again - I'll apologize for the fact that you guys feel like we just don't care. I promise you that we really do care, and we just struggle to give attention to everything we care about.

We get the resource constraints. But you have people here willing and able to do help and do something about it for free-- are we really going to turn them away?

Nope. I am not trying to turn you guys away at all. I'll ask a third time - can we schedule a call to discuss the forums further? I personally would get a lot more out of the conversation if we could do it on a call. Would love to record it and share that back out so that everyone can hear it though.

I read WorldFallz's comments as an implied "yes let's have a chat" and Jaypan has already stated that he is up for it. :)

Really glad to see the movement and spirit here. Let's capitalize on it. *thumbs up*

I would like to participate in this.

Just to make it official... Heck yeah I'm in!

Yes I will take part if I can - most times over the next four weeks are possible for me, preferably in the time frame 9am-10pm London time.

Yay! Thank you all so much. If nothing else, I am looking forward to learning more about each of you.

Next week is our all-hands meeting, so that won't work. I am the only West Coast of the US resident, I would propose that we meet really early (6 or 7am pacific) on Tues or Weds, 4 or 5 of August. That should be 2 or 3 pm for John. Does that work?

7 am pacific = 10 am eastern (my time) so I can do it 8/4 (I have a work conflict on 8/5).

4 Aug, as early as Holly is comfortable with starting, sounds good to me.

Done! Pencil it in for that time and I will get you all meeting details. Would you be ok with a GoToMeeting so I can record it? Or would you prefer Skype or a Hangout.

Great - We'll use GoToMeeting. Caveat - it is not great on Linux machines. Here is the connection information:

Groups Dot Drupal Dot Org
Tue, Aug 4, 2015 7:00 AM - 8:00 AM PDT
Please join my meeting from your computer, tablet or smartphone.
https://global.gotomeeting.com/join/914739301

You can also dial in using your phone.
United States : +1 (872) 240-3212

Access Code: 914-739-301

Let me know if you need to use a phone from another country to dial in and I can get you access codes.

Yes - if you use the URL above, you can get audio and video on the computer.

I have used this meeting service - there is a small piece of software to install, so showing up a few mins before start time is a good idea. Otherwise, it works smoothly.

I'll try to be on the goto-- but I might be voice via traditional phone. Thanks for setting this up Holly!

We had to update the URL: https://global.gotomeeting.com/join/692248413

i didn't forget... I'm having trouble getting the call to go through. Will be there asap.

finally got through, and it says the phone number is not valid lol.

Apologies if someone was already working on this, but I felt it was important to update this issue on the discussion that happened earlier, for transparency. I'm very sorry in advance if I accidentally misrepresent any details here... I wasn't actively taking notes during the call. (Had intended to just be listening intently.)

- joshuami was able to provide more details on what the D.o tech team has been working on. https://www.drupal.org/roadmap shows the D.o tech team's priority (formed in conjunction with the team + Drupal.org Software Working Group). In 2015, this focus was necessarily on things that either increased staff capacity (automating spam fighting, performance/scalability improvements to the site) or unblocked Drupal 8 (e.g. DrupalCI). This makes sense, since without a core product there's not much point in having a site. :) There have been ongoing reports at https://assoc.drupal.org/blog/tvn about this work and others that the D.o tech team has been accomplishing, which is substantial.

- However, as everyone involved in this discussion well knows, Forums are not on that list, and are also not in the "top 10" list for 2016, either (though the DSWG/DA are still putting this roadmap together, to be updated quarterly). Josh pointed out that part of the issue in moving Forum up in the list, is forum usage has been steadily declining by 10K visits or so per year, and I also pointed out that most users are likely to use Google as their go-to support system, ending up at whatever URL solves their problem, whether D.o or otherwise, so (unlike other aspects of d.o) there is a "workaround." And these facts tend to call into question whether Forums is really the best "impact" for investment when we have these roadmap discussions. Though we should recognize that there are many factors at play in the decline of Forums: while the rise of Drupal Answers is certainly one of them, there's probably also the fact that Drupal 7 has reached the plateau of productivity, so support needs may be less intense than a few years ago, and of course the fact that the Forums have been basically untouched for multiple years and are showing their age badly. (Hence the entire reason for this discussion.)

- Jaypan recognized the requirement for there to be a high-level strategic roadmap that the D.o tech team tackles, and didn't argue with anything that's currently in that list. However, his frustration stems from the fact that he is not asking the D.o tech team to take this on, as he is both more than willing and more than capable of doing the improvements himself (I believe he described himself as a "put up or shut up" person). Unfortunately, however, his contributions to Drupal.org towards Forums have largely sat in limbo for months at a time in the past, with the exception of the "mark as spam" link which required him making a lot of noise in the issue, which of course no one likes to do. This is something he has no control over, and it has demotivated him from contributing further. (John_B and WorldFallz seemed to back this opinion up.)

- Holly and Josh pointed out that there is a staff time cost associated with incorporating community-driven improvements, and that this time takes time away from the higher-level roadmap items. Currently, there's only on person on the D.o tech team (drumm) who's capable of doing the level of code reviews that can lead to changes being deployed in production, whether they come from the community or from the roadmap (while this is likely to improve over time, remember that the D.o tech team is still new and basically has only been around for about a year). Additionally, in the staff's experience, there is always substantial work needed to actually integrate community improvements, no matter how well-vetted they are in the issue queue. And while making a totally separate site like forums.drupal.org sounds like a viable solution to this problem, since it would allow the Forums team to maintain this site themselves without needing to pull key DA people away, there are maintenance costs associated with that: tie-in to Bakery (d.o single sign-on), security updates rolled out at the same time as the rest of the *.d.o sites (of which there are 16+), etc. and there's a strong likelihood (or at least this happened for groups, localize, etc.) this would end up all back on the DA's plate anyway at some point.

- And so, at the end of the day, what makes it into the D.o Roadmap is what staff plans to focus on. And the DSWG is unlikely to prioritize Forums at the top of the list, given ALL of the other things that need to be addressed, for reasons stated above.

- When asked whether Drupal Answers was in fact a viable alternative for Forums (after all, the "simplest thing that could possibly work" is just doing a redirect from /forum to there), the answer was no. Drupal Answers is part of the larger Stack Exchange community, which has its own rules/guidelines which are much more around "create the ultimate answer site" and not "help troubled newbies find their way." Newbies are often treated with disdain at Stack Exchange for not searching well enough, or not asking a targeted enough question, or whatever, and their questions are frequently abruptly closed with a one-line "RTFM" equivalent. There's little we can do to police this from a Drupal community standpoint because Drupal Answers is not our community: it's a sub-community of SE. Additionally, most of the people on the call (sorry, didn't get names) said they would not be providing support anymore if support moved to Stack Exchange. They find the idea of helping users for awards and SE's treatment of new users very off-putting.

- We also talked about what other projects do for support with an idea that we might be able to pull some best practices. At this point, nearly all of them use external tools: mailing lists, Stack Exchange, etc. There aren't really best practices in terms of forum improvements we can draw from.

- We didn't really reach any conclusions as far as where this leaves us, but there were a couple of action items:

1) Josh and I to raise this issue at the next DSWG meeting so we can discuss if/how it impacts the larger D.o roadmap (next meeting is August 19).
2) The DA to discuss internally what adjustments, if any, they can make so that a subset of community-driven improvements with a well-defined and agreed-upon plan (such as this one) can be prioritized alongside the existing strategic roadmap, esp. if they are smaller, incremental improvements (vs "big bang").
3) A decision needs to be made on what to do based on those discussions.

I agree with much of that.

I take an opposite view about the evaluation of the forums. There is a constant stream of people visiting the forums who arrive desperate, with a broken website, or a failed attempt to install or upgrade Drupal (often on a live site) who are wholly unequipped to ask on Stack Exchange, to read an error log, or even to log in from command line. They have no one else to ask about restoring site which very important to them or their charity / church / club / small business, and no funds to hire a specialist or even knowing how to find one. Yes there are many undeserving cases. There are plenty others who have struggled and Googled for hours, sometimes for days, for something which a regular contributor to the forums like Jaypan or WorldFallz or me and a few others can resolve very quickly. Close the forums and these Drupal users will be out in the cold - pretty close to absolute zero, as there is really no one else out there helping them when Googling has failed, their IT skills are really not up to running the Drupal site they ended up with, and they need someone to tell them some basic Drupal stuff. They are often pretty frustrated with Drupal and life in general. There is a view that these people should just pay someone if they cannot do it themselves, or use Squarespace or something. Be that as it may, there are plenty of people who, unlike us, do have no real alternatives.

Thanks for the summary Angie, and for the follow ups John and Jaypan. And to everyone for the conversation today. As I mentioned, I was hoping that through conversation we might organically stumble upon the path forward that at least partially met everyone's needs. It's clear that did not happen, but it's not because we don't care or don't want it to. We're just trying to live within our resources here.

Jaypan, I think you touched upon the key thing - how important will forums be when D8 is released? If this is going to be a primary tool for getting Drupal customers on board, then the forums have a lot more strategic significance than we've been allowing for to date. Let me go see what the trends look like after other release dates. That may be useful information.

Most of the participants have already done a brilliant job at summarizing the meeting.

I'd just like to correct one point of webchick's otherwise excellent notes. There actually are many other open source communities that still have active forum support. Just off the top of my head:

• nginx
• jquery
• codeignitor
• laravel
• symfony (!)
• apachefriends
• highcharts
• alfresco
• wordpress
• joomla
• most of the bpm world (activiti, processmaker, intalio)

And those are just the ones I know of personally. I also checked on distrowatch and all 10 of the top 10 linux distros have forums. Nine of the 10 host their own, while slackware points folks to http://www.linuxquestions.org (also a forum, just not their own). Not to mention all the commercial vendor forums that still exist (adobe, microsoft, ibm developerworks, etc).

Personally, what I think has happened is that people who don't like forums have migrated over to something they prefer (ie stackexchange). That leaves a much smaller group of folks that actually prefer to use forums for support. But that's just pure speculation on my part.

That said, let me also respond with my post-call thoughts.

First, foremost, and most importantly-- a big thank you to everyone who participated on the call. It lasted well over an hour and I'm sure everyone involved is very busy. That we all took the time to make the call speaks directly to my second point:

Everyone is participating from a place of doing what's best for drupal.org and the drupal community. That's amazing and it speaks volumes of our community. This particular discussion has often turned acrimonious in the past. That we've finally had an intelligent and thoughtful discussion on the topic is a direct result of all the participants, equally frustrated, coming from a place of trying to do the right thing.

And finally, I'd also like to summarize my current understanding into a TLDR version. Please correct me if I misrepresent anything.

1. The forums on are the decline
   
   I don't think anyone disputed that. What is in dispute, however, is the cause. There are basically 3 possibilities:
   
   1. no one uses forums any more in general.
   2. the forums suck, so of course no one uses them.
   3. D7 has been out so long most answers are already available thus obviating the need for new posts.

   The fact that posts have declined is backed by empirical data. The cause however, is not. Any one familiar with research and data analysis knows that correlation != causation. More importantly however, no one's opinion of why forum participation has declined is any more valid than anyone else's at this point since there is no empirical data to validate it.

   The reality is probably a combination of all three, but there is simply no way to know.
   

2. Stackexchange is neither newbie friendly nor a replacement for forum support
   
   Again, this is pretty much universally accepted. That is not a ding against stackexchange, merely a fact. Handholding newbies is not what they're about. They shouldn't be faulted for not being good at something that is not their goal.
3. Drupal.org resources for improvements (separate site or otherwise) are severely constrained
   
   Joshuami pointed out that there is basically one person to do code/functionality reviews. There's no possible way to be even more constrained, so that is a hard and fast limitation.
4. Forum improvements, regardless of the manner, magnitude or scope, are not on the roadmap for 2015 or 2016
   
   And the reality is, they are not likely to ever to be a priority-- even if resources weren't an issue. period. full stop.
   
   As Jay has already pointed out, Joshuami (DA CTO) is the voice of authority here so we have, finally, gotten an authoritative answer on this point from someone in a position to provide it.

So to affirm my own hypothesis, yes, the people that can do something about the forums do not prioritize them, while those that do prioritize/use them, are not able to do anything about them. It wasn't an oversight. It was a strategic decision. Until now, that was just conjecture on my part. I think we've at least finally resolved that as a statement of fact.

The only open question seems to be is that, in spite of all these constraints, is there any possibility of getting anything done in the forums? Jay and Holly seem to believe the call left open the possibility that something can be done. Unfortunately, I came away with almost the opposite impression-- that basically nothing would get done because even small improvements would take some, however small, amount of time from the single resource that can do code/functionality reviews and the DA was unwilling to do that for the foreseeable future.

It would be good if Holly or Josh could confirm or deny that possibility in this issue. The very worst possible outcome would be to leave open the possibility of getting something done, have people spend valuable volunteer time on it, and then have their issues languish for months unattended with no intention or plan of doing anything with them. That's disrespectful and incredibly damaging. Definitely worse than leaving the situation as status quo imo.

I agree with the above post.

The relevance of D8 to support needs

I also heard, "when D8 comes out, there may turn out to be more or less need of the forums, let's see what happens". I don't think that the appearance of D8 will change anything. Those who work a lot in the forums can see they meet a real and significant need. Those who are not using the forums now, are not seeing that need; and when D8 comes out, will still not turn to the forums, or see what is happening in the forums, beyond raw number of posts.

Who are the stakeholders here?

In this conversation, the large group of Drupal stakeholders who rely on the forums as consumers of support have had no voice. Should they? In retrospect, it would have been possible to canvas the views of forum users, and to bring in one or two to the conversation (though most are occasional users). That might have carried more authority, than for the voices calling for greater prioritization of the forums to come from three of us who answer questions, and who ourselves like but do not need the forums.

Thanks, all, for the additional clarifications/nuance. Sorry for not capturing it above, but OTOH I think it's actually better coming from the people most able to advocate from your position—you! :)

I think the statement about D8 was more in relativeness to D7. Basically, D7 has now been out for over 4 years. Many problems that you might have with D7, someone else somewhere has probably already had that problem. So you're far more likely to find an existing answer somewhere on the internet (D.o forums or otherwise), versus asking a new question.

Drupal 8 will change that, because basically no one will have had the same problems in Drupal 8, at least for the first few months. And so I think the proposal was to extend the Forum metric gathering past Drupal 8's release before declaring a formal stance on its priority. Because we know that event will create a massive uptick of newbies who need help, and so it follows that it should in turn cause some kind of measurable uptick in forum usage (as well as an uptick in Drupal Answers usage, uptick in people asking for help on external networks like Twitter/Facebook/Quora, etc.). That's probably going to present a better picture of actual forum usage/community need than the current / recent forum metrics.

And now that roadmap prioritization is done quarterly, that also means that if it's not in the 2016 roadmap now, in Q3, it could end up there in Q4/Q1, after D8's release, based on said metrics.

Does that make sense?

The lack of subscription is a big problem, in my opinion. Especially considering the nature of many of the posts; often it sounds like someone has run out of options and doom is approaching. I've tried several times in the past to help out someone in those situations only to wind up dropping the ball because I never got told that the person responded, and usually it was Jaypan who had to roll in to try to help. So I mostly stay away now because I don't want to be responsible for getting someone's hopes up only to wind up accidentally neglecting them just because my Drupal.org dashboard isn't my homepage.

Drupal Answers is where I tend to linger nowadays when I'm having a hectic day with Drupal and need to get distracted by someone else's problems. I feel like maybe it's more newbie friendly than is being characterized (or I just don't linger often enough), but it's definitely not a support forums replacement.

As an aside: Did a recording of the call happen?

No recording. It would not have added much to what you read in this thread, where others have covered things thoroughly, aside from the voice of Joshua, who said loud and clear that forums are a low priority, and likely to remain so; and that DA resources are to short to cover everything, so there are unlikely to be resources for low priority items like the forums any time soon. Those of us asking for more attention to the forums suggesting that prioritizing D8 makes sense, and on the basis that the product and the support need each other, they should be prioritized together, not as alternatives, which is happening with documentation to some extent, and we thought should also happen with forums.

Joshua also said that whilst a problem with committing code to d.o. is that it is so complex, and therefore easy to break, starting a separate site for the forums with the d.o. single signon and other integration would represent more rather than less overhead.

The meeting ended with some satisfaction that views had been heard, but without any indication that there was a realistic prospect of things improving with the forums, which left the argument that closing the forums is better than doing nothing still on the table.

Um. You definitely can leave Acquia out of the DA's chosen priorities, thanks. ;)

A couple questions/comments from posts in this thread so far:

"Josh pointed out that part of the issue in moving Forum up in the list, is forum usage has been steadily declining by 10K visits or so per year,"

How does it compare to website traffic trends overall? Like, without context, those big numbers aren't telling us much because "forum usage" != "visit counts." What about actual forum activity year over year? Suppose the forums are active (new posts, replies, etc) as they were but aren't coming up in Google and so the visits continue to drop; I don't think that would be justification for the lack of attention. It seems to me that, as long as I've been paying attention at least, the people making posts are the core audience of the forums and not the Googlers or otherwise random visitors.

What are the trends in other sections of the site, even? That 10K visit decline per year data point kind of makes it feel like the level of thought put into this issue by decision makers is still really cursory; just enough to rationalize opinions that the forums are not important but not enough to actually substantiate those opinions.

"which left the argument that closing the forums is better than doing nothing still on the table"
Is this still being advocated as an option? Surely a crummy forum will drive people away from Drupal a little bit less than having none at all.

Surely a crummy forum will drive people away from Drupal a little bit less than having none at all.

Basically three of the regular contributors of answers on the forums have been driving this issue, and it is encouraging that three people on the DA side have responded and given their views, even though they may not be what we hoped to hear. Jaypan has said clearly that closing the forums is better than doing nothing; as I read what WorldFallz says above, she takes a similar view. I am inclined to agree: the forums are not statically crummy, they are in decline (at least in usage). I feel that decline reflects badly on Drupal and I am inclined to agree that closing the forums in favour of some alternative solution may be better than letting them drift. There are a lot of complex considerations, and not much data. There are at least a few other extremely credibly people working in the forums who have not participated in this discussion, and they may agree with you that a crummy forum is better than nothing.

I cannot answer the question about traffic. Maybe someone from DA will answer it.

I don't think there's any question that the forums in their current state are a black eye and embarrassment to Drupal the product-- they are, after all, part of core.

Sure, anyone familiar with Drupal knows what they could be, the awesomeness that Drupal is capable of (i basically recreated much of stackexchange over the course of a long weekend), but newbies (those most likely to come to the forums for support), won't. The impression they will get is what they see-- not what the possibilities are.

Indeed, when people post to the forums about using Drupal for forums in their site they invariably complain about how lacking forums are and want to immediately 'integrate' something like phpbb or smf (probably the worse possible option for a newbie).

I am very much still new to Drupal compared to y'all(I have only been building Drupal sites for about 2 years), and I am having a hard time understanding (after reading all the comments), if there are several people who are willing to build a new forum(and there were several) on their own personal time, why the Drupal staff can't/won't just cut y'all loose to build it. I mean, if they don't have to do most of the work, and it greatly improves the forums, I can't see why they wouldn't wan't that to happen.
IMO as someone who is newer to drupal (especially to drupal development/coding), I would love to see a good forum set up. That would be something I have definitely been looking for. That way I wouldn't have to go searching on google for hours just to not end up getting as specific an answer as I needed, or get penalized on drupal.stackexchange because I was looking for further clarification for an answer. If good forums were added I would be very happy.

But then again, I am newer to drupal so I may just be not understanding the reason why it is difficult for regular users to contribute code to the drupal site.

I want to reiterate the thank you to everyone that is participating in this thread. Particular thanks to Jaypan, WorldFallz, John_B, and webchick for joining the call and spending their time on forums. We are working through a difficult problem with difficult answers. I appreciate the civil discourse and the search for solutions.

Steps we've taken since the call

1. Reached out to Drupal Answers moderators. I've contacted kiamlaluno through his contact form on Drupal.org to see if we can get the moderators at Drupal Answers involved in this conversation. A lot has been said about Drupal Answers not being friendly and treating new people with disdain. It would be best to let some moderators speak to these statements and provide their own point of view. Participants on Stack Exchange are answering Drupal questions and many people in our user research from last spring/summer pointed to Stack Exchange as a source of where they found information and good answers.
2. Reached out through the Stack Exchange contact form. If we don't hear back from Drupal Answers moderators, it would be good to figure out if there is data and integrations that can be provided by the staff at Stack Exchange. They have a well documented API that we can integrate with if we decide to go that route. I'd also like to help them connect with forum participants to figure out how we can bridge some of the needs between the two systems.
3. DSWG (and possibly DCWG) conversations are getting scheduled. We have an awesome group of people committed to providing insight and advice to me and my team. I want to get them involved in this conversation. All working group notes are public. So anything discussed can be shared out.
4. Research! Below, I've compiled quite a bit of research and background to inform the discussion. It is not perfect or comprehensive, but I hope it is a solid start.

Some of the themes that are coming up seem to hinge on "what do the stats mean", "why can't we get changes published to Drupal.org", "why can't people just build it on a new site", and "other projects maitain forums so we should to".

What do the stats mean?

This is a tough one. We have lots of stats, but they are mostly analytics and node counts over time.

Here is a little data regarding forum posts created over time. 2008 was the height of forum usage with over 50k forum posts created.

Traffic to the forums section does not corellate. Visits to the forums section and content types have been tracked since January 2011. This was shortly after the redesign was launched in late 2010.

Traffic was relatively steady in 2011 until July when it grew through September. The most traffic to the forums in a month was in September of 2011 with 978,758 sessions in that month. We've seen a steady decline in traffic since that time. In June 2015, our sessions to forums was 300,946. (I excluded July 2015 as forum data is not consistent for that month due to a transition to Universal Analytics.) That's about 31% of the traffic over a period of 4 years.

During that same period of September 2011 to June 2015, traffic on Drupal.org declined from 5,936,622 sessions per month to 3,486,995 sessions per month. That is 59% of the traffic over a period of 4 years.

Traffic to forums have declined faster than overall traffic. Drupal Answers appearing as an alternative could be an cause for this. I do not have analytics data for Drupal Answers, but I will request it.

Why can't we get changes published to Drupal.org?

You can, but it takes time. I say this from experience in growing our staff over the past year. We had two contract employees working on Drupal.org prior to 2014. We now have 10 full-time staff focused on improving Drupal.org and its infrastructure, the last of which was hired in November 2014. Just getting that team up to speed on the complexities of Drupal.org and its infrastructure was not at all easy.

Drupal.org is not a typical Drupal site. We have a large amount of authenticated traffic and a large number of nodes. As such, caching and module performance is a little different for us than a typical large-scale Drupal site that primarily delivers traffic to anonymous users and can take advantage of caching.

Moderately-sized changes that would typically perform well on other Drupal sites do not scale well for Drupal.org. Our developers have learned this the hard way, so we work hard to have BDD test coverage, or at least a comprehensive test plan, for every deployment we make. We average more than 5 deployments per week because small frequent changes are easier for us to manage. (It could be argued that small frequent changes are best practice for most large production sites.)

Neil (@drumm) is primarily responsible for deployments on our team with the most total experience on Drupal.org. In the past, following every DrupalCon, and many smaller sprints, he became almost entirely focused on deploying community contributions for at least a week. That is still partly true, but we have become better at prioritizing our work to make it easier to communicate the focus of our team. And we are getting better at providing environments that hide some of the complexity of Drupal.org—or at least compartmentalize it—so that is easier to give volunteers a path to helping with this code. It's easy to say yes and burn out our committed volunteers and staff with deployment rights and responsibilities with long hours and little positive feedback for their work. It is much harder to sustain a work plan over months and improve a site with as many needs as Drupal.org that has 14 years of technical debt and perhaps the longest consecutively updated code base of any Drupal site. (We still have a couple of Drupal 4 tables that people have been afraid to clean out because of the possible impact!)

Sustained focus brought us a lot of great features and much better performance on Drupal.org over the past year. And the technical debt is getting smaller every day by simplifying the systems that we have whenever we can.

Why can't we just build it as a new site?

Our current focus is on making the *.drupal.org ecosystem of sites and the underlying infrastructure as stable and performant as possible. We maintain about
10 production Drupal sites and several more related services. (This number fluctuated a little in the past as we had varied numbers of DrupalCon sites.) Every time a security update comes out, we update faster than most sites because of the visibility of Drupal.org. We update 10 Drupal installations, run tests and manually check our staging sites to make sure these updates can be cleanly applied.

Every production *.drupal.org website has single sign-on through Drupal.org and shared cross site customizations including role syncing and profile data. Most of these sites also use the Bluecheese theme for consistent look and feel—though we have custom themes for each events and Drupal Jobs that are separately maintained.

Every site we manage has a preproduction workflow that includes dev and staging environments that are sanitized so that developers on those environments do not have the passwords and private information of our users. Each of those sanitization scripts are created per site depending on the data stored. Particularly for Drupal.org, this makes it possible for us to have anywhere from 20-30 dev sites that allow community volunteers to access a build of Drupal.org that allows them to build new features to be contributed back.

Every new site we add increases the overhead we manage for these other sites. Right now, we would prefer to consolidate sites to a shared codebase rather than expand the support and maintenance burden. Mostly, that is because of budgets and cost to operate. Consolidation has actually made it possible for us to add new features to the sites we manage faster than in the past.

That said, we may need to revisit this policy if we can't get to a pace that keeps up with feature demand and gives people a better way to help.

Other projects maintain forums so we should to...

Despite my inclination to focus on other priorities first, I do agree that Drupal.org should have some sort of forum for new users to ask questions and get feedback. My own belief is that we need to value multiple communication channels—forums, Stack Exchange, IRC (maybe even Slack), Twitter, etc.

The question is whether we need to build all of those channels with Drupal. In the examples that were given of projects that maintain forums, none are using Drupal for their forum solution. More common is PHPBB out of the box (Joomla even uses them rather than a Joomla based solution) or hosted solutions (e.g. Symfony is asking users to go to StackOverflow on the top of its forums, jQuery uses forums provided by Zoho—a SaSS company).

Many projects with forums not powered by Stack Exchange still try to limit the development costs of maintaining the code of their forums to focus on other tools.

What's the minimum thing we can do that would provide the most benefit?

Every time I have my team look at a new feature, I ask them to consider what is the minimum viable solution. What's the least we can do? How quick can we do it?

For forums, I do think enabling comment notification—which is already planned for other content types as a part of our content strategy work—would be a significant-if-small improvement. We'd still need to test it, but it could be deployed in the next couple of months in conjunction with other improvements.

I do not feel we should build a Q&A solution in addition to forums. A new Q&A feature was originally part of the proposed options from the community tools team. I think WorldFallz proof of concept was very well thought and an excellent approach. However, the work to integrate that into Drupal.org or a separate site would not be more important than improving search or documentation or implementing a number of other truly imporant features when there is a hosted option available with nearly the same feature set.

Q&A is solved by Drupal Answers—if not perfectly, at least it is good enough. It would be better to integrate with that tool already in heavy use and include that part of the community conversation in our larger picture. It is not listed on the Drupal.org Support page, but it could be added.

Next steps

We will be exploring the possibility of adding notifications as an interim improvement to the Drupal.org Software Working Group. I am also going to recommend that we update the support page with a link to Drupal Answers with explanations for when each option would be preferred.

As we already plan to add comment notify, the work should align well and not add too much to the long list of work. That does not rule out further improvements, but it does give us a relatively quick way to get an improvement.

Also, I will not shut down this conversation, I think it is too important. I am going to move this issue to the Drupal.org Customizations queue, change its type to feature request, and change its status to Needs Review. The issue summary is being updated to reflect a plan to update the Support page to include Drupal Answers within explanation and prioritize the adding of notifications so that the forums we do keep function better.

Sorry, not sure why the Component field changed on this; I was just trying to add an issue tag for the DCWG...

Year Count
2008 50,602
2009 49,329
2010 43,426
2011 34,529
2012 25,513
2013 17,554
2014 11,321

These numbers probably reflect, that the forum technically froze over 5 years ago and should rather be seen as an urgent call to action, instead of an indicator, that the forums aren't used much.

Jaypan - this is not about Josh, and it's not ok to try and vilify him here. Josh is just articulating what the Association is facing as a whole. I 1000% understand why you are frustrated, but this is not because Josh does not believe that forums matter, or that he doesn't care about your feelings, and to imply as much is not ok. He has actively outlined a number of steps that he is personally taking to learn more, along with one big feature win that we think we can apply. Josh and I have spent a lot of time in this thread and with you guys to try to find a win that doesn't take the limited staff we have away from the priorities that have already been set. We've also ensured that Working Groups know about this discussion (I brought Angie in from DSWG early) so that THEY would be aware for the next prioritization round.

I know it does not make you happy, but it's not ok to make it personal.

I have a list of rules that I try to use for every meeting. The top two are this:

1. Critique the idea, not the person.
2. Don't take it personally when your idea is critiqued.

I would really love it if this discussion to stick with those. I think it would be a lot easier to hear where you are coming from and try to be helpful if you were not maing it personal so often.

Leaders get critiqued for their decisions.

And I'd like to second that. That's all we're doing here. If one is going to proffer a false cause, one should also be prepared to be questioned on it.

The original basis for the stance of doing nothing was the position that 'forums are dead'. Josh clearly stated that multiple times on the call. And based on my memory, no one else did. That's not a personal attack, it's simply a fact.

Then, in spite of the the shifting of the burden of proof, I went ahead and provided a list of over 20 major projects (including several cornerstones of drupal itself) still utilizing current active forums which proves that to be a false assumption.

The second basis put forward for the position of doing nothing was that forum traffic has dropped off drastically.

No one disputes that so the texas sharpshooter metrics weren't really necessary or helpful. All they do is serve to reinforce the idea that facts are being presented in order to support a decision that has already been made.

Saying something over and over again doesn't make it true. Neither does it being said by someone with accountability/power over the thing be discussed.

Again I say, the simple fact is no one's opinion of WHY forum traffic has dropped off is any more valid than anyone else's. Without empirical evidence, there's no case to be made either way. Regardless of who's opinion it is. Authority over the decision != authority over the facts.

I'd also like to point out that those wanting to improve the forums are not asserting that we know why forum traffic has dropped off. The fact is, it's just as likely people don't use them because they're terrible (1997 terrible, one step above animated gif xmas lights terrible), as they do because "forums are dead". You can't give people something terrible to use, and then say "see, they don't use it, so why make it not terrible". But without evidence, our opinion is no more valid than anyone else's either.

In the end however, it really doesn't matter. The message has been communicated and received loud and clear.

Those with the authority for making the call have done so, which is more movement on this issue than we've ever had before. And we finally have transparency and a record of the decision. So for that, I am personally grateful (I'm not being facetious). I've repeatedly had this nagging feeling that I wasn't doing enough to get this fixed. At least now I know I've done my best.

For me, the additions of notifications would be a real step forwards. More is needed.

On the call Josh was courteous and articulate, and respectful, and he deserves and receives that respect in return; this should not prevent us saying, as I think it is fair to say, that almost every point he made was a reason why nothing much could be done for the forums in the short to medium term.

Collectively (and possibly individually) Jaypan, WorldFallz, and I (like a few others who have not participated in this conversation) have contributed thousands rather than hundreds of hours work in the forums, over many years. Such work brings us benefits (though little if any indirect commercial benefit). Drupal has a history making its supporters passionate about it, and of using up (it is usually called 'burning out') rather many of those people who are passionate. No one is to blame for that, in my view, and probably there is no one who could repair it. When someone at a mature point in the life cycle of the Drupal 'fire' feels, often fairly, balked in their attempts to work for Drupal, they will sometimes express their regret about the divergent views of another community member in language which is plain and even uncomfortable to read. If this frankness can still be permitted in the Drupal democracy, without it being called 'vilification,' Drupal will continue to thrive, though a little poorer for the loss of those who perhaps feel they need to move on.

Response to #23

That's why we've been focused on semantic versioning, Drupal CI, and the localize.drupal.org update, and not on forums. It feels like an insult to imply that we are we focus on what appeals to us.

Why forum haven’t been focused? Drupal’s success is highly dependable on forums. Drupal people are asking support and regularly getting helped through the contributors. Forum is the backbone of Drupal’s success. If problems are not listened, if asking for helps are ignored; then obviously Drupal will be ignored by people one day. Not focussing on forum like a decision “Slow Poisioning” to kill it. If Drupal will not be there then you busy people (for other things like Drupal CI, Localize.drupal.org etc.) will be busier to resolve it, restore it. Ignoring forums means you are killing Drupal obviously. I have been learning Drupal new every day and my main source is Forum which is ornamented by helpful contributors.

From my end it is a strong demand to focus on forum or let people go.

I get help and help people on the drupal.org forums, but the SE Drupal forums are so much easier to use and the only reason to come to drupal.org is when the info isn't on SE. Let's move to SE fully.

A Comment and a Question

I am relatively new to Drupal (April 2015) and have found this thread both interesting and bewildering. I have a comment and a question about it.

Comment

I discovered Drupal Answers via Google shortly after starting on Drupal. I couldn't tell whether the Drupal Post Installation forum or DA was a better place to ask my questions, so I started posting my questions on both. It was interesting that sometimes I got an answer on the forum and sometimes on DA. I seldom got the workable answer on both, but I almost always got what I needed from one or the other, so I kept posting questions on both. This is what carried me all the way through development of a five-site multi-site installation, putting the sites online, and getting things to work reasonably well. I don't think I could have done that without the help I got on both the forum and DA. I was amazed by the generosity of people in both places, who obviously knew their stuff, taking the time to answer questions of an anonymous stranger over and over and over again.

When my questions got hard and technical, Jaypan was one of the greatest sources of help. It got to where I would post a question hoping Jaypan would answer, and when he did it usually solved the problem.

Other people were helpful as well, including some who posted above in this thread. I am eternally grateful to the community on both the Drupal forums and Drupal Answers for getting me up to speed in Drupal. I have a lot of work still to do to improve on things and add functionality. Whether the two places merge, move, or stay where they are, I hope the helpful people remain available somewhere for the rest of my climb up the learning curve.

I'm glad to see that Drupal's executive director and CTO, as well as others from the inner circle of both Drupal and DA have participated in this thread. They obviously are taking Jaypan's complaints seriously, and this has become a window for a newbie into the internal workings of this amazing open source community/organization.

Question

While the Drupal execs are paying serious attention to this thread, I don't understand the outcome -- or lack thereof. Can someone please explain what prevents them from granting technical control of the forums to a team consisting of Jaypan and a couple of other dedicated contributors to revamp the forums?

Jaypan and some others here appear to be both knowledgeable and trustworthy enough to handle the responsibility and passionate enough to get the job done. In order to do it in proper bureaucratic fashion, the execs could initiate the process by asking for a team to form itself and submit a proposal for what changes they would make and what methods they would use to accomplish them.

If the problems are acknowledged and the right people are available to fix them for free, what stands in the way of Drupal letting them do it?

Agree with #84.

I completely agree with #84

Regarding the traffic for Drupal Answers, the data is available for everyone on Quantcast at https://www.quantcast.com/drupal.stackexchange.com

I wouldn't be surprised if Drupal Answers took over a lot of traffic that previously went to the forums, Stack Exchange tends to get high rankings in search engines.

I'm a moderator on a Stack Exchange site (not Drupal Answers) and use Drupal Answers myself. While I disagree to some extent with the claim that SE sites are newbie hostile, they certainly have more rules than a typical forum and the expectations for questions are much higher. I think the hostility is to a large part perception, a bad question in a forum will likely result in an unanswered thread, a bad question on SE will get closed. The result is the same, but the active rejection on SE is perceived as much more hostile. I don't think SE is newbie hostile, but I agree that for users that are very new to Drupal it can be very difficult to ask a question that is well received on Drupal Answers.

An SE Q&A site like Drupal Answers cannot replace a forum entirely, there are whole categories of questions that they don't accept at all. They are a very useful tool, but they don't aim to do everything a forum does.

One thing I wondered while reading the thread was why an existing forum solution wasn't considered, but that was then later mention as an option by joshuami. If developing a solution in Drupal isn't possible right now, using an existing forum software like PHPBB, vBulletin or Discourse would be the easiest alternative.

They are a very useful tool, but they don't aim to do everything a forum does.

That's all we're saying. And most folks that use both seem to agree and say exactly this.

If developing a solution in Drupal isn't possible right now

That's actually not the issue. I did it in the course of a long weekend. Moreover, the forum enhancements I proposed in my document were very very basic and easily done with Drupal.

The issue is expending ANY effort/resources whatsoever on forum functionality (regardless of the implementation). Adding yet another non-Drupal technology is likely to be even more of a nonstarter because it will not only involve additional effort, but involve additional skills and familiarity with a non-Drupal system that won't leverage anything we already have on drupal.org.

The issue is expending ANY effort/resources whatsoever on forum functionality (regardless of the implementation). Adding yet another non-Drupal technology is likely to be even more of a nonstarter because it will not only involve additional effort, but involve additional skills and familiarity with a non-Drupal system that won't leverage anything we already have on drupal.org.

I was more thinking along a hosted forum solution, that would leave the major technical effort with the external provider.

I am puzzled by the 'Needs Review' status. Three regular contributors to the forum have asked for the forums to receive or at least facilitate more technical contribution. Three representatives of the Drupal Association have indicated that they are not prepared to do this in the forseeable future. Every other contributor has said, mainly in strong and unequivocal terms, that the Drupal Association has erred in its judgement.

Josh has taken a view on this issue, and it seems unlikely that review by any other community member, taking into account the efforts of the forum contributors ('do-ocracy') or the consensus of the thread ('democracy') will alter that decision. Therefore, I take it this is an issue where review, unless it merely supports the decision the 'judge and jury' had taken even before the issue was opened, would be unwelcome? If my cynicism is unfair, and a review would indeed be helpful, we might seek some party who has not yet contributed or formed a view on the issue to read the issue, and to provide guidance based on his or her evaluation of the evidence and arguments which have been presented in it.

@90/DoctorWho - in that case, no resources from drupal.org or the DA are necessary and anyone can do exactly that any time they want to. This issue is specifically about 'official' drupal.org forums/functionality. None of which can be added to or changed without some, however finite, amount of resources from the infrastructure folks.

@91/John_B - i'm a little confused about the status as well.

...it seems unlikely that review by any other community member, taking into account the efforts of the forum contributors ('do-ocracy') or the consensus of the thread ('democracy') will alter that decision.

That's also my understanding as well. However, it's probably not a bad idea to leave it open for a some period of time to perhaps let others comment as well.

We've finally had some actual users take an interest and comment recently. It takes time for decisions like this to filter out to a community and I wouldn't want to discourage potential commenters by marking it 'Closed (won't fix)' so quickly.

This issue was marked needs review so that the topic of the issue could be discussed with the Drupal.org Software Working Group (DSWG). The monthly DSWG meeting occurred the 19th of August.

The title of this issue is "petition to move forums to Stack Exchange". No one in the DSWG felt that a wholesale move of the forums would be good for the community at this time. That said, they also understand that changing the priorities of staff working to help get Drupal 8 released before the next prioritization meeting would be disruptive and unproductive.

Text updates to the support page that highlight when to use Drupal.org Forums versus when to use Drupal Answers was accepted as a temporary solution. (I'll post a couple text update options in a separate issue this week.) We also discussed comment notifications. Staff are still figuring out the best way for us to implement email notification of comments on Drupal.org. This feature is planned for several other content types and that solution should work for forum posts as well.

In our next all working groups prioritization meeting, we will review the prioritization of improvements to forums. It's not expected that forums will prioritize high enough for immediate improvements, but that doesn't mean we cannot review code if it is submitted in a way that we can test against our existing codebase and configuration.

Submitting code for improvements to Drupal.org is encouraged, but I do not want to pretend it is simple or easy. Instructions for contributing code to run on Drupal.org can be found at https://www.drupal.org/contribute/drupalorg/code/develop. Code that needs to be deployed on Drupal.org needs to go through our development environments and ideally submitted as a patch to drupal.org/project/drupalorg.

A common solution that works on most Drupal sites is not guaranteed to work on a site with the scale and performance considerations of Drupal.org. We thoroughly test code that gets committed to production. We still have a lot of work to improve the speed at which we can deploy new code to our 14-year old codebase. Significant new features are especially difficult to quickly deploy because their are usually dependencies. Small changes can be reviewed and deployed more quickly, but may still be rejected if they do not pass performance or BDD tests.

It has been mentioned a couple of times that building a solution outside of Drupal.org is an option. Drupal Answers is an example of that, but I understand where some may feel that phpBB or Discourse or other tools may also be an option. You are encouraged to test those options. However, Drupal.org's single sign on is limited to other Drupal sites in the *.drupal.org domain. Changing our login solution is not in the short term roadmap, but that is something we are looking at for long term planning that would make integration with external systems much easier.

A new *.drupal.org site (i.e. forums.drupal.org or answers.drupal.org) would need integration with Drupal.org. Having launched a couple of new sites on the Drupal.org infrastructure, the process of integrating the site and setting up the environments for ongoing development is not a trivial process. That work has to get prioritized.

I will leave this issue in needs review until after the next prioritization meeting. Thanks to everyone for the feedback in this thread.

A child issue was created at #2556893: Update support page to clarify why users would get Support on the Forums vs. Drupal Answers, and to mention Drupal Answers at all with some draft text that needs review.

Joshua,

Is your comment #93 the answer to my question in comment #84?

The question was what stands in the way of letting a team of experienced Drupal developers revamp the forums. If I understand your post, the answer is that you can't just give them the reigns of the forums because whatever they do has to go through your testing procedure before going live. And that testing has to wait in line behind other, higher priority projects, such as development of Drupal 8. And that wait may be very, very long.

Have I got that right?

If I felt I had time to contribute to it, I'd advocate the off-site forum solution.

A forum at some nice URL like drupalforums.org or drupalsupport.org would be, in my view, the best short-term way to get a forum-based support mechanism in place (before 2020). I struggle to imagine how the work required in getting phpBB (or any other non-Drupal forums) incorporated into a drupal.org sub domain will be any less challenging, and how that approach would avoid languishing in the "To do" list just like the existing forum improvement ideas have.

@Jaypan
If I read joshuami correctly his attitude has slightly changed (for reasons we don't need to speculate about) compared to what seems to be his stance in your call. #93 reads much differently than his posts before although perhaps not that different as you might have hoped to. If that is sufficient for you (or anybody else) to try to get changes and the process to change started I cannot judge. The risk of getting a bloody nose is definitely there.

A) Moving drupal forums to stack exchange? Bad Idea.

B) https://support.drupal.org is a good idea, Holly should have the clout to get that done.

C) D8 is probably a security risk. If WorldFallz has a (mostly) working D7 version, use it. Set it up as a project(s) with WorldFallz and Jay (Jaypan) as Maintainers, which gives you issues queues and allows anyone to DL, make changes, and post patches. See also @webchick footnote below.

D) You get it built, I can migrate any data you want from these existing forums to the new Support.drupal.org .

{sorry if I've repeated others' suggestions, I hit wall of text overload around #60.}

Best,
Michael

Footnote: @webchick

"Additionally, in the staff's experience, there is always substantial work needed to actually integrate community improvements, no matter how well-vetted they are in the issue queue. And while making a totally separate site like forums.drupal.org sounds like a viable solution to this problem, since it would allow the Forums team to maintain this site themselves without needing to pull key DA people away, there are maintenance costs associated with that: tie-in to Bakery (d.o single sign-on), security updates rolled out at the same time as the rest of the *.d.o sites (of which there are 16+), etc. and there's a strong likelihood (or at least this happened for groups, localize, etc.) this would end up all back on the DA's plate anyway at some point."

Can you re-assess DA staff needs in light of using approach C)? If I understand it correctly *.d.o subdomains have zero user data? And only need the d.o single sign-on tie in? Automating security updates for a single subdomain is trivial, if Acquia won't share I'll give you a copy of my scripts. . .

I think approach c) is exactly what that footnote's about (this was me parroting Josh btw, not my own personal stance, for clarity). Both localize and groups were originally just as you describe: a couple of motivated community members who took on primary development/maintenance of that part of the site. The problem was in both of those cases, folks eventually moved on to other endeavours, and so those two sites now became problems for the DA to solve, and that's basically what japerry is now being directed to do, instead of doing something else which would have a much higher impact on the community as a whole (such as improve the forums).

I'm not defending the DA's position—I literally do not understand the idea of turning away free work by motivated individuals who are merely asking for their contributions not to be ignored—but I can understand it.

Well, bummer.

Okay, out side the box time . . .

Can the tie-in to Bakery (d.o single sign-on) be directed to a non *.d.o site?

With the thought of modifying C) to be on an independent domain and not a *.d.o subdomain. Thereby keeping the entire drupal.org/project oversight aspect, but removing {all?} DA time commitments.

If someone can tell me what the d.o forum traffic is, I can probably donate a dedicated-server for this. (Well, if it's > ~500K Drupal pages per day I know I can without spec'ing anything.)

Best,
Michael

Comment #93 was an update on the DSWG conversation and outcome, but it also was an attempt to respond to comments that had questions about giving control of forum development to a team of volunteers. If the forum is integrated with Drupal.org, then we have staff and long-term infrastructure volunteers familiar with those integrations that have to be involved in the testing and deployment. That testing and deployment takes time. The bigger the feature or change, the more time it takes.

Bakery sets a cookie that is read across domains. Our implementation of single sign on is very specific to *.drupal.org. Our cookie does not work with other domains, and for security reasons our subsites have to be served up from hardware we manage. If it is a site with a different domain, it cannot have single sign on at this time. (I would love to have a better solution for authentication. It's on the long term list of infrastructure improvements.)

If it is not a *.drupal.org domain, a separate support site could have its own authentication system and would have no requirement of running on Drupal.org hardware. That is essentially what Drupal Answers represents. There are other examples of sites that provide key Drupal services that are not funded, hosted or maintained by the Drupal Association. We have several examples listed on the ecosystem diagram that we put together last year. Everything in red is completely outside of the scope of integration with Drupal.org. They can pull data from using our API, but we do not push users or data to them.

If we have volunteers that want to build on our servers and maintain a site similar to groups.drupal.org or localize.drupal.org, I encourage that, but I also do not want false hope. Deploying a new site on our hardware is a significant undertaking because of the requirements for performance, security and user privacy. As Angie mentioned, both Localize and Groups need help to get upgraded to Drupal 7.

I think many developers will agree that it is way more fun to deploy new things than maintain old ones.

"Can the tie-in to Bakery (d.o single sign-on) be directed to a non *.d.o site?"

Nope. :\ Browser cookies do not work that way, and neither does Bakery.

If the DA is unwilling to allow a subsite for this (and they have their reasons), the only possible solutions are:

A) Jaypan/Worldfallz taking the work that was done and proposing it as patches/sub-modules/Features/whatever of the Drupal.org customizations project, as granular as possible to allow for speedy review/commit.

B) Forking the forums onto a totally separate domain like drupalsupport.com, with separate logins for all participants, etc. and starting (another) competing service to the existing D.o forums.

Obviously A) is vastly preferable; however, I can certainly understand wanting more assurance from DA staff that the work would not be for naught prior to going down that road.

Hi webchick,

Oh, I agree #104 A) is vastly preferable! It's the reality behind that, that caused this 100+ post thread about moving somewhere else :(

I haven't used Oauth (OpenID ?) in a bizilian years, does it {still?} allow logging into site ABC by using your Drupal.org user/pass? Did it ever? If someone knows off the top of their head, great, or I can look it up.

The relevant points seem to be:

• There seems to be a significant traffic fall off in the Drupal forums (with the implication it's from bad functionality) and assumptions that users (especially new) not being readily helped.
• WorldFallz and Jay seem willing to work on fixing the forum issues (with the implication that once project-fied, there are more people willing to help/code/QA)
• Doing anything through DA is pointless. (No offense intended, just how it is.)
• Some variation of #100 C) seems to be the only realistic means with an anywhere near term solution.

Issues to hurdle for #100 C)

• Are WorldFallz and Jay willing to commit to development time and being project maintainers?
• Is there a mechanism to authenticate users from Drupal.org?
• What is the traffic load for just the Drupal.org forums?
• Is DA willing to close forums to new posts and link to the new support site?

What did I miss?

Best,
Michael

Followup:
To my mind, "starting (another) competing service to the existing D.o forums" isn't an option. If the new service isn't DA approved/acknowledged, there's no point.

The documentation How Bakery works is a good explanation of what we use for single sign on. The use of that module predates having staff, and I think the Drupal Association itself, by a long time. It works for now, but it definitely has some limitations that we would like to ameliorate by eventually moving to a more widely used standard like SAML.

For the record, since I seem to be frequently quoted on this, I have never said we would not review code submitted to a Drupal.org or a subsite built following the guidelines at https://www.drupal.org/contribute/drupalorg/code/develop.

We will absolutely code review. We will not have the available resources to help refactor the code if we find issues, but we will respond if we see issues. We do not have unlimited resources to work on everything and this is not prioritized above the other work on the roadmap. Again, I don't want to set false expectations. I also very much believe that having another subsite is an extra upgrade burden that I would rather we didn't pick up. We manage quite a few services at this point. While everything is automated, it still has to be tested for a successful deployment and to make sure we don't introduce regressions—particularly in performance or security.

For those of you that feel forums should be prioritized higher that is fair, but please do not make accusations that the staff are callous or uncaring—they put in pretty crazy hours trying to maintain and improve Drupal.org and the systems of sites around it. We care a lot and are doing everything we can to make Drupal better, improve our tools, and get the word out about how great Drupal is as a platform for building amazing websites.

Please be considerate not to vilify a process that is an attempt to do the best with what the resources we have available.

Hi Joshua (joshuami),

I in no way meant to, or even meant to subtly imply, that the DA staff is callous or uncaring. You're part of a bureaucracy and you have to work within the boundaries as they are enforced upon you. My posts are just a reflection of d.o reality and an attempt to solve the issue that users, especially new, are not being well served by the d.o forums.

Webchick and yourself explained in #103 & #104 that Bakery / single sign on isn't an option. Understood! Which is why I changed the approach, as not having a way to authenticate users from d.o is a 'deal killer.'

(I'm calling it OAuth for want of the proper label)

Is there OAuth type functionality [Single Sign On (SSO)] on d.o whereby users on site ABC can be validated by d.o, similar to the way users on site ABC can be validated by Twitter or Facebook?

Best,
Michael

Clarification Edit:

The approach change is changing the user authentication from push from d.o, to a pull from d.o. E.g. not using Bakery, use something like Facebook OAuth (FBOAuth).

.
Michael-Inet wrote:

... not having a way to authenticate users from d.o is a 'deal killer.'

Why? What difference does it make if someone asking or answering questions on the new forum is registered on d.o.?

Hi New,

NewSites, #110 wrote:

What difference does it make if someone asking or answering questions on the new forum is registered on d.o.?

In essence it's a question of legitimacy, the goal is to not compete with the d.o forums, it's to replace them with a DA approved/acknowledged platform.

It also extremely abates security concerns, if the new platform does not have to keep any user data.

Nor is there's any real inherent desire to replace them for replacement sake, it's about the only workable option given the constraints placed upon all participants.

Best,
Michael

That isn't what I've been saying you said.

Just to be clear, it's also not what I've been saying. I'm saying exactly what Jay said-- that on the call it was made clear that:

1. forums are not on the radar for 2015 or 2016, and maybe not even 2017
2. neither a separate site nor improvements to drupal.org itself would receive resources for code review and approval due to the highly limited nature of having only 1 resource that does it all

If that's a mischaracterization, please just come right out and say so and clearly state the correct position.

You really can't have it both ways. You can't encourage code submissions and volunteers to expand time and effort on code and improvements for which you have no intention of dedicating resources for review and approval.

As I've said previously, that's totally disrespectful, completely against the spirit of community, and the worst possible outcome of all the possibilities.

I already have a ton of unsubsidized skin in this game-- I spent HOURS on a requirements document, working prototypes, team meetings, and even started working on chunking up the work for issue queue submission before the plug was pulled on the Community Tools Team. It hardly seems fair to ask for MORE with no guarantees that our work will even be REVIEWED much less implemented.

Is it just me? What part of that sounds reasonable or fair to anyone?

I'm not defending the DA's position—I literally do not understand the idea of turning away free work by motivated individuals who are merely asking for their contributions not to be ignored—but I can understand it.

Thanks for saying that webchick. I'm of the same mind, but it's nice to hear someone else, outside the forum user contingent, actually say it as well. At least I know I'm not crazy, lol.

1) Are you willing to commit any time to code review for forum improvements?
2) Will this code review happen in a reasonable time frame?
3) What do you consider to be a reasonable time frame?
4) What actions can we take if code is not reviewed within that time frame?

It seems as if what is being requested is a service level agreement for how quickly we can review and implement contributed code. Even with open source projects that have staff to focus on code maintenance, guarantees are not typically how open source contribution works.

As an example within our community, Drupal core maintainers or contrib maintainers cannot guarantee when a patch will be committed—and they have much more extensive test coverage through DrupalCI to tell them when contributed code might create a regression.

We can review code as time permits and commit when it is ready and performant.

Is there OAuth type functionality [Single Sign On (SSO)] on d.o whereby users on site ABC can be validated by d.o, similar to the way users on site ABC can be validated by Twitter or Facebook?

There is no solution that could be implemented for SSO that would not require significant refactoring to how we do authentication.

Eventually, I could see giving users the ability to choose their authentication source and use SSO from another service like Google, Twitter or Github to log in. If someone where to build a completely stand-alone drupalforums.org or similar, that is the approach I would recommend as it might give us a hook to allow users to tie that information back to Drupal.org eventually. This would be an excellent feature for Drupal camp sites as well, but it would not be quick to implement.

1. forums are not on the radar for 2015 or 2016, and maybe not even 2017
2. neither a separate site nor improvements to drupal.org itself would receive resources for code review and approval due to the highly limited nature of having only 1 resource that does it all

We now prioritize work with the working groups every quarter. I don't believe that the priorities will shift wildly from quarter to quarter, but I don't think it is easy to predict when something on the list will be completed. Many things could happen between now and next year. Drupal 8's release will likely speed up change in our community and trigger us looking at our currently planned work differently.

I do not want to promise something we cannot deliver. I also do not want to shut down someone that has the time to cooperatively contribute work back to Drupal.org or help build a better service. We do the best with what we have and the time given. That is all I can offer.

Following DrupalCon Barcelona, it would be nice to see if we can get a couple of Drupal Answers moderators in the room with a few key volunteers on forums. I do believe there is a way to help everyone with the toolset we have and some small modifications. It would be nice to see if we could get some communication going between these two sites and overlapping feature sets to see what the gap is that we most need to fill. I am willing to help coordinate a meeting of the moderators if that would be helpful.

Thanks Jaypan for bringing this.
I used d.o forums a few years back, and I'd love to see the forums get more attention again.

- Many people have abandoned Drupal forums for Drupal Answers. Mickeytown2, for example replies to almost every question on DA about Boost module and Advanced Aggregation module fairly quickly. I haven't seen him much active on d.o forums.

- Looking at the descriptions of each forum in drupal.org/forum, it will become obvious that the current forums are actually Q&A, except the "General Discussion", which only contains a few questions.

As long as we make the Q&A pattern and discussion and opinions separate, DA and forums can co-exist.

Thanks a lot to Jay, WorldFallz, John, Josh, Angie and everyone else for the effort. I'm here in need of an extra hand.

I'm in agreement with Jaypan...Drupal.org forums is broken and needs fixing. Newbies must spend hours sifting through irrelevant posts and/or comments to find a solution (or not), that may be present in many forms I recently made a recommendation to add a bit of "Structure and Control" for the process of submitting, testing and finally posting Contributed Modules. I didn't even get an acknowledgement of receipt for the suggestion...how much effort does that take? I'm of the opinion those in control here simply don't want to "rock the boat" and are more comfortable with the status quo.

Jaypan, thank you for bringing this up.

Thank you, Jaypan, WorldFallz, and John_B for personally helping me on the forum and for all your effort to improve them.

To weigh in on the issues at hand:

1) Should the forums be moved to Stack Exchange?

I don't think so. For 2 reasons:

1. Stack Exchange's format is not conducive to the kind of discussion that happens on the drupal.org forum. Many of the forum questions are unfocused because the asker is a newbie and does not know what she does not know. The answers can also be unfocused because it may touch on many aspects of Drupal and there are usually many ways to do something and different contributors offer different perspectives. There is seldom a single right, or best, answer.
2. The drupal.org forums are not bad enough to abandon. The notification issue is huge. In Jaypan's list of forum problems (from the related forum post), the lack of notifications is by far the most egregious, IMO. Implementation of comment notify is listed as a task in this issue, which would address that. Is there skepticism that this will get done in a timely manner?

2) Should we implement text changes to /support to mention Drupal Answers?

Please, I am begging you, no. Remember that the people who seek support are confused. Often they are new to Drupal. They have been banging their head against a wall to try to figure something out. Finally, they decide to ask for help, often as a last ditch effort. The last thing we should do is offer them a confusing decision - one which they have no ability to make - about where to ask their question.

IMO, there is no criteria upon which the user could base that decision so we should not present the option.

So, it seems like we are at an impasse because the forums are not a priority for Josh. This is understandable, because as I understand it, Josh does not set his own priorities, they are set by the roadmap. We have all been there. Someone's in your office wanting their project worked on, but you can't justify working on it because there items that have been given higher priority.

What I do in that situation, and what I think should be done here is have a discussion about priorities.

I think the forums are critical to the long term success of Drupal. The newbies that I and others help on the forum are tomorrow's evangelists and contributors. I would place improvements to the forum above many things that are on the roadmap. I tell people all the time that there are a lot of great things about Drupal, but the community is the best thing about it, and I think the forums are a big part of that.

Surely, the roadmap can be amended. How can we affect that?

I completely agree with bander2. Well said!

I agree with bander2. I just removed my stack exchange profile. The whole point system and reputation is absolutely not helpful to people seeking help. Can the forums be improved sure, but to get rid of them would be removing an essence of what Drupal is.

It’s been a while since I’ve had time to help out in the forums but i am floating about so thought I should probably add my opinion to this.

For the most part i agree with where Jaypan is coming from. As I work on all sorts of platforms in several languages (Drupal is just one of them) I end up using the Stack Exchange system a lot and I can completely see the benefits of using Drupal Answers over the drupal.org forms.

However, while Drupal Answers would work great for those of us with largely more technical questions, I think the common theme of responses in this thread of 'what about new users' are completely valid as Stack Exchange in general isn't geared towards catering for normal end users, it’s for technical ones. Having said that, the list of things wrong with the Drupal forums and the apparent lack of willingness/resources/care to get them fixed despite the obvious gains for users and the overall image of Drupal is, frankly, terrible.

Now I haven’t had time to read the whole thread, so forgive me if this has already been suggested, but why don’t we attempt to meet this in the middle? Clearly as things stand forums on Drupal.org horrid for users / moderators and Stack Exchange is too much not a forum for a lot of those users but perhaps a third option of a community built site dedicated to specifically cover these issues would work.

Clearly the willingness and ability to resolve the forum issues exist in the community, and it would be in keeping with the general idea of an open source project, that is to say it would be community driven. Ok its perhaps not the most ideal route (fixing drupal.org forums would obviously be best) but i feel it would be a very good advert for the community, it would resolve the fact that any changes / fixes seem to be a nonstarter, we can keep it open source and all the rest of the good things that Drupal is, at the same time we avoid using a completely third party site like Stack Exchange and its reasonably non flexible system. It wouldn’t be without its own hurdles but i think it’s certainly worth discussion as a potentual middle ground.

At least a few of the arguments against a non-Drupal.org support forums community:

1. It's not *.drupal.org. - I don't really care about this one, myself. Drupalcontrib is, as an example, an extremely invaluable 3rd party website if you're dipping into some of the more complex/massive modules like Commerce.
2. No shared login support; the existing method won't work for an off-domain website
3. Specific concerns introduced by a 3rd party website intended to be a support system:
   • User experience takes a hit; yet another account to make.
   • Security implications? Security failures that reveal account information might be more likely to reveal drupal.org specific account information. My observations in other domains would suggest that people registering at this new website when they're in a jam would have a high chance of just using their Drupal.org password for convenience. Even developers do this, so arguably it's a problem introduced by Drupal Answers, too.
4. Developers willing to do the work, probably. There haven't been many in this thread even interested in the idea, or expressing a willingness to make it happen. This is probably the most critical reason, IMHO.

well ok so:

It's not *.drupal.org. - I don't really care about this one, myself. Drupalcontrib is, as an example, an extremely invaluable 3rd party website if you're dipping into some of the more complex/massive modules like Commerce.

I agree. I dont see this as a massive issue. If it were to become a drupal.org endorsed site then creating a new subdomain on drupal.org for it to 'tie things together' isn't all that hard to do (unlikely and probably not needed but its not completely out of reach. Its just a DNS record).

No shared login support; the existing method won't work for an off-domain website

Its a small usability disadvantage sure, but is it too much of a hit to take for much improved functionality? As it stands i think most people would prefer a working forum solution over having to only login once. Most forum users probably never need / want to post issues anyway and those that do probably wouldn't mind all that much.

Specific concerns introduced by a 3rd party website intended to be a support system:

User experience takes a hit; yet another account to make.

See above.

Security implications? Security failures that reveal account information might be more likely to reveal drupal.org specific account information.

This is always a problem with -any- site being compromised. Chances are those users who would use the same account details on drupal.org and any third party forums probably use the same details for everything anyway so there's no additional risk. also see my earlier point about multiple user accounts, chances are most wont have / want / need an account on both systems.

As for other implications, a service like Cloudflare would be a must and a good deal of testing and review, but that's the same for any large web site or project.

Developers willing to do the work, probably

Im not so sure. Everyone seems to be in general agreement that something needs to happen, and a lot of those have expressed willingness to help. Im sure we wouldn't be too short on devs for it. At the end of the day a third party site would likely be less work as its a clean slate anyway.

The all comes down to whats easier to achieve. An overhaul of the forums on Drupal.org, a new, community run site to take over from the forums to do it properly or moving everything to Stack Exchange and maintaining the same level of support for non technical users.

An overhaul, as we've established seems to be either basically impossible or at least a very long way off
Stack Exchange simply isn't the right platform for most of the normal forum requests
A third party site can both be contributed to and run by the community while fitting everything we would need it to.

There's another risk I lost during some post editing: If the 3rd party "drupalsupport.org" forums do well enough we'll just be adding to the "Well, our forums aren't great but that's okay because people just go to X" line of thinking we have already seen, where "X" is Drupal Answers and Google.

I'd rather see a third party website than status quo, myself, but the reason I don't more strongly advocate that solution is because I can't be certain I'd have any time to help. What we need/want to happen on D.org most likely won't, so we're not really left with an alternative other than rolling our own.

Thank you Jaypan for promoting this issue along with WorldFallz, John_B, the folks from DA and others who have been wrestling with this problem.

There are a few posts that really resonate with me on this subject Comment #117 is one, also Comment #69 and Comment #84.

Until reading this, I had forgotten why or even that I had stopped visiting the forums. I shifted to Stack Exchange a few years ago; it happened very organically. To put it bluntly, it is because as the majority of observers have indicated, the Drupal forums are antiquated and don't have the necessary tools for the job. That said and now that the issue is in focus, I see letting the forums languish despite the efforts of skilled and motivated contributors as a huge lost opportunity. This is Drupal.org; if you're going to learn about Drupal this is where you are logically going to go. Also being Drupal, we should have the best forums; it's Drupal for crying out loud, you can build anything with it.

It's my opinion that if you are new to Drupal, you'll probably get the best information (regardless of antiquated forums) at Drupal.org forums. Once you have a good working knowledge of Drupal, sites like Drupal Answers are more useful but in the beginning I am certain the info from Drupal forums is going to be more useful and valuable. That is why the forums should be a priority, they are the first impression.

In summary, after reading this discussion and a few related threads, my thoughts are in line with the sad irony of the "no-thanks-were-too-busy-300x200.jpg" file that Worldfallz posted. It may not be the intended message but it is the message that is resonating.

Anyway, that's my 2-bits.

Question: Since the Drupal.org forums are primarily built using the Drupal core Forum module, how many of the proposed improvements could be added to Drupal core? Presumably not all of them make sense for core, and even some that do might have to be an opt-in feature (so there would still need to be a followup issue to turn that feature on for Drupal.org).

But I thought it was worth mentioning since it seems like a rather obvious way to get improvements onto Drupal.org without having to specifically push every line of code through the Drupal.org staff review process... and because any improvements would then be available for other sites too.

(The above could also apply to improvements made to contrib modules that Drupal.org is already using - although I'm not sure if Drupal.org pulls in the latest versions of contrib modules as regularly as it does for Drupal core.)

Overall, reading this thread it feels like the methods used to decide Drupal.org priorities could use some review and refinement. I don't think most people understand how those decisions are made and what criteria are used to make them. Figuring out what to prioritize is a hard problem, but it if a proposed feature does have outside volunteers who are ready and willing to work on it, it does seem like that fact alone should bump it up a bit higher on the priority list... Perhaps there should be a separate issue to discuss that?

I haven't kept up with how this is going but it looks like it's still active: https://www.drupal.org/project/harmony_core . Might want to consider that for a start of a Drupal based solution and maybe see if the maintainer wants to help out here. I don't see him on this issue so he may not know about it.

@WorldFallz I tried looking at that Google Doc which no longer seems to be there.
@John_B D8 is a nice idea though as far as I know the d8 Forum module in core doesn't change the architecture which has been the same since 4.7
@Joshuami Could use something other than Drupal, but we know it and it's infrastructure needs.

Not on the roadmap for 2015-2017 - :'C

We need time to rebuild/think about this - yep and time is money. If not done by DA it'll have to come from the outside.

OK! So here are my thoughts, thanks for pinging me @michelle.

I'm going to avoid a wall of text as there's a lot to read already.

Harmony is a forum project built in Drupal, first part is there in that it's an entity based forum. It's D7, won't be D8 for a while, is aimed at being a modern extensible solution. The second phase of work with it is private messaging, subscriptions, notifications and performance. Also migrations in there. Work's happening now to address PM and some of notifications, with someone else doing perf. Some stuff to do! There's a distro which will show it off, it's the only viable drupal built forum solution.

D.o forums suck and it doesn't represent Drupal so well, I'd like to rebuild it. How this happens, not sure, I'd invest time into this.

As I understand it, it still needs to go through Drupal.org staff review before it is committed to core.

Someone please correct me if I've misunderstood.

You misunderstood :) The Drupal.org staff is not formally involved in reviewing/committing patches to core at all (of course they can and sometimes do review particular core patches in the issue queue for their own reasons, just like anyone else, but there's definitely no requirement).

To get on top of this issue I'd suggest we rename this to "Improving d.o forums" and create a separate issue for the problem of a barrier to contributing.

An issue about the barrier to contributing to d.o is a good idea (there might be one already...)

On changing this title, I think we can instead conclude that a complete move to SE and closing of the d.o forums wont be done, and close the issue.... BUT we are still waiting for some feedback from some SE volunteers ... and maybe for another DSWG meeting. (Can we get a date on the meeting added to the remaining task section of the issue summary).

It is already in the issue summary to make an issue:
to turn on comment notification for forums (and postpone it on the issue that is implementing that for other content types)

I think issues for improving forums might already exist? or can be made as children of an other (possibly older existing issue) on improving the forums.

Made some small changes to the issue summary remaining tasks.

WorldFallz and Jaypan thank you both very much. I have enjoyed and learned a lot from your many comments and responses in the forums in my 7+ years of using drupal.

Yes, the forums would benefit from even a little TLC (tender loving care).

Back at comment #27 I suggested adding the "follow" feature would help usability of forums. Others have suggested comment notify would help.

Now with 130+ messages and exponential frustration this thread appears to be less an example of working together towards solutions and more one of obstacles.

Rather unfortunate for the drupal community as will be the loss of contributions of WorldFallz and Jaypan.

Few more thoughts. Decline of traffic to forums, to echo others this is because how people interact and solve problems has changed. There's a reason why SE has become successful and d.o forums have declined and it's because it does a better job of helping people and surfacing information.

Ultimately this is a resource issue in that there isn't any, the way to get some is to make a social/q&a/help community on d.o become a priority.

FWIW comment notifications will go a way to help with engagement with forum content and getting people back to the site.

FWIW comment notifications will go a way to help with engagement with forum content and getting people back to the site.

I believe you're quite correct. It would be interesting to give it a try and find out.

If I can throw my 2 cents in.

I am a php programmer who uses Drupal amongs other things, and I use Stackoverflow and StackExchange quite a bit. Yes, StackExchange has a differnt set of guidelines for questions that are asked, but it is far far superior to Drupal Forums. Most of the time if I'm looking for a solution to an issue and I end up on Drupal Forums its an abandoned question (2 years ago) that has no solution and a load of people saying I'm having the same issue.

If I land on a DrupalAnswers page its usually solved or got some useful info.

If you want old style forums, you should use a commenting / forum engine such as Disqus or similar.

Drupal is great for doing lots of things but it's not great at running huge forums such as the one here and while I'm at it it's not great at sharing project code, please move all module source to Github. I've tried several time to submit code to projects and given up in frustration.

Thanks

Toby Allen

Yes, Disqus would be a huge step forward .. lol. It's always a good idea to give all your content away to a 3rd party tool, you have no control over whatsoever. [irony modus off]

I think, what I took away from the whole discussion is, that changes to the forum have to be really, really small and incremental, so that they are easy testable by the infrastructure guys. I can absolutely see how big chunks of code don't get tested, as it just is too much of an effort to run all the necessary tests against + to understand all the changes somebody else did. It's probably just too much much to be handled at the moment.

Couldn't it be at least tried to go a strategy of small steps? If it doesn't work out (as promised) we can still complain. :-)

PS: I'm also happy to contribute some time if needed.

@tobya I agree on the d.o forums, I can't think of one occassion I've used them as they're so poor. On Drupal not being good at forum stuff, that's why this project exists: https://www.drupal.org/project/harmony_core

@Stefan Lehmann do you have an idea on what these things would be? Comment notifications would get anyone who wandered to d.o forums, posted and got a reply back to the site. Like I said it'll be a shot in the arm for engagement.

Surely, the roadmap can be amended. How can we affect that?

I asked that a month ago. Am I to assume that the roadmap can not be affected by passionate members of the community?

While I totally understand the frustration here, unfounded speculation about someone's motives isn't advancing the discussion here.

As an update from DrupalCon, the D.o working groups met, and the DA board met about the working groups. The DA board wants to see staff produce a "community engagement plan" which will cover topics such as how community members can affect D.o roadmap priorities, and how they can propose/work on changes not on the roadmap. The working groups provided their input to staff for this plan. ETA for completing that is sometime before the end of the year.

People need to pay attention to what Alli (heylookalive) is doing with Harmony and Communications Stack projects. What he's building is something that deserves some consideration. In my opinion, at the very least, what he's done with harmony_core deserves to replace the structure of core forums in D8 or D9.

Drupal is an open source project that is completely and entirely dependent on its community, I think it's high time it starts offering itself as a viable solution for online communities in general.

Thanks @jakewilund!

Last ditch - Harmony, a Drupal entity based module (series of modules) which give you a forum:
https://www.drupal.org/project/harmony_core

On the D.O/DA working group - I'd happily be involved in this given I've got experience in this area, and have built the only viable Drupal forum solution.

For anyone interested in making D.O a place to discuss things in a forum type environment to do this well will be no small task.

I have stopped posting replies to support questions, after many thousands of such replies. Not sure why I reacted that way. It is not a protest, it is more in sadness. I always knew that that type of contribution to Drupal would never earn the same respect in the community as code contributions: the assertion that non-code contributions are equally valued in Drupal would not need to be repeated so often were it self-evidently true. Perhaps having this situation made so clear is a bit deflating.

Jaypan, the fact that you have stopped reporting spam is something I have suspected for a while. There has been a marked increase in the amount of spam in "New forum topics". I think your great effort there was hiding from many what an issue spam is on the forum.

While you were taking care of it, I thought it was no bug deal. But now I see that it is a huge issue. Second only to the notification issue.

The spam is a separate ongoing issue. The increase in spam has coincided with the changes to user role progression. For reference see:

• #2508373: feedback on new user role progression
• #2408359: Configure Mollom on Drupal.org

And I have to admit that I too am finding it increasingly difficult to keep motivated enough to handle spam, keep the forums organized, and help users. and when I'm not feeling motivated, spam handling is the first thing that gets dropped, so I've been doing less myself lately. :-(

I participated in general support and GDO a long time ago and have largely moved on to supporting the projects that I work on as well as ones that I utilize / have had issues with. I see the lack of forum / GDO engagement as similar to the shift in blogs removing comments. There's almost too many methods of getting help and so reporting something to a forum / singular page is so 90's that most people don't.

It is problematic from a new-comer perspective I could see though if there's "support" and it's poorly maintained, how am I to get support from this community?

Current sources of support I can think of at a glance:

Internal

• GDO
• Forums
• https://www.drupal.org/project/infrastructure
• https://www.drupal.org/project/webmasters
• the comments section of api.drupal.org

External

• Twitter
• Reddit
• Stack Exchange
• http://dropbucket.org/
• http://drupalmodules.com/

If code contributions are valued over documentation contributions (perception). Could we do this:

Have a project that everything points back to that is just a repo for documentation / issues. Have issue threads entirely geared towards support. Then if someone "fixes" a documentation request, they get a commit. This would emphasis in listings and elsewhere that "commits" to documentation and support are just as important as other things. Project name could be something like https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal_support and all links would point back over to there, shutting down older support forums which largely are dead.

These are tough problems.

We’ve been talking through it some more over here at the Drupal Association - and also monitoring the replies here - to listen.

There are two points that we’ve heard loud and clear:

1. The community is not ready to wind down the forums.

Though it is not as widely used as it used to be - it still serves these key groups: newcomers who are finding their feet, and those asking general advice, rather than specific technical solutions. There is not enough community consensus to simply shut down the forums and move to Drupal Answers at this time.

2. We (as the Drupal Association) need to find better ways to accept community contribution.

This is something we focused on during our meeting with the Working Groups during DrupalCon Barcelona. Integrating community contributions to Drupal.org has been a tough problem since before the DA had staff. How can we respect the selfless effort of community members while at the same time respecting our constraints and the need - sometimes - to say no? We’re looking hard at how to do this better and make the process for getting work reviewed by staff more systematic and transparent.

Our content strategy work, and the user research that went with it, recognizes the need for an improved Support system on Drupal.org. The outpouring of feedback in this issue only reinforces that.

We can't de-prioritize our other initiatives, but there are some incremental high impact changes that affect multiple items on our roadmap that we can bubble up to have an impact here.

All that said - this particular issue is for the petition to move forums to stack exchange. It seems clear it’s time to close won’t fix this issue - and open some issues for those incremental changes.

As such, we’re prioritizing two areas that are among the biggest pain points on forums, that will also provide larger wins on the rest of the site:

Notifications:

• #1304216: A user should be able to "follow" individual pages of content and receive email notifications for new comments - This will genericize the ‘follow’ feature that exists on forums to allow following and email notifications of other content types.
• #2585049: Redesign 'follow' button pattern to be applicable to all content types - As a related issue we need to be sure that the design pattern for the follow button will work for other content types.
• #2585061: A user should be able to "follow" forum pages - To extend the newly genericized feature to forums.

Spam fighting:

• #2529118: Whitelist certain urls for Mollom spam checks - This change (made yesterday) will allow us to crank up the strictness of the spam filter, globally.
• #2533178: A user should receive confirmed role from manual assignment only (not automatic) - Having enough community members who can confirm users means we can eliminate automatic granting of the ‘confirmed’ role entirely.
• #2386751: Replace 'report spam' links with Flag functionality - And some related improved admin views

I do encourage everyone else here to please, open additional issues that you think will help - particularly where they are incremental and high impact. I understand the reservations around contributing code - but those contributions are appreciated as well, if you feel you can make them.

Whilst the changes you've mentioned to the existing forums are good and will help I think they're missing the point.

If the initial request was wanting to move away from d.o to another Forum it's because the current forums do a poor job. If providing the best place to get help with Drupal in a forum based manner is the goal this will need a rethink of what they are, how people interact with them and what features are expected.

If anyone wants to do that I'd be up for it, but somehow expect that this won't be a priority and that d.o will still be using core forum which hasn't seen a structural change since D4.7. Sadface.

@hestenet I think comment #155 is good. As a regular user it will certainly help from my perspective. I still find browsing the tracker brings up some interesting items in the forum including replies from Jaypan and Worldfallz and being able to follow the items so they appear on my tracker will be a plus.

I'm not sure it will answer the concerns of Jaypan and Worldfallz who have been two of the most active contributors to the forum. Overcoming the frustration that has been experienced may require some direct reaching out to those people.

and that d.o will still be using core forum which hasn't seen a structural change since D4.7

Per #126, I still think improving core forums is one of the ways to move forward here..... (though certainly not the only one)

The kinds of efforts to contribute code which Jay and others made are praiseworthy. There is an even better way of improving the forums: ideally the solutions need some proper UX work. In modern UX work, counting visits or time on site or even posts is doing it WRONG. Why? because, for example, many answers are repeated over and over. More posts, or more clicks, just prove how hard the answers are to find, not how popular the site is, and a declining number of posts may well be a good thing, if one stands back and views the matter with common sense rather than the SEO dogma we have all, I dare say, bought into.

The huge waste of the time of those who contribute answers is be reduced, as are statistics for site usage, if visitors find the the right answer quickly. The data-driven method of improving is described by Gerry McGovern is described in the latest Web Ahead podcast, and he says he latest book is a instruction manual for implementing data-driven UX. If I dared hope again (which I do not, yet) I would start an issue suggesting that improvements are based on data-driven UX, rather than on the views either of DA or of some of us who have been regular contributors of support. Ideally those new issues which have been created should be postponed for four or six weeks while a proper investigation is made of users are really doing on our forums.

The spam increases are directly related to the increase in Twitter and web traffic mentioning Drupal 8 RC1. We have increased our strictness of spam moderation and have a people on this full time.

It happens anytime Drupal gets popular online. We have a very open community, so spammers regularly learn our spam fighting techniques and adapt theirs. We are adapting again.

As someone who routinely handles the spam problem on drupal.org nearly every single day I can say without a doubt, that the increase in spam began with the relaxed registration and role progression changes on drupal.org-- I mentioned it months ago before there was even a beta, never mind an RC, in one of the other issues. As did others at the time, iirc.

Just read this thread with increasing sadness and disbelief of what is happening, reminds me of an article i read recently. I can't help myself, i really need to put in my $0.02..

I've been using the forums since i started out with drupal. I learned a lot from them, and found them to be a valuable resource, especially in combination with a good search engine ;-).

There are two things that especially bother me when i read this thread:

1. The numbers say forum usage is in decline, and discussion has taken place wether or not that has anything to do with the lacking tech driving the forums or a lack of interrest. When i read this, i can't help but wonder how are new users actually going to find the forums at all?
   When opening drupal.org, is there a link to the forums right in my face? nope. Is there a list of active topics shown to spark my interrest? Nope. What is that slogan again?
   

   Come for the software, stay for the community

   ? Well, frankly i see a lot more software than community when visiting the front page.
   You and i may know that hidden in the menu bar somewhere, there is that one little link called forum. But be honest, you can't blame anyone for totally overlooking it.
   Anyways, where are we supposed to go when the forums are gone and you don't feel at home at SE? Also hidden as a little menu link is the item community, that lists IRC (if you're really lucky the person that can answer your question happens to be online), mailing lists (an even more horrible outdated alternative for the forums), and social media (searching for a forest between the trees, way too many little groups, nothing centralized). So no viable solution there as far as i can see.

2. Have you all forgotten what gives a good site value? Content!
   There is such a lot of good content on the forums. The tech may need quite a lot of improvement, the content however is golden and it would be a great loss to let all that go to waste. Personally, i find the lack of features not more than a minor annoyance, i visit the forums for the content.
   On the subject of following forum topics: when i post a question or a reply, i am always able to find it in my dashboard, neatly marked with red text when someone has replied.

So on the point of moving to SE, i'd say no because of forementioned moderation issues and the fact that for me, the forums are sufficient, albeit purely because of the contents. On the point of just removing the forums, i say definitely not, on the contrary, please start some more promotion!

@Jaypan I am definitely reporting when i see spam, and recently opened a separate issue about the spam problem. Even though it appears my recommendation to stop spambots from creating accounts way before they can start posting in the forums has gotten nowhere, as i understand it at least it seems Michelle has gotten her moderation queue now as requested, and with results it appears. My point is, people do seem to take note and something actually appears to be happening, if only in baby steps...

If the comment view I requested has shown up, I'm not aware of it. I just started going thru the webmaster queue to help out with the reports, which isn't a really efficient way of handling it but it's all we have right now.

@michelle In that case i stand corrected. I assumed you got your view because the issue was marked as fixed.

@Michelle - It's not pushed up yet, but we've been working on it on a dev site - I'll see if I can find a better issue for that- or maybe re-open your old issue #834574: Improve Adminstrative Views for Spam Fighters as its pretty related

Been pondering this overnight: would some fundraising (i'm thinking about crowdsourcing here) help to get some work done on the forums? If so, we could start pondering about some possible perks, the amount needed and a list of what needs to get done...

@babipanghang,
That's a very good post at: #165

It seems to parallel my thoughts about the forum and the irony of the issue.

Thanks,
Andrew

@Jaypan So pay the drupal organization to get someone to review the work on the forums specifically?!

Just read this thread with increasing sadness and disbelief of what is happening

@babipanghang's comments echo my thoughts exactly.

I was randomly reading an old support post about a PHP memory issue and saw @Jaypan's footer and have now read the whole original thread and this one. It's sad (and frustrating) to see something as great as this community come up against barriers that prevent it from supporting itself in an efficient and effective manner.

I might be missing something, but out of curiosity (and forgive me if this is a silly question, never really thought about it until now) but how much control does the average user, or perhaps a more senior site user, have to develop features/etc for the Drupal.org website itself? It seems that just about anyone can contribute code for review by the wider community to any issue for any module or even core if they have the ability, but what about the website?

@Chasen - this is the current parent documentation page for community contributions to Drupal.org: https://www.drupal.org/contribute/drupalorg - It outlines the process for getting a *.drupal.org development site to develop code on.

To speak to resources and review - Jaypan is absolutely right that finding away to provide timely community code review for Drupal.org contributions is an issue for us at the DA at the moment.

Although I would argue that that IS fundamentally resource related.

We're a pretty small team trying to find out the right way to say 'this is what we have to focus on, this is what we can minimally support, and this is what we can't support at all.' There is a tremendous amount of work that could be done if resources truly were unlimited - but we're doing the best we can with what we have. Our work is divided between features and maintenance - and we also have to ensure that any new features (our own, or community contributed) don't create so much more maintenance burden that there is no time for more features.

It's a challenging thing that is rewarding when we get it right and very frustrating (for both you as the community and for us as a team) when we get it wrong.

As I said in my comment, #155, above - the specific issue of how we prioritize community contributions (particularly ones that weren't part of existing priorities set by our board or the working groups) is something we spent a good part of Barcleona soul-searching on. We're continuing to try and see if we can figure out a better way to do this. That's going to be an ongoing process.

Hi all :)

Drupal.org forums first priority is to serve you the users. Stack Exchange first priority is to serve their shareholders by hoarding money for them.

I suggest to Drupal users to consider using community owned tools instead of corporate owned tools. Because the first priority of community owned tools is to serve you the users ;)
- - -

Below are details about the benefits of community owned versus corporation owned

An increasing number of people realized that the Drupal community first priority is to serve you and all its users. Compare to Corporations, where their first priority is to serve their stakeholders. Corporations do so by hoarding money for their stakeholders. Yes serving the Community is often on a Corporation list of priorities but it's a much lower priority ;)

For example, when a Corporation is facing a challenging decision and have to choose an higher priority between:
• Option 1: Increase their profit/Hoard more money;
• Option 2: Serve the interest of the Community.

Then most Corporations will not hesitate to go with option 1. Hoarding money. One real practical example is tomorrow morning you could receive an announcement from Stack Exchange saying that for now on you have to pay them money to access part of their services. Or announcing that they will provide part of your private information to third parties to increase their money hoarding. Or announcing that they will close their website because their stakeholders are unhappy with the amount of money hoarding. With a Community owned project you're protected against such behaviors.

As you know Corporations are really welcome in the Drupal community but as contributors. Not owner.

Corporations are not able to compete with the value of Community owned projects. Instead, they get value by both contributing to the Community owned project, and hoarding money via other channels. Conditional to not interfere with the Community decision making.

One clever action early taken by Dries, the founder of Drupal, was as early as 2001, to make the Drupal project Community owned. While at the same time welcoming contributions from anyone, including Corporations.

Sometime a website seem to be community owned because it uses wording such as "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA)" or "Open Source". But if you search who owns that website you will find that it is owned by a corporation. Not owned by a community.

Here are the sources and small legal prints that demonstrate that Stack Exchange is owned by a corporation:
http://stackexchange.com/legal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_Exchange

Hi all :) I added the "Concerns" section. If you have any, feel really free to add yours to that list.

Regarding post #176, in following this thread for over three months, I've sometimes wondered if it would be better if Drupal were run by a corporation. A corporation that wanted to keep its market share would not allow its public forums to whither and rot.

NewSites :) Have you considered contributing to Drupal community? I mean is there any contributions you're interested in doing? Contributions such as increasing its response time, or facilitate improvements to its public and community owned forums? All contributions are welcome. Ways to contribute at https://www.drupal.org/contribute

The following might be news to you. But the decision making process of a community and a corporation feel very different. Most community owned projects such Drupal use a collaborative structure. And most corporation owned projects such as Stack Exchange use a pyramid structure. In a community with collaborative structure all users contributions to the decision making process is encourage, welcome, and focus on serving you the users. This is valuable but we can expect a slower response time as more people are involved with their valuable contributions. If the community users want things to happen they have to take actions. Actions such as contributing their own time and energy, or a paid contributions by hiring a freelancers, or contributing with a donation to the Drupal Association. In a corporation pyramid structure one or a few people at the top make all the decisions. Users contributions are usually not encourage and not welcome, unless requested and controlled from the top. And the focus is on serving the stakeholders by hoarding money for them. Another way to look at those is the community workflow goes from bottom to up (from users to elected servant-leader). Compare to corporation workflow goes from top to down (from leader to users).

Instead of complaining about what the community is not doing to our liking I suggest to consider:
1. First step, complain;
2. Second step, contribute to your community. So things move forward faster ;)

Again community first priority is to serve you the users. Compare to corporation first priority is to serve their few stakeholders by hoarding money for them. This is even more obvious when corporations listed on the stock market. Such as Wall Street. To each their own preferred decision making process. Which one is yours? Collaborative or Pyramid? Have you actively tried to contribute to both before making your decision?

Hi Jaypan :) I understand you're interested in the first step. Which is important. Are you interested in taking further actions with the second step? Which make improvements to the Drupal forum happen.

Your successful and numerous contributions to the Drupal community forums demonstrated that yes it's possible to improve Drupal forums. Such as your fabulous contributions to the 'Report spam' button, and reworking the 'Topic creation'. The community is grateful for those.

In his previous comments Joshuami said the forum volunteers are happy serving users toward improving Drupal community owned forums. Including when appropriate to commit code-checking to improvements. But as you know they have limited resources. Are you interested to continue joining the community efforts? The more join the faster it goes. Have you considered asking Joshuami or the Drupal Association if there are any ways in which you could contribute?

And which decision making process is within your comfort zone? Community-Collaborative or Corporation-Pyramid?

Good morning Jaypan :) Sorry to hear you had a bad experience with contributing to the community forums. I understand the speed is not to your liking.

As you know Joshuami and hestenet are saying that yes the Drupal Association (DA) is happy to review user' contributions. Then when appropriate the DA is willing to commit them. But DA often can not. Why? Because there is a blocker. What is that blocker? Mostly cause by limited resources.

Hi all :) Do you have any suggestions on how to remove that blocker? So that Drupal users' contributions could be implemented faster. Toward improving your community owned Drupal forums. So that it better match your needs.

Heads up that in my personal experience months of delay between submitting a contribution and the commit is sometime normal within a collaborative structure. The speed depends mostly on the number of people available and interested to actively contribute, and the available resources. As you know most contributors are volunteers. If we expected instant review and instant commit we might expose ourself to deception. About that party-crasher-blocker that cause the slow progress. How could it be remove? Do you have any suggestions?

Jaypan :) If both a Community owned forums and a Corporate owned forums were available. And both were matching your needs. In other words full clone. Which one would you prefer using and contributing to? Assuming that in both options, the handling or your contributions and the forums match your needs.

"Regarding post #176, in following this thread for over three months, I've sometimes wondered if it would be better if Drupal were run by a corporation. A corporation that wanted to keep its market share would not allow its public forums to whither and rot."

NewSites,

"Drupal" is run by a corporation; specifically…

In 2008 the local Drupal community organizing the 2009 DrupalCon in Washington, D.C. formed DrupalCon, Inc. to help with the organization of the conference. The Drupal Association, as a body of people and dedicated volunteers, has been at the center of the organization of these conferences. The organization pursued US 501(c)(3) tax exempt status, which was granted in August of 2010.

In July 2011 DrupalCon. Inc. formally assumed the business name "Drupal Association" and began acting as the legal body to support the worldwide Drupal community with a new mission and governance. In October 2011, the Drupal Association set up an office in Portland.

From http://assoc.drupal.org/about/history

(The next question in passing is: who owns the Drupal Association?)

For the record, "communities" own exactly nothing, because unless they are legally recognized (i.e., a corporation), they are wholly abstract entities. Legal entities, such as individual people and corporations do own property; this is why legal entities exist. As such, it is the owners that decide the disposition of their property (under law), NOT undefinable abstractions like communities. Note also that the IRS (Internal Revenue Service) grants 501(c)(3) tax exempt status to legal organizations (read: corporations), not abstract communities.

Despite the diverting political obfuscation within this thread, your point regarding "market share" is well taken: diminishing participation in the forums indicates the corporation that is the Drupal Association has been losing market share where it counts: the broader contribution from that abstraction known as the community.

…And efforts by the firm's representatives to cajole volunteering individuals to do something more (i.e., run faster, jump higher) will not change the trend. The trend will only be reversed when those volunteers, and additional volunteers, realize value in contributing. (And "value," like beauty, is in the eye of each, individual beholder.)

This entire thread is an example of a volunteer realizing diminished [personal] value in participating. That is, diminished value of "running faster and jumping higher" for the benefit of the corporation. Wherein lies the return to that contributor? When one considers that "volunteers" are indeed [de facto] employees (in the real sense, not the legal sense) who do real work to keep the corporation [web site] content valuable, then it will be interesting to see how (or if) the corporation will replace the high-value "employee" who is leaving.

One may think of most (if not all) of the present and past contributors as employees of the corporation (albeit unpaid with money, but NOT uncompensated: reference Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs), who provide valuable content. (This is true of ALL corporations: for-profit or non-profit.) As has been noted elsewhere, the trend is that this pool of "employees" is diminishing.

"Hi all :) Do you have any suggestions on how to remove that blocker?"

Technical officers implementing web site changes will not fix this, because the underlying issue is not technical (although the symptoms may be).

The business issue is: employee (i.e., "volunteer") retention.

Having noted the above, the situation (and trend) is not un-reversible, IF the corporation decides to reverse it. However, that will require first and foremost management recognition of the issue (i.e., employee retention), and implementing appropriate [corporate] goal and objectives second. This would be followed by [corporate] actions designed to retain and build community (i.e., "contributing employees") involvement and contribution as a corporate initiative and corporate business process to build and retain a qualified pool of contributors.

In other words, management has to cause "the ship to go in a different direction; the direction that builds and retains quality volunteer contribution." Unless this happens, nothing of substance will change.

…And the "employees" will continue to leave…

Nothing personal, and no hard feelings: it's just a business issue...

Harry

Hi Harry
Thanks for you thoughts. I don't know whether that analysis is really right though. I have been a big contributor to the forums, and I feel pretty used up. I have not attempted to contribute code to d.o. as Jaypan has, so have not experienced the 'sharp end' in the way that he has. However, if you look at core and contrib code contribution, Drupal has a history of burning out people, and yet the community has constantly attracted new blood.

I don't really think that the historical tendency of Drupal to use people up can be shown to be related to the decline in the the number of sites of Drupal. The decline in number of sites using Drupal has several aspects, and Drupal is increasingly penetrating the 'enterprise' sector, which for the financial side of what you describe as the Drupal 'business' is on the whole a good thing, and is likely to bring in money both to the association, and to for the individuals who continue to work in Drupal - is it not? And, as we are often reminded, contributors to Drupal core (mainly though not only code contributors) are more numerous than ever.

It may be true that the amount of contribution which is paid has increased and will continue to increase. Drupal is certainly changing, technically and culturally. Seen as a business, Drupal might do even better if it were better at retaining talent, and there might be fewer people left by the wayside hurting. Drupal, seen as a business, is nevertheless doing rather well as far as I can see.

John

Hi All.

This is a tough issue. I get where everyone's coming from.

I believe some kind of active forum and documentation that is friendly to newbies remains absolutely critical to the onboarding process to any open source project, and I agree with all the other posters that Drupal.org is struggling in this area. That's why I've taken the time to search for this thread and read through all 185 comments preceding mine.

I'm new to Drupal, but not new to software development. I've spent the last week or so trying to settle on a modern workflow for Drupal 7 projects, including Git, Composer, and something resembling CI/CD and some kind of coherent syncing data strategy between production, staging, and development. I have no deadlines or fires to put out yet. No specific projects in mind. I'm learning Drupal because a friend of mine works for a dev shop that needs advanced Drupal developers and they're having trouble finding qualified help.

I've really struggled over the past week, combing through all the various information scattered around the web, Github, YouTube, and Drupal.org, and trying to synthesis and extract the pieces that would make me productive and forward-leaning with Drupal.

As a frame of reference, I've been thinking about my experience as part of the Meteor and NodeJS communities. Early this year, spam became a rampant in the Meteor Forums (aka, Google Groups) and we needed a more flexible, robust solution. Although a modern forum could clearly be built in Meteor/NodeJS, the community ultimately decided that re-inventing the wheel was not the most judicious use of resources. It was more important to solve the spam and UX problem quickly. Long story short, we're now using Discourse (Ruby on backend and EmberJS for frontend), and I think it was a good decision. Imperfect, but practical and made an immediate impact on the UX for those community members spending hours of their time answering questions and participating in the Meteor forums.

Forums are not dead, but the 2005 UI/UX is. Most newbies could care less about the SSO.

It seems to me that it is time to experiment with a solution outside of Drupal.org. Good faith efforts have been made to communicate and establish the facts. I don't think any feelings will be hurt if we try something different, maybe bringing it back in to the *.drupal.org family at some point down the road if successful, or shutting it down when Drupal.org comes out with a better solution. If there are others interested in trying this approach, I'm on board as a supporter.

Hi Harry :) Thanks for your contribution in above comment #185. Interesting point of view.

"Drupal" is run by a corporation

I'm assuming it's not your intention but some might misinterpret your above message as both Drupal and Stack Exchange are owned/run by Corporations. Doing so would be spreading false information. As you probably know there are various types of corporations and organizations.

The Drupal Association (DA) is owned by a not-for-profit organization. Not a corporation. Whom ever told you the DA is run, or owned by a corporation might have received false information, or misinterpret the information from that source, or might try to deceive you.
Source 1. Source 2. Source 3.

• By definition "a nonprofit organization (NPO, also known as a non-business entity) is an organization that uses its surplus revenues to further achieve its purpose or mission [to serve you the users], rather than distributing its surplus income to the organization's shareholders (or equivalents) as profit or dividends." Source.

Stack Exchange is a owned by a corporation.
Source 1. Source 2.

• By definition a corporation is owned by its "shareholders and each of their shares in the ownership, control and profits [corporation serve their shareholders by hoarding money for them] of the corporation is determined by the portion of shares in the company that they own. Thus a person who owns a quarter of the shares of a joint-stock company owns a quarter of the company, is entitled to a quarter of the profit (or at least a quarter of the profit given to shareholders as dividends) and has a quarter of the votes capable of being cast at general meetings." Source.

By the way in 1995 I funded a corporation, so that's 20 years of experience with a corporation. I'm also a volunteer, an enthusiast contributor to Drupal community and various community owned projects since ~2000. Completed a university degree in both federal and state laws. So I have some understanding of corporate owned versus community owned projects, their priorities, rights, and real first priority and intentions. I'm not saying that all corporations are bad. I'm saying that in some cases a corporate owned tool is appropriate in other cases it is not. It's my personal belief that it's better for the Drupal users and their forums to be owned by a Community. Not a Corporation. While at the same time welcoming a Corporation in the Drupal community but as contributor. Not owner.

It's the not-for-profit "Drupal Association" that owns and runs the forums hosted on drupal.org not "DrupalCon, Inc.". Both happily collaborate. But the "DrupalCon, Inc." ownership is limited to the Washington, D.C. Drupal Conference (Drupalcon). And most importantly "DrupalCon, Inc." is also a not-for-profit organization. Not a corporation. Source. The "Inc." letters in its name might cause confusion? But the legal facts are clear.

As for your allege point about Drupal contributors/volunteers reducing. And the challenge of retention. What is your source for your claim that number of contributors are reducing? Yes there are contributors leaving. They are really free to do so. Sometime it's not a good match with their current preferred type of structure and interactions, interests and such. But the average numbers of Drupal contributors is steadily increasing. According to the DA the total Drupal community is over 1,000,000 users and developers. Composed of over 97,000 active contributors. 30,000 developers in Drupal.org. 3,200 Drupal 8 core contributors. Since the beginning and year after year those numbers are steadily increasing. Source 1. Source 2. Source 3.

Again I'll let users decide which tools they need and prefer investing their time and energy into. I suggest to Drupal users to consider using community owned tools instead of corporate owned tools. Because the not-for-profit and community owned Drupal.org forums first priority is to serve you the users. In comparison, the corporation owned Stack Exchange forums first priority is to serve their shareholders by hoarding money for them.

Hi Soupala :) Welcome to the Drupal community. You might be interested in the introduction documentation at https://www.drupal.org/documentation
And the Developer documentation at https://www.drupal.org/documentation/develop

Those documentation are both owned and contributed by the Drupal community. You're welcome to contribute to it or improve it if you want to by asking for your own editor access at https://www.drupal.org/contribute/documentation

By the way, if you're interested, while you're getting started your unique and valuable newby experience is a good opportunity to share it while it's fresh. And improve that documentation where you feel there is room for it. Then maybe invite the next new comers to pay it forward. You and all users would benefit from that.

There is indeed a shortage of qualified Drupal developers. The learning curve is steep but after they passed it most skillful devs that I know of find it rewarding. Including abundant work or business opportunities.

I've read this thread with a mixture of:

• Sadness
• Irritation
• "I knew this would happen"

Firstly to disabuse future readers of a notion which is being propagated here without any challenge:

Drupal.org forums first priority is to serve you the users. Stack Exchange first priority is to serve their shareholders by hoarding money for them.

Incorrect: If the drupal.org forums were a priority at all, this issue wouldn't exist. Secondly if the drupal.org forums had a priority to serve the community there would be a priority of the Association (see above for why this is not the case).

Secondly I thank the few community members who have held the forums on d.o together through sheer force of will for so long for their contributions. Unfortunately it seems that the reality is that the drupal.org forums are undead. They have died but still go on existing simultaneously. I predict that this will have unpleasant and unforseen consequences for Drupal adoption and drupal's viability as the versatile swiss-army-knife we know and love. Almost everything I've learned about drupal I've learned from people like JayPan by reading (with difficulty) their forum posts.

I am deeply concerned about the Drupal Associations governance and it's fitness for purpose, the D.A shouldn't have priorities a role or a remit unless it's given to it by the community. The community IS Drupal, everything else is neither here nor there. As an example we've gone from years of 'contributing is the best support you can give drupal' to 'Support the project you love' (Pay us a membership fee).

I feel - and have felt for a long time - that contributing, in what ever way you can, is good for Drupal and that no method of contribution should be placed above any other in terms of it's validity, equally however, I feel more and more that drupal.org and drupal as a project are moving further away from community "ownership" it seems to be becoming more and more difficult to contribute to drupal.org (in any number of ways).

It feels to me that Drupal (the project) and the DA need to thoroughly investigate what the blockers are to increased community participation in Drupal.org development and the running of the DA. I feel that open source projects should be agile, quick to respond to changing needs and wholy responsible to the community behind them, drupal, unfortunately is no longer any of these things.

As a final note, I respect, value and in no way want to diminish the work of the team behind the DA and Drupal development but I feel I would be doing Drupal and the community a disservice by not giving my $0.02.

If the drupal.org forums were a priority at all, this issue wouldn't exist. Secondly if the drupal.org forums had a priority to serve the community there would be a priority of the Association

Konnichiwa/Hi MJCO :) Maybe my comment was not clear? What I meant was what I wrote. Nothing more and nothing less than that. I didn't say the drupal.org forums are a priority for the DA. I didn't say either that "serving the community" means improvements to the drupal.org forums are a priority. Me saying so would be setting myself unrealistic expectations and setting myself for disappointments. I understand it's not your intention but if you would claim I said those you would be putting words in my mouth ;) Again I'm assuming that was not your intention.

Here is what I said "The not-for-profit and community owned Drupal.org forums first priority is to serve you the users. In comparison, the corporation owned Stack Exchange forums first priority is to serve their shareholders by hoarding money for them."

• Where in the above the keywords are the word "owned". In other words, before investing time and energy in drupal.org forums or Stack Exchange forums, I suggest to consider the strengths and challenges of those two types of ownership. One you own :) The other you do not own :(

By the way I'm a volunteer contributor like you. I'm not a member of the DA. So I did not set their priority.

Speaking for myself I trust the DA's decision when it comes to set their priorities. They own their decision. They said they welcome suggestions. They listened. They confirmed reception of the various inputs. Then they made their decision. They also said that improvements to the drupal.org forum is still on their to do list and in progress. For example one the latest successful volunteer contributions was the improve spam link at https://www.drupal.org/news/responding-to-spam-on-drupalorg

So what could speed up the progress on the improvements to the drupal.org forums? Well for one thing more volunteer contributors taking actions result in faster progress. Contributions such as patches, testing patches, documentation.

If you're interest in a faster progress on improving drupal.org forums. What would you like to contribute? :)

I agree that removing the blockers would result in faster progress. I would add that removing blocker is both the responsibility of us the users and the DA both working in collaboration, including volunteer contributions.

@Francewhoa, you're talking to people that have actually gone through the "contributing" process for *.d.o sites. Just regurgitating the same comments, in a tone that implies that we don't understand how this all works, is a little insulting.

@Jaypan is correct, "contributing" to *.d.o sites is a complete joke. There is currently no "formal process" that allows the community (as a whole) be involved. Community driven initiatives only ever happen if:

A) It aligns with the DA(Drupal Association)/WG(Working Groups)/infra team or
B) It affects core and is spearheaded by a core committer

Furthermore, there are also no "gates" like core has that allow features and bugs to go through quality checks. Often these features/bug fixes are just "rammed through" without any formal community involvement of any kind. Case in point: developers are making UX/UI decisions when they shouldn't be.

To say that "we own" *.d.o sites is a 100% false statement. The DA/WG "owns" them. The DA/WG determines priority. The DA/WG is the bottleneck, not the individual contributors who are willing to spend time and effort on a specific area (that no one else cares about typically) to improve it for everybody.

Now, this isn't to go without saying that what the DA/WG has done already is, indeed, a vast improvement. However, by "institutionalizing" *.d.o improvements, we've also essentially cut out the community entirely. Personally and just from simple observation, what I see that is needed is:

1. The forums to be split of into a separate forum.drupal.org sub-site so they can be managed independently from the main www.drupal.org site.
2. Better/more documentation on who is responsible for what on each *.d.o site as well as the workflow for getting improvements on them.
3. "Managers/Admins" for each of these *.d.o sub-sites and allow them to work with DA/WG/Infra, not subjugated by them (this is how it should be IMO).
4. Allow individuals to be notified (opt-in) of future planned improvements/initiatives. No one knows what is going to happen, just that is has happened after the fact and are left to complain because they weren't involved before it was deployed.

There are undoubtedly more things that need to happen, but this entire thread started because an individual could not contribute because it wasn't a "priority".

---

Now, all this being said, I'm tempted to close commenting on this thread; it's being bike-shedded to death. This issue is specifically about moving forums to stackexchange. The decision was made: no, that will not happen. Going back and forth over semantics of why this issue was created helps no one.

Also, there is nothing wrong with this decision. If anything, it should show the DA/WG/Infra that this is a serious issue and that more formal procedures should be in place so the community can properly contribute in a timely manner. I would imagine though from reading @joshuami's responses that they are, in fact, aware of this and things will soon get better. It just takes time.

I would also like to remind everyone that, while *.d.o sites are seemingly stagnant for new "features" right now, I would imagine that the majority of this reason is to do with D8 and the upcoming release. In 2016, I hope a lot of that dies down and we can get to a more "community driven contribution process" again.

@markcarver I agree.

To get some change as a result of this giant issue, @jaypan @WorldFallz @markcarver could we have a conversation about what we want a discussion forum community to look like. If I get enough time I'd look at making a non d.o forum using Harmony.

Hi Jaypan :) I understand you're saying more volunteer contributors taking actions does not result in faster progress on the improvements to the drupal.org forums and the speed is not to your liking. In my personal experience more volunteer contributors result in faster progress. But to each their own experience. You own yours :)
As for the speed not to your liking you mentioned that a few times. As you know the D.A. welcome suggestions, and their own their decision with priorities.

The latest successful volunteer contributions was the improve spam link at https://www.drupal.org/news/responding-to-spam-on-drupalorg

Hi all :) If you're not familiar with the other successful volunteer contributions related to Drupal.org customization, including improvements to the Drupal forums, find the list at https://www.drupal.org/project/issues/drupalorg?text=&status=Open&priori...

In that list, notice that the more volunteer contributors are taking actions result in faster progress. All contributions are welcome :)

markcarver :) Thanks for your 4 suggestions about what is needed and how those procedures might better serve those needs. Interesting.

All :) If someone is not familiar with the procedures for volunteer contributors to suggest improvements to drupal.org forums, those procedures can be found within those pages:
https://www.drupal.org/node/73179
https://www.drupal.org/node/1155816

Those procedures were first published in 2006 and 2011

markcarver :) Thanks for expressing your concerns that this thread feels like bike-shedded to death. I agree with Jaypan I believe it's important to keep this thread open. I encourage you to contribute to it like you did if you feel you need to. While at the same time I suggest to let others volunteer contributors also feel really free to contribute if they also feel they need to. Closing a thread might be miss-interpreted by some as trying to bully them into silence. I understand that's not your intention but some might miss-interpret. If this thread is no longer of interest to you as you know you're really free to come or go as you please. I believe all contributions are valuable. Including yours.

@Francewhoa, you're talking to people that have actually gone through the "contributing" process for *.d.o sites. Just regurgitating the same comments, in a tone that implies that we don't understand how this all works, is a little insulting.

markcarver :) Sorry to hear you interpreted my contributions in this thread as a little insulting. Is my intention to insult others? No. Never crossed my mind actually. From my end it feels like we're having a friendly and healthy discussion here. As you know my contribution is that I suggest to consider the strengths and challenges of those two types of ownership. Community owned forums versus Corporation owned forums. Thanks for your patience while other contributors might need to ask for clarification, or ask the same question over and over about that. Doing so is really welcome :) But might result in the same answer over and over.
If that helps to answer your fears or concerns if any, when I use the ":)" sign I mean friendly intention. Nothing more or less than that.

To say that "we own" *.d.o sites is a 100% false statement.

markcarver :) By "we own" I meant a contraction/simplification of what I said: "The not-for-profit and community owned Drupal.org forums first priority is to serve you the users. In comparison, the corporation owned Stack Exchange forums first priority is to serve their shareholders by hoarding money for them."

markcarver said:

This issue is specifically about moving forums to stackexchange.

This is missing the point, is it not? That was set as the (provocative) title of the thread because it may have appeared to Jaypan (as it appeared to me) that the DA had their fingers in their ears, and that everything was hopeless. To my mind that title is a way of saying 'listen up or close us down (us = forum content and code contributors).' The issue has changed because, to their credit, DA have engaged, even if it to say that hopes for better forums are largely unrealistic; and because almost every non-DA contributor has, for varying reasons, said that Drupal would benefit from a higher priority for the forums. The thread is really not about moving to stack exchange now.

If the thread is in danger of being closed down because the title does not reflect the reality of the issue, the options are

• to leave it under a misleading title;
• to close it down a thread where supporters of the forums have found a home, on the somewhat disingenuous basis that title of the issue is no longer in issue;
• or to find a title which reflects the real issue: what about renaming the thread: 'persuade the DA to adapt their policy on the d.o. forums to reflect the balance of the views of the Drupal community, as voiced below'?

@Franceswhoa

Konnichiwa/Hi MJCO :) Maybe my comment was not clear? What I meant was what I wrote. Nothing more and nothing less than that. I didn't say the drupal.org forums are a priority for the DA. I didn't say either that "serving the community" means improvements to the drupal.org forums are a priority. Me saying so would be setting myself unrealistic expectations and setting myself for disappointments. I understand it's not your intention but if you would claim I said those you would be putting words in my mouth ;) Again I'm assuming that was not your intention.

I'm certainly not trying to put words in your mouth, -I- am saying that the forums are evidently not a priority for the DA and that the DA is not serving the community, recent "improvements" to Drupal.org have all been about serving the DA, not the community.

@John_B

or to find a title which reflects the real issue: what about renaming the thread: 'persuade the DA to adapt their policy on the d.o. forums to reflect the balance of the views of the Drupal community, as voiced below'?

I would be inclined to agree with renaming this issue, but I also agree that closing down this issue would be a bad idea, this is probably the most discussion or attention the forums have received in a while and for posterity's sake it'll be nice to have a "we did try and save them" conversation record if the forums stay this bad for another 10 years...

Signed
-Another Bitter but still Loyal Drupal Community Member-

@Jaypan 100% agreed.

This level of discussion is extremely healthy, especially in the context of this subject being discussed. Airing dirty laundry isn't always pleasant but the civility so far is impressive and I still hold onto hope that constructive criticism from this discussion will be actioned.

Perhaps re-opening the topic from Closed(won't fix) would be good as well as it has quite a negative connotation in relation to the new title?

Lets see . . . three lumberjacks show up at my house; I don't know, just for fun lets call them Jaypan, Worldfallz and John. They offer to cut firewood for a few hours most days for me, I get to keep the firewood and they're not going to charge me anything for it, not a dime for their time or the tools they use. Absolutely free. I can heat my home with it, give it away, sell it, whatever. After a few years of this, the woodsheds are full, but the sheds are leaking and the wood is rotting. Now, I could understand if they just stopped cutting wood for me. I could understand if they thought, because I hadn't maintained the sheds and was letting the wood rot, that their efforts weren't appreciated. But not these guys. These three kindly lumberjacks come to me and say they want to fix the sheds, repair the roofs and such, they might just need a little help from me.

Now maybe firewood isn't my priority, but I'm damned sure not going to tell three guys that have been cutting firewood for me for years for free that it isn't. My mother raised me better than that. You can dress it up however you want, but it's unkind, rude and disrespectful . . . even if I'm volunteering all my time helping the homeless, saving puppies or contributing code to the core of some open source cms . . . say for example, oh I don't know, lets say . . . Drupal.

And on a purely practical note, maybe I'm busy. But, given all the time they've invested in those sheds full of firewood and all the time they're going to continue to invest, if they're treated properly, it's probably just smart if I help them out a little so they can keep helping me out a lot.

Now consider this, what if my business is selling wood burning stoves and one of the reasons I've been able to sell so many wood burning stoves is that I give away free firewood with each stove, free firewood is sort of like free support for wood burning stoves. You think maybe people might stop buying my wood burning stoves if the wood I gave them was rotten, or if I didn't give them any at all? What if I just gave them a couple arm loads full, instead of a full truck load anytime they wanted it, bet I'd see less of those wood burning stoves going out the door. Can't really give away free firewood by the truck load if those lumberjacks leave. I guess I could hope that three more kindly lumberjacks will happen along. . . happen along and offer to fill up my rickety leaky wood shed with firewood for free . . .

Come to think of it, I might want to take a little time away from the workshop, you know where I tinker around with wood burning stoves . . . trying to make them better. . . and spend a little time helping out those lumberjacks.

Anyway, back on topic, you might want to consider what someone new to Drupal, someone who's invested some time in it, but not so much they can't back out and change directions, takes away from a conversation like this where such a low priority is given to support for new users by people who call the shots. Not a good impression folks; and it gives me more than a moments pause about how I'm going to proceed. I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Well said @imbilly. Particularly this part:

Now maybe firewood isn't my priority, but I'm damned sure not going to tell
three guys that have been cutting firewood for me for years for free that it
isn't. My mother raised me better than that. You can dress it up however you
want, but it's unkind, rude and disrespectful

Maybe DA doesn't intend it to come off like this but it does and I get a queasy feeling whenever I read the boilerplate explanations about why improving the forums can't be done.

@imbilly, that’s just about the best analogy you could have used for this situation, its bang on.

At the end of the day, unless something happens to get around this impasse people are going to leave / go else ware / start their own projects and Drupal will suffer as a result.

DA doesn’t even have what i would consider a 'valid' reason for not allowing these improvements. Telling an open source community that you have 'No Resources' is akin to saying, 'Thank you for all your work, all the things you've built, all the people you've supported, but we don’t trust you to do make some improvements to the oldest and crappiest part of Drupal'

Hell if it’s a funding thing, add more advertising to Drupal.org, there is sure as hell the opportunity for it, even if it’s just for 6 months. I’m sure most of us would rather DA made some money to help deal with 'Lack of resources' than not, and if a little more advertising does it, then so be it.

I find the whole situation extremely frustrating, and it basically just feels like a slap in the face to the rest of us who have put in time to help the community.

@Jaypan I’m glad you started this thread, it’s certainly a discussion that has needed to happen both for the forum and to show just how DA is failing to prioritise the needs of the community (the very thing the entire Drupal Ecosystem is built on). I'm happy to help support on w/e platform you end up using going forwards, you're support within the community, and that of others (Wordfallz, Nevets and many more) has been invaluable to me and many others over the years.

I'm not a regular contributor to the forums anymore - but I have certainly documented some fixes, and posted other fixes we've paid for by consultants as a 'pay back' to the community, as I simply saw the forums as a wonderful way to give back and share Drupal solutions. But the forums themselves had such a terrible framework that it was difficult to use them properly.

A couple of years ago I noticed that the forums were fast becoming moribund. One of the biggest problems is the simple problem of searching! And then there's the spam...

It's very clear the that the Drupal management team do not see this amazing resource as an important part of Drupal.

Like Jaypan, most of everything I've learnt about Drupal has started on the forums, and answered often, on the forums.

I cannot tell you how useful it has been to us. I'm very sad to see them in the current state and what's worse, sadder still to see no concrete plans in action for them.

I would like to thank Jaypan and Wordfallz for all their posts on the forums, I still find them very, very helpful.

Totally agree to @Jaypan point of view. There should be real improvements.

Whoooo.. It took me 3 days to go through the entire chain. Lots of interesting/painful endless talks, suggestions, views, opinions. Was wondering if we can create a poll and see what the democracy has to say?

Was wondering if we can create a poll and see what the democracy has to say?

Probably.

However, what the Board of Directors say is "law," as determined under the By-laws, and carried out by the association staff; this being true of all corporations: for profit or non-profit. That is, the Board of Directors and management team set the direction and determine the work to be accomplished. (Regardless of polls; although it's always nice to know the mindset of the customer base.)

It appears the corporate officers and employees are working very hard carrying out their duties as required by the Board of Directors (with their intent delegated to various working groups); and because resources are finite, work is prioritized. As indicated by extant evidence, they appear to have a heavy workload.

Jaypan's issue is merely way down the priority list; this is the gist of Joshuami's remarks regarding priorities ahead of this issue. It's not a case of they not seeing the importance of their customers' contributions; it's a case of having other priorities ahead of significant website [usability] improvements. (As evidenced by repeated statements above.)

I doubt that the current method (i.e., working process) of implementing website change is arbitrary; but I suspect is driven by/derived from the business goal and objectives mandated by the directors (whose duty is to be cognizant of risk, among other things), which subsequently results in operational procedures and work processes implemented by the officers and employees. They are merely carrying out their instructions as best they can, via those derived procedures/processes, given the resources they have. (And "method" - process - is a resource.)

In other words, the ship is going in the direction it has been instructed to proceed. If it is instructed to change direction, or more to the point, instructed to include customer (aka "community") resources in additional aspects of its operational work plan, then it will. Until then, it probably won't.

Should instructions (directives) from the directors address this issue, or to the extent the corporation's officers have the leeway to change under current directives, then the officers and employees will naturally respond (as they are being compensated to do). There appears to be movement toward change with Webchick's remarks in post #144; specifically, the consideration of a "community engagement plan."

This appears to be an opportunity the corporation has leveraged only to a limited extent; the limit which has stopped Jaypan's contribution in its tracks, and has resulted in so much customer consternation herein. (The "community" being the base of customers.)

NewSite's question in post #84 indicates that limit to which the corporation has pursued the opportunity to engage the customer base (i.e., "contributors") as a supplemental workforce. No doubt this limitation is driven by [corporate] concern for the risk of including customer contributors (read: not our paid employees) into additional [critical?] areas of the development process of corporate-owned resources. (I.e., the websites.) This is a valid concern. However, from a business management perspective, risk tends to be manageable with judicious implementation of appropriate controls (which may or may not currently exist within the corporation's procedures).

Should the forthcoming community engagement plan include/indicate greater use of customers as [unpaid] employees within the workflow, the corporation will have the opportunity to get past this particular limit on its growth (and the associated customer dissatisfaction), and perhaps find additional ways to use its customers' creativity/contribution. But, the key for success from a business management perspective will be ensuring effective controls are in place, so as to enable greater customer engagement within corporate processes.

As a Drupal customer, my advice to the corporation (if asked) would be to consider how growth can be constrained/restricted, should the same kind of innovation and creativity mindset that is inherent with the Drupal CMS itself, NOT be applied to corporate business processes and methods.

This consideration might be a good agenda item for the community engagement plan effort.

Nothing personal, and no hard feelings; it's just business.

Harry

Thumbs up for this issue.

Several interests and goals are in some conflict here, mainly because the resources are limited and especially given the growth that drupal has accomplished along the years.

Simplifying things with a little analogy, one can say that Drupal has been going trough a phase of evolution where its original ecological niche, defined by an open source community, is expanding to a corporate/business one. This is deriving principally from its potential for development of large applications (which has been more than proven along the years) and also from the ever increasing necessity for management of its community and product resources (modules, ...).

So it isn't surprising that those two drupal paths (Community/Corporate) are diverging from each other.

Must we choose one or the other? I don't think so. On the contrary, this situation is happening everywhere in the technological world and is also redefining business ideas outside of it. Welcome to all of us to the global/'instantaneous' world...

What can we do? I think, that an organic and valid solution to this situation (community feeling that the resources are not shared in the best manner) is very simple. And i also think that this issue is it.

Lets ear, loud and clear, the voice of the old and new drupal open source community.

Edit: rereading my commentary, i realize that it can bring some wrong interpretation. By corporate and community path, i am not referring to people but to valorization and priority in decisions.
After all, drupal spirit can be seen when many of the greatest contributors to the open source community are corporations or individuals intimately connected to them.

I'm following this discussion with interest, and I can completely understand the frustrations being expressed.

Since the suggestion proposed was to move the Drupal forum to Stack Exchange, I thought it appropriate to quote that site's founder, Joel Spolsky: "Eat your own dog food".

By this I mean that Drupal is a content management system that's capable of running forums, so to run a support forum for Drupal that's not on the Drupal platform is a pretty lousy advertisment.

Now that Drupal 8 has been launched, I assume there is a plan to move drupal.org to the new version at some point in the future. This would seem an ideal opportunity to make the needed forum improvements. There seem to be volunteers willing to assist. Hopefully a way can be found to harness their enthusiasm.

James

Now that Drupal 8 has been launched, I assume there is a plan to move drupal.org to the new version at some point in the future.

I doubt there is a plan yet. It took a couple of years, IIRC, to start the move of drupal.org from 6 to 7, and took 18 months to complete. It is a big job. Even if the forums have some hope if improvement at that stage, it will be a long wait.

It was listed as a 'remaining task' to create an issue for implementing comment notify, so I created an issue for that, but this issue should probably be closed as a duplicate of the issue that TVN created which depends on another one being done first. So it looks like this is in the pipeline for some day.

I want to say what cannot be said enough that Jaypan and WorldFallz (and VM who I haven't seen in this thread, and some others) are amazing, kind, and generous for the support they provide. Open source software, and Drupal in particular, would not be what it is if it weren't for benevolence like theirs (yours rather, as you'll probably see this :) Thank you.

Just an idea.

Following the new branding campaign of Drupal 8, maybe drupal.org should change its slogan on the front page from 'Build something amazing' to 'Proudly Supported Elsewhere'?

Following the new branding campaign of Drupal 8, maybe drupal.org should change its slogan on the front page from 'Build something amazing' to 'Proudly Supported Elsewhere'?:)

Spot on better yet "Build something amazing, support sold separately!"

@ahillio thank you for the mention. I check on this discussion from time to time. I have not engaged because I've stood under this tree a few times in past years. I've had nothing to add that I haven't already included in similar discussions. I believe that links to those discussions are included within this discussion.

I can sum up my feelings about the entirety of all of these discussions with this analogy: when one is hungry for the fruit of a tree, standing under a tree known to be barren leaves the hungry fruitless. If one is left only to hope for fruit and stands under the tree long enough, they die of hunger.

hello all, I came to read half of this thread due to Jaypan's post on my question on the forum.

I'm a newcomer, I started Drupal just three months ago.

I had started to write a boring, long-winded post that would have made me look silly.

I come from Postnuke. Postnuke went to become Zikula, I stayed with Postnuke, and I am now painfully migrating my websites to Drupal.

Dear Drupal: don't make the same mistakes as the Postnuke team did.

1- Don't close your support forums, expand them!
Preferably with a subforum for every module

2- Go the integration route for the forum! Choose a great third party opensource project and integrate it into Drupal as Drupal's core forum. There will never be enough resources to keep up in features with the big players in the forums game.

my 2 cents

subforum for every module, please no. Each project has an issue queue that provides module specific aid. As far as a 3rd party app, I'd disagree with that as well. If a third party app is utilized may as well use stackexchange. A 3rd party app introduces other issues for drupal.org ... mainly having to maintain it. The community has enough to secure with its' own code.

I'm also with VM's #220. Wordpress has sub forum-like features for every module, and they hardly get any attention.

I do not believe there is any need for sub-forums. There are many other alternatives.
Sub-forums exist in the hope of organizing a little better a large amount of post so that the user is not completely lost when searching for an answer. But the structure of a tree becomes much more like a maze with the growth of the forum and its topics and the need for much more branches/sub-forums.

But what to do when we have a forum with the width and scope of drupal?
An interesting solution is to try to develop a better search interface for the user, more interactive in trying to answer its needs and questions than just give hundred of post with some similar word to its search key.
For this, the search engine has to have something that helps him in understanding the needs of the user and the structure of the post in relation to them. It has to depend on some meta data or semantic. One normal way of achieving a semantic of the posts is to use tags (taxonomy), but there is thousands upon thousands of post and given the complexity and dynamism of drupal and its ecosystem.

How can we give the proper tags to them before the end the third millennium?
Fortunately drupal has also thousand of hands called community. Better yet the objective of the forum is to serve this community. Why not give it the work of creating the metadata? For example, if i want to save a post that is relevant to me in a particular way, i can give it some tags or categories (a bookmark system...).
Latter when another user want to do find something, the search engine will have at its disposition all those tags and theirs partial structure by users to give a much better answer.

And this is just the beginning, it can ever evolve in all sorts of ways. The more you give power to the individual needs of the user, the better semantic the global engine will have at its disposition.

about using a third party forum solution:

1- do Drupal users want to have a leading, full-fledged forum module with all bells and whistles that appeals to end users ?

2- does Drupal have the resources to invent its own wheel in the forum world to directly compete with IPB, VB and phpbb3 ?
("we don't want to" is a bad answer)

3- when it comes to using resources for maintenance, are resources better spent on:
- maintaining a homegrown module with limited features to just accomodate Drupal support with no perspectives of ever becoming a full fledged forum module (groups, private messaging, that will be used on Drupal sites as a community selling point
OR
- integration of a leading third party module and maintaining integration of its newer versions (including security and module-specific hooks) that will appeal to nearly everybody

4- when deciding what module to use for Drupal's own forum, who is the decision made for and with what goals?
- is the decision made for Drupal developers, to minimize resources to maintain the module
OR
- is the decision made for the users who want a full fledged forum, to use both on Drupal.org and on their own sites ?

Drupal.org is (should be?) pretty much also a showcase of what a Drupal site can look like without or with only minimal custom coding.

Regarding sub-forums per module

ok, per module is maybe a bit exagerated - the issues list is probably okay for module-specific discussions, but it lacks a "how do I..." category.
But I still want subforums dedicated to special interest areas.

the background of me wanting dedicated sub forums is that I am a Drupal newcomer.
I am now gradually learning Drupalese and how to use the system, but one of my great difficulties is that when I search the internet for information about a Drupal issue, module bug question, or whatever, I often don't find what I'm looking for.

I like using forums. I tried the IRC, but I found it difficult. I don't like mailing lists because the information is short-lived.

I have no difficulties using Drupal core, so my questions go all into "Post Installation, how do I..."
This Drupal forum currently looks like a support queue for Drupal core + modules.

Beyond issues in modules, I have many questions on how to implement features I would like to offer on my website, here are some examples:
- I would like to display nodes on a map including individual per-marker minimum and maximum zoom level range where the markers appear
- I would like to implement user groups with group-based permissions, group-based mailer
- I wonder how to implement group-specific node edit forms
- At signup, how to add users to different groups depending on a choice made on signup?
- So far, I have not been able to display a nice thumbnail carousel linking to colorbox
- Looking at the database structure, I wonder how I can implement payments, i.e. my payment-handling script gets a payment confirmation containing a node ID and a user ID, then how can I tell my script to update the node, add the user to a specific usergroup? (I feel groups and permissions are two areas Drupal core should cover better)
...

All the above questions don't really belong into the support forum, but there is no other place to ask - and also no other place to post tips and how-tos on how a specific problem has been solved.

By the dynamics of the post installation forum, most questions get answered with a pointer to a couple of standard modules and then quickly disappear in the queue without much room for deeper discussion. These questions are also forgotten, and when searching for information on any of my above topics, I just get either no results at all, and when broadening the search a long list of old threads with 1 or 2 pointer-type replies without further discussion on how to really achieve what the poster wanted.
And on the other hand, nobody will go into the support forum to post ideas or hacks or to follow up on old threads either.

Some subforums were deprecated and users are pointed to groups, but I had a look at the groups and most of them are dead.

currently, I don't know where I can go to:
1- see what other people posted on topics related to my above questions
2- post new questions
3- post my tips, solutions, hacks

@Jaypan:

One one side, was having a sub forum per module, the problem being that this many sub forums creates a maze that gets confusing. This is a result of the traditional forum, where all content is organized in a tree, and the way to access that content is to navigate the tree, and see what is new. That's what we currently have.

I came back from the "one subforum per module" opinion, because posters here are right, the issue queues are okay to deal with module-specific issues. But I still would like specific topics.

I disagree that the use of a forum should be to only see what is new - I would like to see what is old, i.e. what has been posted in the past about a specific topic. A place that is not really about bugs and support, but a place for "how do I..." questions and solutions, where fewer threads are posted and where threads remain visible for a longer time, thus also encouraging posters to publish their tips & tricks and solutions there.

Take this very thread for example. If you didn't post it in a reply made to one of my posts in the forum, I would never have found it.
In my opinion, it belongs into a forum, "Drupal.org website improvements" or something - I feel "issues" being the only venue to post such topics equates hiding the topic from a broader forum audience, where people would find the topic when casually browsing the forum.

I like browsing forums which offer topic-centric subforums.
Given my current interests, I would browse topics like "database", "imaging, slideshows, galleries", "usergroups", "permissions", "user profile", "user registration", etc.
But there is nothing to browse.
I guess your "tags" would be useful for that, but I don't see posters tagging their posts correctly in drupalese - I think they are more likely to post their question in the correct subforum.

Using the forum to find relevant posts about a specific topic is nearly impossible.
For example, I would like to know how to add a specific user registration workflow that gives users a choice, then displays different registration forms and finally adds them to a specific group when their registration is complete.
Searching for "user group registration add" yields 685.000+ "forum and issues" results, of which maybe just 0.5% are relevant.
There is no link to an advanced search.

If there were relevant "how do I..." forums for the topics "user, user registration and profile", "groups", "workflow" I would just spend some hours browsing and searching them and I am pretty confident I would find what I'm looking for.

Even after throwing us a bone saying that they would add notifications to the forums, the organization hasn't even followed through with that. This is getting ridiculous.

Care to elaborate on that? Neither of the linked issues has a closed (wint fix) status...

In my opinion, it belongs into a forum, "Drupal.org website improvements" or something - I feel "issues" being the only venue to post such topics equates hiding the topic from a broader forum audience, where people would find the topic when casually browsing the forum.

Issues are NOT the only venue for such discussions. This discussion and others like it in issue queues are certainly not hidden by any means. My thought is that whether a discussion is occurring in an issue queue of in some other forum, discussions can and will be missed and for legitimate reasons. Forum threads aren't regularly reviewed by the d.o. teams that would be implementing the improvements or overseeing them which is why an issue was utilized. You and others don't find discussions such as this one because you and others aren't reviewing issues frequently enough or at all. That said you may not feel a need to review issues. I believe there are significantly more users that come to the forums specifically for answers to their own questions. Perhaps they answer a few here and there as a pay back (which is great) but they aren't interested or don't know how to get involved beyond the forums.

I believe the general thought when first implemented is that forums were for general support, issues were for bugs/ and things beyond general support. Though I agree with Jaypan on his points regarding module issue queues, the fact is that there is a support request component, the ability to follow those postings, and obtain more module/theme specific help can be provided by the sub-community of users that are working with any one module/theme. It may be that the migration of developers to git-hub may have caused some decline in maintainers maintaining the d.o. issue queues and the hope was that the sub-communities would be able to cover support and triage. This hasn't happened for most of the projects hosted on d.o. but has for some of the most used modules.

To respond to your search challenges I suggest using your favorite search engine (if you don't already). This won't overcome all challenges but will provide some aid. Search improvement is a similar but separate discussion. I find that most of the time in my searches when I'm not finding relevant information or am handed back an unmanageable amount of results is that the issue is the keywords being used (certainly a challenge for new users to overcome when they don't have a handle on drupal terminology).

Often issues with forums are user-centric and don't take into consideration how much more work is generated for those who moderate/maintain/guide/support ... etc. We don't have enough resources to deal with the forums we do have let alone a significantly increased workload with added areas/sections/forums ..etc. to post more questions. I believe that I can still count on one hand the number of regular contributors to the forums (regular in this use means visit and contribute nearly every day). This number has been mostly static for a few years now. That said, I also believe users would be more likely to help out in the forums if it was a tool that accommodated them.

@VM
many thanks for taking the time to reply to many forum threads including mine.

Often issues with forums are user-centric and don't take into consideration how much more work is generated for those who moderate/maintain/guide/support ... etc. We don't have enough resources to deal with the forums we do have let alone a significantly increased workload with added areas/sections/forums ..etc. to post more questions.

This kind of thinking reflects valid concerns but has been the nail in the coffin of too many projects in the past. When the forum disappears (or is reduced), the users tend to disappear as well.

My opinion on this is that only the support forums and basic "how do I" questions need constant involvement by staff.

The more advanced "how do I..." forum areas go way beyond support and I feel they wouldn't need to be babysitted and could be clearly marked as such.

I guess what I am proposing is not to create additional work and spend additional team resources - I would like advanced forums to be created to serve as a central platform where users with advanced skills or requirements can post their hacks, tutorials or questions in relevant subforums.
But the work won't be done with just creating the forums and letting some threads there to rot with just a couple of replies, the forums need modern forum tools to increase activity, the minimum being advanced search capabilities.

I understand increased activity is not something you are looking forward to for the support forums, but it's needed for the advanced topic-centric subforums.
And in the end, I do think many questions that are now being posted to "post installation how do I..." will find answers in the advanced forums, so this should help support work too.

Well done Jay for pushing on with this.

I have just looked at the bits of the forms I used to contribute heavily to (my niches included the upgrading forum, and mopping up older posts in post-installation which none of the other regulars contributors had fancied answering), before getting discouraged. TBH seeing people struggling with upgrades who had no answer for around a week just made me feel sad. I know how much a bit of help means to some questioners facing that. I did answer a question or two.

@232 there isn't any 'staff'. the forums are, and have been since their inception, a volunteer undertaking. Increased activity is welcomed. Not sure what made you think it wasn't. There was a time in the not so distant past was that forum threads never received any responses. While there continue to be threads that don't receive a response, I believe the percentage is much lower today than in the past. The concept of how do I type questions was once satisfied by the docs (as can be seen in the archive). It is rare that any one of the few forum supporters will spend an hour to help one individual walk through A to Z if that means the sacrificing of 25 others not obtaining a response or a pointer.

* An automatic notification is posted to any module maintainers of a module that shares the spelling with a forum tagged with that module. So if someone tagged a forum topic with 'mymodule', I as the author of 'mymodule' would get some sort of notification (email, alert) telling me about it.

As a project maintainer I quite like this idea. I don't want an email, just a notification block in my Dashboard would suffice. This block could have a more link that shows a page with links to all forum posts.

I'd say strait away thats a big improvement because you engage the project developer.

The dashboard and its notification blocks is a good tool for anyone who use drupal.org a little more intensively although it also deserve a lot of evolution like the forums and would be an important part in a future partnership with it.

Those same blocks could be reused in a good way to help anyone who has the intention to help in the forum.
A simple application would be to put some of them in a sidebar (configured like the dashboard...) with a view of the posts that the user has subscribed (or simply commented and has a new comment) contextual to the forum that was viewed at the time.
Another way would be to just make 'sticky' any posts subscribed directly in the view of the forum.
That would greatly help the user in allocating its efforts to each sections of the forum.

Yes, it seems forums are still not really on the radar: https://www.drupal.org/news/2015-year-in-review-drupalorg

Jaypan's this post is the first thing came to mind when reading the 2015 year in review. It's Irony that the post is posted on forum itself. I know that the Drupal.org team is working hard to get most of the suggest carried out. Hope this will be one of them in early 2016.

Happy to say we got #2585061: A user should be able to "follow" forum pages deployed today.

And from our monitoring and some feedback from @michelle it appears that #2646358: Prevent multiple registrations by spammers has had a big impact on reducing spam (always more work to do there of course).

I know these are small things and there's lots more you would like us to work on - but these are some good initial moves in the right direction.

#240 how does this work, where do I view my "followed" forum topics?

The new Follow functionality is based on the Message framework (and thus will be generic to more content types than just forums - we have already added to several other content types and will likely ultimately replace the existing issue follow system with this).

The follow button simply appears in the sidebar of content of any type that has following enabled.

Once you Follow content like a forum post you will get email notifications of new comments (other than ones you make yourself). Those notifications link back to the original post, of course, and include instructions on how to unfollow.

We'll be iterating on this further to add a better ui for managing what you're following - for now you can see activity on things you've followed on the tracker: https://www.drupal.org/tracker (and click on My Recent Content if you want to filter that down some).

I might suggest more specific feedback go in #2585061: A user should be able to "follow" forum pages or be created as related issues to that one - just so that this very long issue doesn't get harder to keep up with. :)

You're certainly welcome. There is certainly more we'd like to do and I don't want to beat the dead horse about time and resources - but wherever we can find more high value, iterative improvements like this to include, we will be trying our best to do so.

Yes, a huge thanks and kudos to hestenet and drumm and anyone else that had a hand in getting this done! That you got it done is awesome-- that you got it done in spite of the huge opposition to doing anything in the way of improving the forums is magnificent.

It's still quite puzzling however, that the DA can't seem to find a way to leverage the community willing to volunteer time and effort on these sorts of items. Most communities would KILL to have anyone volunteering free time and resources to their projects.

That we have the volunteers and refuse to them is quite sad.

Thanks Worldfallz, but I should clarify - drumm and I weren't going rogue on this one - this was absolutely prioritized by the decision makers on the team here.

As I mentioned towards the end of last year, we've definitely been looking hard at better ways to manage community resources. We have had several quite successful examples of volunteer involvement this last year as well as several unsuccessful ones that we know have been disappointing both for us and for the community and we're certainly trying to learn from that. I hope to be posting more about all that soon.

I wasn't suggesting that you guys went rogue, sorry if that's how it came across.

And since we're being totally honest and transparent-- lets not kid ourselves here. The only reason forums got this is because it was being done for documentation and giving it to forums was essentially a side effect (just enabling it for another content type).

Well I'm thankfullfor what gets done to improve the forums, however it's a very small improvement compared the revolution issue nodes and comments have been through in the past couple of years. You can see the forums are slowly being abandoned as they are so long in the tooth compared to other providers, such as stack exchange/ Drupal answers etc. Frankly I think the forums are an embarrassment to Drupal and the DA should be ashamed of treating that group of users (who IMHO are the majority of users) so poorly.

On the subject of the forums, I suspect their is an opportunity to rekindle the forums right at this exact moment because with the release of Drupal 8, more than ever there is the need for discussion. Just yesterday I was looking at some postings I made 5 years ago about Drupal 7 to see how I would go about doing similar things in Drupal 8.

My 5 year old post was a how-to for an area in theming and my thought was to update it with Drupal 8 information because I know someone's going to come along and say "I know how to do 'this' in Drupal 7, I wonder how I can do it in Drupal 8". I think right now is a real opportunity to add to the knowledge base.

I spend a lot time to read this thread and I'm totally in agreement with Jaypan.

This forum is very poor and embarrassing for the Drupal "fame".

The forum is:
- crucial to make a solid support community;
- train new developers and community force;
- help new users/developers;

Instead this forum discourages newbies and they often leave under the impression that they can't even ask the question. Or they have the impression that can't get support.

Please not read this as a criticism to Drupal Organization (Drupal is fantastic) but I think that a good forum is crucial to improve the feedback with newbies and expand the community.

Agree, the emails are annoying, I want to track forum posts but not get emails all the time, like most people I already get an insane amount of notifications.

The feedback about the following functionality should go into a follow-up to #2585061: A user should be able to "follow" forum pages.

Regarding notifications and messaging: Drupal Commons has the functionality you're talking about. While we won't be able to take the functionality without doing a little bit of work, I hope this is something we can accomplish in the not to distant future.

Please track #2658224: Add a UI for controlling email notifications if you're interested in that specific feature.

Yesterday, i was looking at the status of an issue i posted regarding documentation, and noticed that although someone marked it "major" (it wasn't me), the issue hasn't even been assigned to a maintainer yet after 3 months.

Investigating somewhat further, i found out that documentation issues do have some attention. In fact, the last one was closed (fixed) 2 weeks ago. On the other hand, the longest outstanding critical issue was last updated 5 years 1 month ago. From which i have the tendency to conclude that some time is being spent doing the quick&easy fixed, but there's no time for the big ones.

Which in turn leads me to conclude that there is again too much load on the shoulders of too few, just because the system doesn't allow for a more direct approach by volunteers. Same problem as the forums.

So now, i'm starting to wonder if this thread shouldn't be named "Getting the drupal organisation accept a more open system for drupal.org maintenance wherever possible"?

@babipanghang - To be fair, while that is a great idea, it is also a major undertaking so I can understand it not being gotten to, yet.

This comment is not on the topic of improving the forums, but is on the topics of the importance of the forums and the importance of their contributors.

In reviewing some correspondence, I've come across this comment I sent a colleague in an e-mail last June:

I've been fascinated by my foray into the open source world via Drupal. It is remarkable how people ... make their livings as professional developers and support their profession by giving away their expertise. I got an incredible amount of help from complete strangers on the Drupal forum and "Drupal Answers" who have never known my real name nor given me theirs. There is no way I would have those sites up by now if it weren't for their help. I'd like to understand who these highly knowledgeable people are that rummage through the forums looking for random people to help with no expectation (and no possibility) of compensation. Truly remarkable.

I use "stylish" for that. You can do this, also.
Examples:
img 1, img 2, img 3, img 4, img 5, img 6, img 7

Notify me if you want view the site also.

This is interesting: https://www.drupal.org/drupalorg/blog/thanking-working-group-members and the linked https://www.drupal.org/drupalorg/blog/introducing-a-new-community-initia.... Essentially the point is that DA have taken ownership of d.o. much more proactively than they were able to do in the past, and that they will turn to the community to influence and advise. This seems to reflect the kind of change crell has called for in the management of core development, which may be, perhaps unfairly, characterised as 'when you reach a certain size, having the community own the project does not scale, and you need more top-down authority.'

In my mind there are related issues: the broader issue about how far the change in power structure is good for Drupal in principle (of course we all want Drupal to survive and flourish, and it is a different animal than it was five years ago). Then there is the more specific issue about the fact that the new regime which has emerged, with somewhat different interests and objectives than what preceded it, do not 'get' the forums, which are of key importance to the non-enterprisey side of the community, and perhaps less needed among the more professionalised parts of the community, which is increasingly attracting users who are already skilled php developers, and for whom good documentation should be enough to get up to speed with Drupal.

The second linked article sets out the reasons for the change, and the first comment on it calls it 'shenanigans'. Inevitably the flow of investment into the Drupal world is changing structures, and the personal interests of key players substantially, in some ways for the better, although the forums have been a casualty of collateral damage.

Optimal forum design concept is in Discourse, with conversations/discussions at the core, not Q&A.

Really, Drupal only wants to be a community for developers and you have no interest for site builders ?

Stack exchange the worst support system that I have ever seen !

NO THANK YOU ! Never found a website so unfriendly apart from Drupal.org :-)

I still feel like stack exchange may not be the best for Drupal, but counter to the last comment, I find Stack Exchange to be the BEST support system available.

I don't think anybody is seriously talking about moving the forums to Stack Exchange anymore.

Yes just like Driupal 8, nobody can seriously think that it has been done the smart way.

Re: #271, I think this is a really good point. In terms of this discussion, what are we talking about now? What are our objectives?

They've changed a few times throughout the cycle of this discussion which I've been watching since the start, and it's prompted some really great discussion but I think it would be effective here to actually set some needs/wants goals (from the communities point of view and also the DA) and then we can tick or flick them one by one?

@#271 You cannot move forums to Stack Exchange, since Stack Exchange sites aren't forums, but Q&A sites. Use SE as it were a forum, and you will probably find your answers unpublished, especially if your answer is merely saying you have the same issue and you want to find a solution.

Actually, Stack Exchange is not even a support site.

#274: Maybe read my comment in the context of the title of this issue, because I don't really know what you want to tell me.. Again Stack Exchange is afaik not a topic anymore.

#273: Yes please!

Actually, the topic is still the one reported in the title, but the correct term is use Stack Exchange instead of forums, rather than move forums to Stack Exchange.

the comment about site builders is spot on.

from my point of view, both Drupal as a framework/CMS and the Drupal.org website need a state of the art forum module with all bells and whistles.
I don't see how an internal development will be able to deliver that, I still advocate integrating a leading third party opensource forum module.

Kindly make the other petition for Shifting it for STAKEXCHANGE.

Please do not combine two things as your first topic just talk about the ungradation of drupal forum but under that ultimately your aim is to shift to stakexchange.
Hence this was it looks like, you are asking for the ungradation of drupal forum, so with this expression every bosy may say "I agee" but this way also you are indirectly making people to say "SHIFT IT TO STAKExchage". That is totally wrong.

1. Drupal forum upgradation is separate issue.
2. Moving to stakexchange is separate issue (Because stake-exchange has its own problems)

Hence you are putting viewer in two position at a time, probably everybody will be agree to upgrade drupal forum but there will be very different view to shift it to stakexchange.

The whole drupal website is hideous and has always been. It will never attract anyone who hasn't already selected Drupal to work with.

Why there is no option of 'reply' under any comments here??? Take opinion in all way. Why are you restricting the freedom of expression?

This forum uses a single thread approach, you have to reply to the entire thread.

Hi, thanks for clarifying on stackexchange. Now, I want to explain something please take is positively. Let me explain why you are getting comments on "I agree" page so much. There is not a fault of people. The architecture of system(two links one for comment and one for agree) is exactly opposite, And you are providing two different set of information on this two links, hence people getting confused. I mean you have made the "comment link" and "I agree link" exactly opposite, means as per the human perception I agree link working as comment link in your case. Now, let me provide you both, I am just combining both content and arranging in order below I am not deleting duplicate sentences, I am keeping as it is.

1. Comment Link"(which should be First and Prominent)

As any of the forum users here know, our forums suck. They are outdated by at least 10 years, and they are an extremely poor reflection upon Drupal. The Drupal association is not willing to support outside development of the forums beyond saying 'we support you' (without backing that up), and is not willing to update the forums themselves.

This topic was started as a way to get the Drupal Organization to upgrade the outdated forums, by requesting the drastic move of moving the Drupal forums to Stack Overflow.

This petition was started because it was found in this forum post that the Drupal.org Community Tools working team, which had seemed like the best option to get improvements to the forum, had been dropped without announcement, and with no replacement plan in place to upgrade the forum.

Just add a comment saying 'I agree' to the following link (Your link for vote)if you agree to the following question:
The Drupal forums are outdated, and I would like to see the Drupal association focus the necessary resources into improving them.

2. I agree link content:

No comments please, Just post I agree.

Explanation: Now what happens both set of information are provided at one place and people can read entire statement and comment and discuss, and if they are agree they follow the link and just write I agree(because now I agree link does not have any content so there is not a question of discussion, so there will not any comment). Very simple.

Now, In your case what was happening, First provide VOTE and then discuss, which is opposite.

Thanks, Just observed this thing hence just thought to explained...:)..Thanks

Re: #283 - it just doesn't seem to make sense.

The only person mentioning anything about Stack Exchange on the other thread is Codenext. It seems like an active attempt to derail the thread, as Jaypan's post is very, very clear.

@PeterB, Re: #285
Hi, It is not my intention to derail something. Even I ended up on this thread because I was searching the topic for improvement in forum as I was facing some issue with comment system on forum. Like everybody else, after reading the other thread, I overwhelmingly wrote "I agree" because I found it is needed. Then after sometime, I show the other link and read the content of that, then I realize both are not same. Hence I started thinking, "What if there are people which have posted I agree, just reading other post and not this one". Hence after I change my post as "Agree but Disagree" and mentioned that there are two issues and both needs to be handled separately. Hence I posted 3-4 people in reply, to make them aware about this. And After all this some member pointed out me about the issue of multiple notification and I accepted their points and informed them also, I was under impression reply goes to separately hence. Then @Jaypan, informed me the issue of StakeExchange is well over, So I accepted that, and just I observed other thing, so I mentioned in above comment which is not related to forum-StackExchange saga, which was a suggestion that how this both thread should be so you can get comment on only one thread and not people also not get confused. Now, you can see all this conversation and order of happening in both thread, you may not think as spamming. And if I had a intention to spam or derail, I could have not replied to every members on both thread, whoever pointing out to me, I am kindly replying with mentioning of all facts. Very thanks.

@Codenext dude, stop spamming. Also, for the love of god, it's StackExchange, not StakeExchange.

@joetoday, I am not spamming dear, please see my reply in #286, I have explained. Thanks though.

I suggest we go the way of Meteor and use Discourse. I'd almost suggest that we exclusively focus this topic on getting the DA or someone (maybe the DA could take over later if they saw it working out) to set up a Discourse instance for Drupal. The concept is pretty proven at this point, and it's a nice interface.

Objections? I'm going to change the title, in any case, to prevent more questions about Stack Exchange.

Not realistic. If you had followed the whole thread (which is a lot to ask, I know) you would see that the relevant decision-maker at the Drupal Association has taken the view that a stand-alone forum site would add more to the maintenance burden, than a site which (like the current forums) is integrated with the current set of d.o. sites. Because he rejected the suggestions for a stand-alone site in a manner which really left no room for discussion, introducing a non-Drupal solution would only be possible provided it were integrated with the d.o. single sign-on. That would probably also meet similar concerns about the maintenance burden. In that context, I doubt whether this change to the title will advance the cause of the many who consider the forums under-valued by the powers that be.

I'm actually not all that impressed by discourse, and in this case, I agree with the thinking that an entirely separate solution WOULD be a maintenance burden. It couldn't possibly not be.

What's now into the realm of the absurd at this point, is the fact that core drupal forums could be turned into something eminently usable and infinitely better than what we have now, with a small amount of effort that volunteers have already committed to provding and that 'powers that be' are simply not interested.

No amount of logic, evidence, or discussion seems to be able to change that simple fact. They, on their own, have decided forums are not worth effort so it really doesn't matter what the community thinks. Strikes me more than a little ironic, that during all this the "come for the software, stay for the community" disappeared, lol.

I did see this post, but yet no mention of forums on that page, and no post here encouraging anyone to join that effort.

After having my many of hours of work trying to get something done via the community tools team completely wasted in what I consider a fairly disrespectful way, I have to say I'm more than a little leery expending more effort in a similar fashion without having at least some idea that it won't be disrespectfully tossed aside yet again.

Nothing in this thread or any of them, give any indication that any effort on the forums won't be a complete waste.

It seems to me that there is a disconnect between what the DA said it would do and what many people on this thread think was said.

Please re-read https://www.drupal.org/drupalorg/blog/introducing-a-new-community-initia... - that introduces a process that allows the DA staff to work with the community on bringing improvements to drupal.org.

I would also like to direct your attention to #2533804: Create 'Support' Section - that is where forums improvements should be discussed.

The DA has been clear about where forums are in the priority list: https://www.drupal.org/drupalorg/roadmap.

It seems to me that there is a disconnect between what the DA said it would do and what many people on this thread think was said.

In the call with Angie, Holly, Joshuami, WorldFallz, Jay and me, one felt that DA had heard and understood, and had some appreciation of people who had busted a gut and spent thousands of hours (in some cases individually as well as collectively) working on both content and infrastructure for the forums. We were of course disappointed that the DA were not persuaded. So the key motivators of this thread do know what was said, and did in the end feel that the message was 'it is our way or the highway', a point made in the above post in more lawyerly language. We also know about the 'community initiative'. One function of this thread is to make it clear that, whilst we understand the need for some central direction, broadly speaking the community disagree with the priority given to the forums. Perhaps the community baby which is being thrown out with corporate bathwater may be permitted to cry a little?

Many things have changed since that call, primarily that there is now a process by which something like this can move forward with community help. Is there something about that process that seems "our way or the highway?" If so, please provide feedback on that thread, https://www.drupal.org/drupalorg/blog/introducing-a-new-community-initia...

There does seem to be some confusion about what the DA has prioritized, and it is not clear if that's a vocabulary mismatch or what, but when we talk about the "Support" section, That includes the forums. So, if members of the community wants to help out and improve the forums, they can start by providing input here: https://www.drupal.org/node/2533804

It's unclear what priorities you are disagreeing with. If the purpose is to dwell on how things were prioritized in the past and how things were handled in the past, then its unclear what can be done about that.

If the purpose is to get the DA to drop their current priorities and move forums to the top of the list and have the DA engineering team build out better forums, then we would need *everybody* who has a vested interest in all of the things that are not the forums that is currently prioritized to agree to that, *not* just the people who care about forums.

If the purpose is to get the DA to have a more open process by which the community can participate to make things better on drupal.org (because DA engineering focus is currently on other things), you have already been successful, and your input and help is welcome in implementing a better solution.

Thinking about changing the forum when the whole ugly website should be re-done by someone who knows that design mean. The whole thing is ridiculous and you are talking about just a little part of it.

Fair enough re. Discourse, but this is clearly not about SE. We already have Drupal Answers.

Simplifying title to match the actual goal.

...you have already been successful, and your input and help is welcome in implementing a better solution.

Good to hear the message in more conciliatory language. There is a long background here. I for one accept that Drupal has changed, and the organization has changed, and the wider pros and cons of such change are beyond the scope of this issue. Against that long background of frustration, changing scepticism to optimism will take time. In particular, it is a pity if the significant past efforts by Jaypan and WorldFallz and the infrastructure working team to improve infrastructure must be lost, rather than being 'migrated', to the extent that they are found to have been useful and usable.

@Jaypan This thread brought to the forefront a need to change the process by which the DA engineering team interacts with the community. We recognized that we needed better methods for enabling the community to enact change on drupal.org, so we have attempted to fix the process. We wanted to make sure that we were not blocking the community when our priorities are not aligned. We want to prevent wasted effort, and we want to provide the tools to empower you to actually make the changes you want. What more can we do?

@John_B: I understand that there is a long background of frustration, that's why we changed our process in response to that frustration. The significant past efforts of Jaypan and WorldFallz are not being lost. We're starting with WorldFallz effort here: https://www.drupal.org/node/2533804, and many of Jaypan's requests and efforts have already been implemented.

What we're missing, currently, is a discussion of what "better forums" actually entails. It might be spread all over drupal.org in multitudes of threads and bikesheds, but at this point, it's not clear what, specifically, should be 'fixed'. And who, specifically, is going to step forward to make those fixes.

If at any time I or my staff have come across as rude, I truly and deeply apologize. We are all working towards the common goal of a better Drupal.org and more importantly a better Drupal project.

WorldFallz's detailed requirements document influenced several of the changes that were deployed in the past year including the ability to follow a post. There are elements of what was recommended that were implemented through issue queues improvements—such as more information about the users participating in the thread showing up by their username. The new user and confirmed user badges were both huge improvements for learners that are just getting started with the community. The ideas were not ignored; they were valued. That value was not communicated well to the community.

The requirements document recommended splitting the forums into two parts: a discussion forum and question and answer system. The scope of the specification is a Q&A system much like Drupal Answers. Drupal Answers is called out in the document and the suggestion was that having a community-run Q&A would be more polite and welcoming to questions that actually belonged in a forum discussion. The demo site that was created to show what that Q&A might look like was excellent as a prototype to show what was possible. The majority of that specification is not about the forums, but about new tools to augment the forums.

I highly recommend looking into #2533804. It has links to the requirements document and poses some additional questions for clarification. There are some awesome actionable ideas to comment on in that thread.

I am not trying to shut down this conversation, but it hasn't been terribly healthy for some time now. The tone has frequently veered from civil.

Please help us be more constructive by reading the document and adding a comment on the support section plan with specifics of how you want the features to work. If we can get a direction set, it will be much easier for someone with the time to jump in and volunteer some effort to execute on the plan.

@Jaypan, given that #304 is from the current CTO of the Drupal Association, which starts out with an apology, outlines and asks the community for help to move this forward, and also links out to a plan (post and updated by other DA staffers) that specifically mentions the need for forum improvements, I don't think it is fair to say that the DA is ignoring the community.