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By 2houseplague on
I'm very grateful for Drupal and for this site. The combination of a great script and the supporting documentation provided on Drupal.org has permitted a noob to do things a noob never dreamed he could.
So, thanks!
I was looking for an answer today on the site, and as it turned out, I was able to find the answer for myself - http://drupal.org/node/117412
Right afterwards, I began to feel a little guilty for making an unnecessary Forum post. I have seen other noobs chided for that.
Never in response to any of my own "noob" posts, but in response to those of others, I have seen comments that generally tell them to "Try to find the answer for yourself (on Google, or on Drupal.org) before bothering the community with your question..."
I just want to say (and not because I am a noob here) that I think this is the wrong idea, and quite counter to the principles everywhere else in evidence on this site.
Developers have a reputation for impatience with inefficiency, and that's a very good thing. This site and the work that's been done here certainly bear that mark. Indeed all of Open Source (and with it, the defining edge of Management today) give testament to the value of "programmer paradigms".
But, like anything else, even a generally positive influence can at moments get out of hand.
When a noob makes a post to the Forums asking a question that already has an answer somewhere else, it does not necessarily create an inefficiency for a person who knows the answer to come and give it again.
The handbooks are a great reference asset. But, I suggest to you, so are the endless questions of noobs. To convince the programmers in the audience I offer that they enrich the primary reference asset by meta-describing it, creating new link patterns to/from/through it and by bringing the most important nodes into emphasis.
To convince the more marketing-oriented among you, I would say that the noob should be treated like the most important visitor to this site, to be treated as you would a customer. Yes!
DO NOT underestimate the importance of communications to the job that's being done here. Drupal is not the easiest CMS, but it is the best. Thus, it behooves the leaders of this community to 1) continue to evaluate the script against the wishes of its users, and 2) to continuously express the empowering message "You can figure this out!"
I would take it as a sign of Drupal's success that the level of technical proficiency of the average visitor to this site decline.
Some of you fear this, I know.
It is natural for human beings to protect their advantages. Even under the auspices of Open Source, I think we can forget ourselves and indulge in self-importance and selfishness. It is only human, but it is not our best.
Rather than close with a moral argument, I'll describe the situation more qualitatively... for the programmers.
1. There are more of them than there are of you.
2. The importance of the technical advantage to net EFFECT on the Net is shrinking every day.
Do the math.
Comments
It's common courtesy to do a
It's common courtesy to do a google/drupal search before asking a question - that goes for any on-line community, not just open source projects.
Having said that, I've raised duplicate issues and duplicate forum posts loads - but I generally try to go back and mark them as such to save anyone answering the question for me. If I'm not sure that I've exhausted everything, I'll also mention having searched, or link to things that might be related but don't describe the problem.
People answering support questions are doing so out of their own time, and a lot of them, like me, aren't programmers - just people who've been using drupal for a little bit longer than the person asking.
I don't think anyone minds basic questions - that's all relative based on experience. But asking questions the right way is important if you want people to help.
In the three weeks
I've been using this software, I've become very aware that doing a search for basic, obvious answers on this site fairly frequently turns up threads where people instruct others to 'do a search' rather than linking to an appropriate older thread or reference. Changing 'noob' behavior via individual castigation simply does not work.
...
There are far more threads complaining about being told to search then there are threads where that actually happens.
Common misconceptions, several people have a reference to 'search' in their signature and this is often mis-interpreted by the person posting the question. Often the answer is given by the originator doesn't understand the answer, sees the sig and gets huffy first and thoughtful later.
Many answers are trail linked to the solution. Certainly any answer I give that exists in the handbook I trail link to the answer because I or others wrote the page so that others could answer that question. Learning to use a sites resources is part of learning to use the product. Drupal is a bit more complex then most people realize. It takes an average 3 months for many to begin to realize that and several more to really begin to leverage Drupal.
As to customers, that's a mixed bag. We're not a company. No one is paid to be here. We're not actually marketing Drupal. We're a community resource moving in roughly a similar direction so when you go down to your local resource center of volunteers, what you get is a mixed bag of skill levels and interest. So when you come to the forums a lot of factors affect your chance of getting an answer and who the is answering the question. Timezone, day of the week, key people's workload/vacation schedule, subject of the question, how it was phrased.
Developers don't necessarily have a problem with inefficiency, they have a problem with laziness. If people ask the question when the answer is easily located, and then do so repeatedly, then said person will find their questions passed over. As to 'protecting their advantages', that's just silly. Drupal forums and handbooks offer a wealth of solutions contributed by developers, hobbyists, support people. People aren't protecting the knowledge, they are actively sharing it. Open Source developers in general and certainly Drupal developers in specific have discovered by sharing and collaborating how to do something results in much stronger, easier to use and more fun to work with. Having more people knowing how to do something also generates more and a wider variety of solutions.
Your closing arguments make no sense.
1. There is always 'more' of them when you are growing, that's the effect of growing.
2. That's point point of improving Drupal and why some things in Drupal take longer to implement. Some things that appear 'magical' and easy in Drupal often had months or years of development groundwork being laid before then features or improvements become obvious in the GUI. Done right the first time, even if it takes longer is important. Slow and steady.
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide
"cms sweet spot"
To further the discussion, I think it is now important to de-centralize the Forum post example. This is, in reality, only one of many ways this community interacts with the "outside".
What I intended was not to criticize Drupal (the script or the site) in any way... quite the opposite, in fact. I could not be more impressed by what has been done here, and plan to become as vocal an advocate as I can. Rather, I hoped only to call attention to your position relative to what you could call the cms sweet spot. It is true that Drupal is not a company and that no one is paid for their work, but it is NOT true that Drupal exists outside a competitive situation, very much like a company. In this context, the value of more users is a function of the uses to which the script is put. As Illustrated in my chart. Clearly, you have no interest in being the lowest common denominator (circle #3). As you make your way to the left along that axis, the learning curve increases, as does the functional power of the platform. But the number of constituents declines. It seems to me that Drupal is at a cusp somewhere between #1 and #2. Where you go from there is yours to decide. I wanted only to offer this perspective, with my very best wishes :)
http://profitlabinc.com
...
Even if you had been critical of Drupal I still would have answered much the same. I didn't see your post as critical, more just a discussion.
We have various people that want to 'market' Drupal and that's fine. People are welcome to market Drupal. There are several support vectors available to people prominently listed up top. Forums, mail list, IRC, paid services. All of these will provide differing experiences based on the criteria I listed above and whether you are paying someone. And that's also a common thread across Open Source projects (even pay for software too).
Drupal isn't competing with other projects so much. There are comparisons and debates and discussions and converts to many differing solutions. This is all to the good. But we're still not really competing with them. We're competing on what 'who' can do with the current release of Drupal and how we can make the next version better, faster, easier (easier also is a sliding scale depending on 'who' is defined in the discussion - dev, neophyte, themer).
Drupal advances are through the contributed development of ideas and features that people work on. It's really odd, but that's really it. Dries has his, it would be nice to focus on this, direction post he always does and that influences things but it only does so at a very high level. Actual deciding factors are what people want to work on, come to a consensuses on and actually have time to work on.
I understand the source of what you are saying, I'm just trying to pull you into a different perspective on your initial assumptions. :)
We compete against ourselves. We are our own customers. Our marketing is word of mouth and our advocates are those who have used Drupal in a way that helped them. So, if you see a support gap, you'll have to step up to help fill it or it will probably go unfilled until someone else sees the same need and does decide to fill it.
Seeing and filling a need is how I and many others started so we expect the same of others. We invest the time in helping others expecting them to return the same to the next generation of Drupal users. An investment in people is like anything else, if you don't get a return on it, you eventually stop supporting them. However, if you see them return the favor to others, then you are more likely to stop and spend time helping them on more complex issues because you know they will help share the support load.
Rather then a company, think of drupal.org like a community. Some people you like to help and some people you ignore. Everyone has different tastes so as long as most people play nice everything works out pretty well. Participatory community is sometimes a bit messy, inefficient and loud but often results in really neat things.
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide
The way to change a
The way to change a community of individuals is to step up and set an example. Others will follow.
I'll freely admit that I have directed inviduals to use search. After all its how I'm finding the answer to their question. : )
I don't think I've ever just said use search, and offered no other insight or link though.
There is a small percentage of the 100000 users on drupal.org who actually give time to support the forums on a routine basis. We look forward to seeing you set a gleaming example of how to handle support requests in the forums : )
:)
"We look forward to seeing you set a gleaming example of how to handle support requests in the forums : )"
That seems inevitable.
http://profitlabinc.com