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

[Matt Mullenweg]

Scott Merrill wrote:
> 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).

Other good ways to follow the pulse of feedback:

* Subscibe to a "wordpress" search on Technorati, Pubsub, etc
* Same for "wordpress" tag
* Read all ping/trackbacks to the dev blog
* Read the WP.com forums
* Read the WP.org forums

I wouldn't recommend purely mailing lists or IRC because the perspective 
there is often highly skewed from the general public.

I've toyed with the idea of making all the feedback sent public, but 
some people send private messages in the feedback form as well. Maybe a 
checkbox to say "[ ] Post to forums".

Other ideas:

* Search logging
* Most popular codex and FAQ pages
* Daily tag summaries, to get an idea of "hot topics"
* Watching computer illiterate people try WP
* Host a bunch of blogs for friends, see what they say
* Write a plugin/theme, look for patterns in support requests
* Correlate topics to resolved/unresolved threads
* Correlate topics to thread length
* Track adoption and download rate over time
* A/B testing on a large install like WP.com
* Mouse tracking, time spent on each page

Anyway just to cheer things up, here's some feedback we got the other 
day. It's actually pretty fun:

"Your software is really a treat
Creating such a software is no mean feat
Any blogger would be upbeat
However you have to beat
The problem of multiple comments delete
I think because of excess traffic you are feeling the heat.
Don't worry, without teething troubles, no innovation is complete.
I must repeate
Such problems you have to defeat
Vis-a-vis, honest feedback, other problems must take a backseat."

I think all future feature requests in Trac should rhyme. :)

(Of course the funny part is that this feature is already there, it's 
just hidden under the "mass edit mode" link, which isn't very intuitive 
to find.)

-- 
Matt Mullenweg
  http://photomatt.net | http://wordpress.org
http://automattic.com | http://akismet.com