After listening to the Brussels Drupalcon podcast I thought it would be good to post a general write up on the state of support on Drupal.org and what new people or people not really involved can do to help out. A lot of this is unscientific and opinion based.
Drupal has experienced phenomenal growth over the years. This is not new. I am user id 5195 and started 3 years ago. As I post this we have more then 80,000 registered accounts and a growing list of involved companies selling Drupal services. Maybe someone (mythical someone) could do a date, user registration graph to see the current curve. Past graphs showed this.
Over the years many people have joined in (or were already helping) and provided support and answers to a large number of people. Some posts have gone unanswered. My feeling on this is the numbers have gone up but the overall percentage of unanswered posts have gone down. Numbers because we've got over 80,0000 registered users and not all that many folks answering questions in the forums. A lot of unanswered posts are multiple from the same person. A person asking a question, not liking the answer and posting it again. Or someone posting an unclear question and it not getting answered. Or the few who would know that are on holiday and missed it. It happens.
We need to try and emphasize the Drupal mission and principles more in response when some new person comes in all fired up to start a fight rather then get involved and help out.
So, the summary first..... All in all, not bad. Could be better. Could be worse. We still need more people returning the help they have received from others to the next generation of Drupal users. As Drupal core and contrib have continued to evolve into the next generation and our exposure to the rest of the world continues to grow, we gain whole new classes of users, developers and implementers. Read on for some ideas on how to help out and contribute back to the project that gave this great tool-set/CMS.
Now onto some realities and how you can help out.
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