[wp-hackers] Making it better

[cFA]

I have really been wanting to post something about this for quite a
while now.  I love wordpress and I think its absolutely the best app
out there for what it does.

I have also met some extremely helpful people who have taken some time
out of their busy schedules to lend me a hand,   these people are
rare, few and far between however.

The wordpress forums are in desperate need of help. There are so many
awesome experienced coders in our community but it seems not many get
involved in the forum. I wont go into mentioning the extremely helpful
people I see on a regular basis in there, but I do go there daily and
can say that they are bearing 100% of the work and that doesnt seem
right.  I'm just starting to get into php now in a more involved way, 
as up till now I usually just tweaked things, but having a serious
desire to learn php and to help contribute to the wordpress community
thru support/plugins etc is where I am at right now.

One of the unfortunate things about the forums is that when I turn
someone new onto wordpress, or save them from the grasps of
moveabletype,  they come to the wp forums for help and come  back to
me saying, no one ever answers me, I have no idea what to do, I try to
help them if  I can or I call my best friend who is well versed in php
to help.

For me its threads like this one  
http://wordpress.org/support/topic.php?id=29916

that have completely discouraged me in looking to the forums for
help...in that thread I had a need, did the best job I could to
explain the problem and then in 9 more posts proceeded to talk myself
thru the problem, with only 2 responses, I later found out EXACTLY
what I needed doing a ton of searching and finding two plugins by
rboren and kafkaesqui, it was so exciting to find the answer for an
issue I've had that stopped my project development since mingus days,
only this week have I been able to continue the project.

maybe people didnt understand my problem because I wasnt able to
explain myself in a way that wp experts could understand, but thats
the reason I came to the forum- for help. The first thing I do to get
here there is to use the search in all the ways I can think of to get
an answer, then follow the link trail, then I will go to google, and
more often than not my answers will not come from the forum at all but
from other peoples sites, my last resort is to actually start a thread
in the wp forum.

2 final things,  One I can understand how a support forum for
something like wordpress is NOT easy and sometimes the questions are
not easy either and deal with alot of customization. So wp is a unique
type of forum, all the more reason for a unique support team.

Second,  I think alot of the difficult things about the wp forum are
caused by bbpress' infancy  I'm all for a standards based geeked out
forum, but it just isnt user friendly.  I applaud  the recent strong
links for unanswered posts, thats a step in the right direction.  What
I notice now, is that once a post has been replied to it frequently
drops back into the loop of forgottens.

just my 2¢ here 

clint (lokjah)



-- 
iron sharpens iron