Drupal's Prayers Answered?
Hi All, this is a suggestion.
One of the biggest reasons I and I feel many others are put off Drupal is that there is no offical support here. Yes there is support from the community, but no offical support where a user is guaranteed to at least get an acknowledgement even if to say 'sorry that's not possible'.
So why not create a premium support forum where those who pay an annual fee of say $30 get access to those support forums - the Drupal team then gives those support forums priority when they're doing they're rounds. The current forums stay as they are for the community to help each other out if they don't want to pay - but the prem support is used for those who want more reliable and consistant support... and are willing to pay for it.
The target market would be the bulk of businesses and serious users out there - those that can't afford to take on big drupal dev teams (i.e those costing thousands) but at the same time they are not willing to risk their projects on unguaranteed support - which is what you find in the current forums.
It's a fantastic business model and one where Drupal can actually start making money whilst holding on to what it holds dear - being open source. This would make it an ideal way to get a regular income for Drupal where you would probably find thousands of people willing to register. It will also help promote Drupal as it will be more attractive to the more serious users who need that support, hence multiplying Drupals userbase significantly.
I would however suggest implementing the vBulletin to power the forums - as much as I love Drupal the forums here are ancient and very user unfriendly, especially given what we are used to elsewhere. Without getting into a argument about it (please don't get defensive Drupaltins (!) please accept the drupal forums for what they are, very basic forum/ message boards) drupal forums are not up to the job. You can tell which forum software offers the end user what they want by checking out big-boards.com. Around 90% of the sites listed use vB. That tells us the vB software does something very right when it comes to forums, hence why so many people opt to visit vB powered sites than the others. I'd love for the Drupal forums to be as great, but I can face the fact they're not, and not likely to be - you'd need a whole dev team just for them! I'd say focus on Druap as a hot CMS, and accept the forums are just a basic add-on.
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Drupal.org is not a for profit company. The Drupal Association is not a for profit entity. The people who help and answer on the forums do so in the spirit of community and giving back. The complications of running this site as a business would significantly alienate a number of long time contributors not to mention cost far more then the revenue would generate.
The avenues for support are the same as with any number of other Open Source offerings. Find a developer or company that specializes in Drupal and arrange a support contract. There are a number of companies and service providers that do this.
Using vBulletin, a product you must pay for is a horrible idea, completely at odds with the Open Source (GPL) nature of Drupal. If you wish to help improve the Drupal forums, join with others rather then lose completely content integration (with a third party costly product). (oh, I disagree that vBulletin is better too, you loose far to much trying to use it on a Drupal CMS based site)
-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
Interesting but I wonder
Interesting but I wonder who is going to staff (ie answer these forums)? Unless I am making money of the deal :) I prefer to answer public forums where anyone can read. And a fee of $30 per year is probably more than a bit low, I recently called Norton and they charge $99/call (no I did not accept the deal). Paying money brings expectations and $30/year is not much of a barrier and it likely at the rate demand would surpase the ability to answer questions.
I agree
$30 is worth maybe an hour or so of a consultant's time. For a year's worth of questions? The numbers just don't add up. And then there's the overhead of managing this paid staff. Sounds like a nightmare.
And I'm not even going to touch the whole forums comment... Sigh.
Michelle
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See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.
Doesn't seem workable to me
I think there's still a problem in that the paid support will still be unguaranteed the same way the current support is. All you're getting for your money is some nebulous feeling that some question answerers might spot your question earlier than they spot someone elses if they were inclined to hang out in the premium support area. But the quality of answer will just be the same - just that it comes with higher expectations.
How would it work though? For the community to answer the questions, the community would need to see the questions. What's to stop the community using the answers or even tacking on their own questions in the replies of relevant threads? Would that make those that paid their money feel that others can take advantage of the answers they paid good money for?
Or to prevent that would only privileged answerers be allowed into premium support area? That would probably just make questions languish with even less people to answer them, and burn out the answerers anyway. It would probably turn premium support into a support ghetto with less chance of good answers than the free support.
Let's face it, answering support questions in the forums (which I've done a lot of) is a bit like volunteer charity work. Would paying an annual fee to jump a few places in the queues at the soup kitchen get you better service from the volunteers? I dunno, but I'd probably prefer to just answer questions in the free support area where everyone is treated the same.
There seem to be two kinds of open source projects - ones that start from scratch as community volunteer efforts and those that originally started as a business or were run/sponsored by a particular business. While the latter type can often get away with splitting their community along commercial lines, the former type generally can't - it is more of an emotional investment for the contributors.
I think the Drupal Association is going about attracting funding the right way.
--
Anton
New to Drupal? | Troubleshooting FAQ
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sepeck - I'm just offering a
sepeck - I'm just offering a solution. I genuinely feel that Drupal would become an option to so many more people, and the money coming in wouldn't mean Drupal stops becoming a not-for-profit entity. Every penny can go back into Drupal, including paying support staff.
Support and professional services - these are way too expensive for all but those that have quite a bit of money to spend. The annual $30 (or whatever is decided) fee is like an insurance, not everyone uses it. Maybe the volunteers could be encouraged to answer priority support forum posts first - that way they are doing their bit of not only helping fellow community members but getting Drupal revenue, which of course we know would go towards making Drupal even better.
What do you mean by 'losing far too much' with vBulletin? Forum for Forum vBulletin is miles ahead. That's not slagging of Drupal - Drupal is miles ahead when it comes to the CMS side of things, but I'm not sure it's even debatable which forum is best, to be honest anyone thinking otherwise is being blinded by their love of Drupal. I'm just being honest about it. If not vB how about PHPBB? That is open source and again a step in the right direction. If you want more of a community they need the right platform that has the right features, things like topic notifications, thread subscriptions, quoting, bbcode, even down to the forum layout, gosh there's so many!
I hear often on these boards 'join with others and help' and I really wish it were that simple - but to get to the same standard as vB you'd need the entire Drupal dev community working on it, which of course means the rest would suffer. Is it really such a big deal to accept that the Drupal forums are not good enough to host a community to an acceptable standard? You know I really wish things were different, but they're not - I am just trying to be realistic.
nevets - People will still be able to read the priority support forums, just they won't be able to post questions. I wonder how many of them would find answers just by searching anyhow. By you supporting the priority support forums you would be doing more for Drupal than you are doing now - by helping get a revenue which can put towards new equipment, maybe even professional help with the coding or streamlining of core, who knows?... But at least it will be much more self sufficient, financially. As I mentioned above about the fee, it's like an insurance policy, not everyone uses it. and besides, it's not set in stone - the Drupal guardians and change it how they see fit.
Michelle - Please see my responses above re the fee. Regarding the forum - why won't you discuss it? Is it because you know I have a point? There's no good shying away from it, it is an issue that is having an impact on Drupal. Without sounding horrible, it's just not up to standard,
Has anyone ever put out a feedback survey about Drupal? From a users perspective? If not why not? Drupal is prob an ideal platform to create and host the survey too! I bet the results would be really interesting... so long as the questions were honest and not loaded towards getting replies that you wanted to hear.
I know it's a sensitive issue, you have all grown to love Drupal and will protect it like your own child - I understand that fully. But wouldn't you want to know if your child was doing something wrong, or something not quite right? So you could go on to help make them even better, and live life to their fullest potential? I know I would.
forums - sigh
None of those things are forum specific, they could apply to any sort of community content. Yet they always get brought up as shortcomings of the forum module. They are outside the responsibility of the forum module (or Drupal core for that matter) and they have all got (or at least had) solutions in contrib modules.
Getting your head around Drupal means understanding that a Drupal site isn't put together by attempting to integrate individual full featured applications (eg a forum, a blog, a wiki etc) side by side, but by slotting together small generic reusable pieces of functionality together to make a site that has a forum, a blog, a wiki etc. Its a bit like how the unix command line pipes small generic tools together to form bigger tools on the fly instead of relying on large monolithic applications that can do (mostly) everything themselves.
One tendency I notice from 'full forum' aficionados is that to them the community is just the forum.
With the Drupal community (for example) the forum is just one part of how the community interacts and works together. There are mailing lists, the issue queues, IRC, groups, the handbook etc etc and they all have their strengths. The drupal.org forum plays a relatively small part in getting Drupal to where it is (and no I don't think that is because of the forum). No forum could effectively take over all that other stuff.
Yes. There have been plenty of surveys over the years both on the administration and usability of Drupal itself as well as what people want out of drupal.org. The results have always been published as far as I'm aware.
--
Anton
New to Drupal? | Troubleshooting FAQ
Example knowledge base built with Drupal
Forums
Why won't I discuss it? Well, you're the one that came in here saying the forum sucks and it's not likely to get better and you don't want any arguments about it. Not really much point in the face of that. If you look at the group you were pointed at, you might notice that I am spearheading the effort to improve Drupal's forums which is apparantly to you a waste of time.
Michelle
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See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.
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I don't feel that a "premium" support forum is a good idea. This would create a degree of seperation that just doesn't seem open source friendly. This could become a potential for disaster as well if one considers a question being answered incorrectly and the asker demanding their money back.
I also believe that Drupal has made it quite far without adopting a 3rd party script. In this case for forums.
3rd party scripts add a layer of security issues and generate a secondary support forum by default for whatever 3rd party script is inserted on drupal.org and on users sites.
While I will agree that Drupals forum module isn't vB. I have a more optimistic outlook on what Drupal as a community can do to continue to build and progress the drupal forum module into something better. Will it ever be vB ? Personally I hope not as I find vB to be feature bloated myself.
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My posts & comments are usually dripping with sarcasm.
If you ask nicely I'll give you a towel : )
styro - Perhaps we could get
styro - Perhaps we could get a bunch of volunteers to act as prem support staff? Perhaps prem members are highlighted in some other way (maybe their threads are a different colour?). Where there's a will there's a way - I'm sure some arrangement could be made if that's what the Drupal guardians wanted.
I hope you're right about the DA going about funding the right way. I'm just offering another suggestion and one which I think Drupal could really do well on. I think Drupal has a lot of potential - but if I am totally honest, I don't think it's going to meet that unless it get's enough of an income to not only sustain itself but to invest in itself as well.
Remember, I am just trying to help, I'm not the enemy (keep saying that cos I feel I am about to get shot down any minute).
??
Can't we just have a discussion without being accused of beating someone up? Where in here are people attacking you? Everyone is discussing the question you raised in a mature, responsible fashion. Disagreeing with you is not attacking you.
You are right. Facts not always obvious to new people just discovering Drupal.
Pay for support staffed by volunteers..... I doubt the community would go for that and the Drupal Association is constrained by the legal system under which it is setup under regarding profitable enterprises.
The Drupal Association is able to fund infrastructure projects and is almost a year old.
Drupal is not for everyone, every company or every site.
-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
no shooting involved
It is easy to misconstrue constructive criticism or robust debate in plain text as a personal attack when it really isn't. Generally the more often and longer someone spends discussing stuff online the less flowery emotional waffle they add for conveying intention - that gets old and they probably have better stuff to spend their time on. Or someone isn't using their native language and/or from another culture etc and might have a different grasp of the niceties.
So don't assume frankness or lack of subtlety in a reply means angry flaming - 99% of the time it won't be.
Sorry if you've already been operating that way - it's just I see a lot of new users that often see hostility in replies when it isn't really there.
--
Anton
New to Drupal? | Troubleshooting FAQ
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Michelle - You posted your
Michelle - You posted your comment in response to my first post, which was made before I was given the link to the group you are spearheading.
Your group was started about a year ago(?) How much closer are you to vB's standard? Realistically at the pace you are going when would you expect the drupal forums to meet that standard? Another year? Two or three maybe? Even five perhaps? Or more?
Don't get me wrong, I think it's brilliant that you guys have recognised that the forums need 'sorting' but I am a realist, and I don't think the Drupal forums will be up to vB's standards anytime soon. The last announcement post in your group was made in April.
I think the Drupal.org forums need changing _now_ hence why I think that perhaps working with another forum software to power your forums _for_the_time_being_ would be a good move. Then perhaps when the Drupal forum has made enough progress and is comparable to a vB forum, you can revert to using that by importing the posts.
Drupal.org is (I believe anyway) suffering because it's using Drupal's own forums. I don't need to mention how much more popular mambo became when it started using 'proper' forums for it's community, and I should need to point out again that if you go to big-boards.com you'll see that around 90% of the forums listed are powered by vB - that says a lot about which forum software 'users' prefer to use, and it means vB has got something incredibly right.
sepeck - You know, it's hard to put these points across because on the one hand you don't want to offend the long-standing Drupal members and guardians but on the other you want to say you believe something is fundamentally wrong. That's why I said I feel like I am going to get shot down any minute, in fact I actually deleted part of the sentence before posting it, the deleted bit said: "because I have seen that happen on numerous occasions before". I deleted it because I felt it was negative and not nesc, and I didn't want any 'new' visitors to see what has gone on before (because hopefully things have moved along, and best not dwell on the past, esp if it will effect a visitors perception).
Apologies if I haven't replied to everyone who has commented, but I find the forums really frustrating here - it's much easier to see new posts when they are shown after each other. On these forums you get loads of different forks, and it becomes a pain to go up and down the thread trying to spot the ones you've not read. (I know it says 'new' on the new posts, but not everyone has time to reply to a post the first time they come back to a thread).
Again I am really sorry for talking about the negatives in these posts, I think Drupal is great and I am itching to give it a go, but I have to say when I believe it can be improved on - I would hope that honesty would be encouraged and welcomed, as it's the best way to improve on anything. Yes I know everyone can help, but I'm not a coder (although I am learning) and I don't think a small donation from me (as a non-drupal user) is going bring about the changes the forum needs. Which brings us back to my original post, which was my suggestion to try and help give Drupal what it needs. A plan to help it become self sufficient, with enough money to invest back into it and help take it to the next level much faster than it can now.
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That's not a correct assertion. The sticky at the top of the group was authored in April however there are posts dated as early as yesterday 11/14 immeditaly following the sticky post at the top.
I also disagree with the assertion that Drupal is being held back in growth by not using vB or similar.
There are charts around showing the growth of Drupal.org
see: http://acko.net/blog/drupal-org-explosion-and-trends & http://groups.drupal.org/node/1980
These show drupal.org is growing at a very nice pace, despite the "why aren't drupal.org forums using a full featured 3rd party script" or the ever so popular "Drupal forums are plain" debate. While Drupal.org is a community, it is a support community that I don't believe needs all the bells and whistles of a full feature forum script. I assert that if Drupal deployed vB, it would do so with most of the features turned off in such a script.
I think it is most important that on drupal.org a single search is best, a search that searches the forums, projects and the like. Even though many users don't seem to use it.
The constant references to big-boards.com aren't a measurement I'd hold value in either. Realistically every site I've looked at through big-boards, is essentially a forum centric community and am unimpressed by any of handful of sites I visited using it as my launch pad.
It seems to me that if users want a forum centric community it would be best to build your CMS using that forum's software. Most have a CMS add on these days in subdreamer including vB.
For the benefit of new comers who are reading this. If you want a 3rd party forum integrated your own Drupal site these modules are available in the downloads area you can freely install these. Each of these modules offer varying degrees of integration.
for vB see: vBulletin
for FUD see: FUD Forum
for IPB see: Invision Power Boards
for SMF see: Simple Machine Forum (the one Joomla uses for integration)
for netForum see: netForum
for phpBB see: phpBB
The above are links to the modules for Drupal that integrate these 3rd party scripts into your Drupal installation. This shows that if you are unhappy with the drupal forum.module, you have options available to you and are not at all locked into using the drupal forum.module if you don't want to.
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My posts & comments are usually dripping with sarcasm.
If you ask nicely I'll give you a towel : )
It's not the forum
What is a forum? Basically it's a topic with replies and attachments and permalinks. Usually it's organized by containers for easier browsing. Getting down to it, Drupal forums work pretty much like SMF or phpbb. But without the eye candy.
WordPress, the most used blogging platform, uses bbPress. I personally feel that if there was a case study of sites that shouldn't use bbPress, Wordpress.org would be there. Their forums are hard to navigate and browse unless you're using the search function. Yet WordPress thrives. Why? Their forum? No. I believe it's their documentation. (More on that in a little bit.)
For years now people have been complaing about the Drupal forums. I personally would love to see a bookmark (or add to tracker without 'subscribing' feature. Many people have. But it hasn't happened. And Drupal hasn't suffered. Why? I believe it's the community.
Every day people come to the forums here and post their problems. And most of them get their answers. There are non-technical people like myself that will try to answer some 'lower-level' 'how-do-I' type-questions and then there are power users who take on more difficult questions and then their are developers answering questions. I don't have the stats, but I'd say there are far fewer techical questions that go unanswered here than at other CMS boards. Because hundreds of people want to make this platform better.
Has using the Drupal forums stopped anyone from posting their problems or helping others with theirs? No. Would vBulletin or SMF make people post more questions or answer more? No. Sure, private messaging and avatars and post ranks would be 'nice' but it's really not necessary here. And would it be worth the added server overhead? Probably not.
Of course, the forums aren't perfect, but they work.
I currently have a WordPress site (that I'm switching to Drupal sometime this year) so I've spent time in that world. I absolutely hate their forums. But I love their documentation. Instead of posting in the forum there, I'd go to their Codex and after a few clicks I usually find what I'm looking for. (Of course, to search their site, I use a google site search, since their 'in-house' yahoo search is crap.
Here, it's more difficult. I usually have ten to twenty (seriously) tabs open to find something in the Handbook. (This is especially true for theming. There are so many pages that say almost the same thing it's hard to sort through.) Now, Drupal's Handbook has come a long way in the past few years. Before it was utterly frustrating to use it, now it's somewhat frustrating.
Maybe more attention should be paid to documenting the system than the forum functionality of the site. I haven't read too many complaints about the act of posting a topic and getting replies.
So, yes, I agree that the forums need some work. (Actually, it may be time for a new site theme here.) But the forums work. They've worked for years. But making them a bit more 'user friendly' wouldn't hurt.
~silverwing
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MisguidedThoughts | tvTonight
Well said
I agree totally. Drupal's forums are simple and lack eye candy but they are perfectly usable. I do wish they'd turn off threading, but that is a design decision, not a weakness in the forum.
http://drupal.org/node/34496
FWIW, I am working on the forums, but my module is unlikely to be used on d.o because of the sheer number of contribs involved.
Michelle
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See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.
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I love threading. It helps me keep who said what to who about which sub topic that branch went off on.
-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
Tangents
It does help with that but, at the same time, I think it encourages tangents (such as this one). And it can get hard to follow conversations when threads get large. Having something that jumps from one "new" to the next would help with that.
Michelle
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See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.
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Yes, but your post to me, which that was in response to, was several hours after you were directed to the drubb group.
It was started but no one has followed through. I've only started working on the Advanced Forum module less than a week ago. I don't have a lot of spare time, so it will likely take me a while. I'm not aiming for "vB's standard", though, because I can't stand vB. I'm just trying to improve Drupal's forums.
Why does the date on the sticky post matter?
Most people around here would disagree with you. There's nearly 200K posts. People are using it just fine.
It's not a matter of offending. We just don't agree with you. Drupal.org has a policy of eating its own dogfood. Splicing in vBulletin's propriatary and (IMO) crappy forum software is not only against that policy but a really bad idea. Here's some reasons why.
Sure, they got something right... Marketing maybe? IE is used by around 90% of people, too. Does that make it a good browser?
There's one thing I'll agree with. I wish they'd turn off threading on here. But that's a matter of changing an option. No need to change the software for that.
Of course, but we're going to be just as honest and tell you you're way off base. People start threads all the time saying what's wrong with Drupal and yet somehow we're managing to grow at an incredible rate despite all these "flaws". This forum already has an insane number of posts. If changing to vBulletin would increase that, well, there's another reason not to.
Michelle
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See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.
interesting idea
I think @Brook has an interesting idea. One that can be implemented by a professional service provider, but not expected of the Drupal Association? Why don't you post on the paid services forum to see if there are any takers for this idea and run with it yourselves?
some qsns & suggestions
This thread is long and I may have missed something but
1) like to know how or what features does vbb have that really matters ??
2) things that would really help this forum :
a) something like "answers" .... user can label the post with "satisfied" label if her/his question has been answered satisfactorily
b) on log in I have the option to view ( sort ) the posts as "satisfied", "new", "open" or such similar logical sorting .... for example I may straightaway click a question whose answer I supposedly know and then find this has been already answered. I could have saved the time if I knew by some label/icon/stamp that this has been answered satisfactorily
c) i can promote some questions which I am not getting answered to "i will donate/add to what I plan to donate" area if some non3rd party core drupal team answers ( this may not be exactly in spirit with opensource ... just an idea seeking various opinion ) - thus here there is a scope of raising some fund without any compulsion on any side
http://img80.imageshack.us/img80/2181/drupalforumxi1.gif
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A: Could be done if people had the option to edit their own post by changing the title. I don't remember what permissions are involved nor do I know what the reasoning is for not allowing that, but perhaps that could be changed?
B: Sorting on that would be a lot more complex. No easy solution for that.
C: If you have a question not being answered and you are willing to pay to have it answered, just repost it to the paid services forum.
Michelle
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See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.
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A) I believe was turned off to insure that a thread is not deleted and with it comments made by others. Edit and Delete permissions are at moment tied together.
B) Sorting may be taken care of at some point by the views.module if it every gets deployed on drupal.org. Either way, this would produce a great amount of queries I'd think.
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My posts & comments are usually dripping with sarcasm.
If you ask nicely I'll give you a towel : )
Ah, yeah
I'd forgotten about edit/delete being tied together.
Michelle
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See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.
Whenever I see a freeware
Whenever I see a freeware program & then find out that it's just a crippled shareware program I won't use it.
I'm new to drupal & what attracted me to it in the first place is the documentation available here & the open support forums.
Would hate to see a payable open support section, as this whole drupal thing is openSource & information shared should be freely shared.
Besides, when freely shared, there is more dynamism to the project as thoughts/solutions/infos/problems are constantly being added
by actual day to day users of drupal.
The forums are pretty good, even for a n00b like me. Often I've found a solution or get an idea by looking at other folk's tech problems,
which saves me having to post a new node (<<< getting drupalspeak here, bit by bit :p)