[wp-meta] [Making WordPress.org] #7: Search individual plugin/theme forums

[Making WordPress.org]

#7: Search individual plugin/theme forums
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  Reporter:  Daedalon     |      Owner:
      Type:  enhancement  |     Status:  new
  Priority:  normal       |  Component:  Support Forums
Resolution:               |   Keywords:
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Comment (by Daedalon):

 > > As for the priorization, in my opinion this deserves to be the single
 most important task for the meta team. This has by far the highest impact
 on the WordPress community.
 >
 > You're welcome to your opinion, but ultimately, I have to disagree with
 you here. Search is important, but then again, Google is a thing that
 exists and they do it better than we can. ... Search is indeed something
 we want to improve, but it is somewhat behind things like "updating the
 forums to something originally made this decade", sort of thing.

 Thank you for your comment, Otto. Google search does not currently resolve
 this issue; that's why this ticket has gained so many comments from the
 community. However, I completely agree with the priorization of updating
 the forums over this, because that would likely fix this and other issues
 as well.

 If that is actually in the works, it deserves the highest priority in my
 humble opinion. Being able to limit your search to a specific plugin's
 forum will save such amounts of time currently spent in searching,
 writing, reading and answering the same questions multiple times.

 For example I know a number of my questions have been answered before, but
 have no way of knowing in advance which ones. After studying the first 10
 to 20 Google results to no effect I'll post the question. Often I get a
 response several days later from the plugin author linking me to the post
 where the question was answered before. I think the maintainers of some
 popular plugins have developed their own solutions to keep track of the
 questions and answers they give.

 To quantify the issue is a game of imaginary numbers, but may shed light
 on what the effect of the issue might be. If 5% of WordPress.org posts
 would match the pattern described above and these users could save 5
 minutes in each of the steps of searching, writing, reading and replying,
 that gets us 20 min * posts per day / 100 in time savings. I don't know
 how many posts there are per day, so I'll use a guess of 5k/day here. That
 would make 5,000 * 0,05 * 20 = 5,000 minutes. That's just over 3 days and
 11 hours of saved effort in the WP community every day.

 Another perspective I've thought this from has been to think how much time
 could the developers of each of the most popular plugins be able to switch
 from support to development, and would guess more than an hour per day per
 plugin. That has a drastic effect on the amount and quality of plugins
 available.

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Ticket URL: <https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/7#comment:12>
Making WordPress.org <https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/>
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