[wp-hackers] Forum Usefulness (was Data recovery)

[Scott Merrill]

David Chait wrote:
> FYI, I don't believe the forums are really a useful place for asking 
> questions of users...  It is extremely fragmented (okay, unless you sticky a 
> post on the homepage), and I'm sure not everyone makes it there.  

No wonder so many people feel that WordPress development is driven from
on high, and is largely removed from what users actually want.

Sure, the forums can be noisy.  Sure, people may ask for (or even
demand) the moon without realizing the scope of their requests.

A new forum section could easily be made to consolidate these sorts of
questions from the development team.  Users who are casually interested
in the development of WordPress, but not interested in enough in
following this mailing list, could be encouraged to participate in the
threads opened in this new section.  For all the talk about "what users
want", this seems like a pretty easy way to collect some real, publicly
verifiable information on what (at least some) users want.

> Wordpress.com, et al, users probably don't visit much as they are told to go 
> elsewhere -- yet that's a growing base of 'usability testing' given it's 
> limits.

Yeah, it's a darn shame that so few people participating in this list
see any kind of overview of common support / feature requests submitted
directly to the wordpress.com power structure.  Maybe a lot of these
arguments would be averted if this information were made (more) public,
or summarized in some meaningful way (a la the Google zietgeists, or
Sifry's quarterly summaries).

-- 
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