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By sickhippie on
I used to work for a company that created Drupal sites a few years back - 4.x and 5.x sites. The forums and issue queues were practically useless, and FULL of people who would take longer to tell someone to RTFM than it would take to help with their problem. I quit working with Drupal because of how arrogant and elitist the members were, and how dysfunctional the forum was. There is actually a feature request I posted on my birthday in 2007 - the first response was almost a year later, changing the status to "postponed" and explaining why it couldn't be done. Problem is, I had already done it (with a cheap hack), finished the project and several others, and given up on Drupal altogether. Other issues posted got no response or no follow up (after I responded to the response).
Well, here I am - a couple years later, and pulled into another Drupal project. I had hoped it would be different given time - hoped that maybe some of the community issues had been ironed out. No such luck.
On the project I'm on now, I have been scouring the internet for solutions for various issues. With only a few exceptions, when I find someone on the Drupal forums or issue queues that has the same issues, they are either ignored completely, told to RTFM (usually with the insinuation that the problem is PEBKAC), or the thread is hijacked with arguing about what solution would be more 'elegant' - which would be great, except 3/4 of the time they're not even talking about the problem presented in the OP.
Now, before you all go off on a rant - hear me out. I have helped out where I am able. I've posted help on issues in the queue on projects I use, I've tested patches, I've helped people out who have had trouble patching, I've shared code snippets, and so on. Immersing myself a little further into things here, and I've come to one inescapable conclusion. It's doubt it is a new idea, and I think it's probably been shot down by the core team time after time.
Simply put, drupal.org needs email notifications of replies to topics or issues - and I do not use "need" lightly. I believe the main reason more people do not post and are not more active here is they simply do not know when someone has written back to them! I have run several forums and been active on several more. Email notifications is the biggest way to drive repeat traffic and build a robust community. Right now, to see if anyone has responded to an issue, I have to come here, log in, and click "My Issues" (or Issues -> My Issues). To see if anyone has responded to a forum thread I'm a part of, it's come here, log in, click "My Account", then "Track". That's a lot of hassle to go through, especially for someone new. I realize there is "subscribe to project" - and that's great, for people who really want to focus on clearing out issue queues and help people. I made the mistake of subscribing to "views" once - never again.
The worst part about all of this is that Drupal is easily the best CMS out there, paid or not. I have to wonder if, for all the talk about how great it is, the community at large doesn't really want Drupal to be accessible to the masses in a WordPress way. Maybe there's secretly some level of geek status that comes from being really good at something so behemoth? Kinda like the Linux users that mock people who prefer a gui over command line - regardless of which gets the job done quicker?
I realize that I'm going to upset some people here with this - and while that is not my intention, I know it will happen. I'm presenting my honest opinion on the community as I have seen it over the last few years. I welcome all sorts of arguments and rants, but prefer well thought out posts.
I'll be keeping my 'track' page up and refreshing every so often, since that's the only way to know if anyone is responding back to me.
Comments
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A few things (might have missed a few of your stuff, it's too bloody long ;)
I've been prone to respond with "RTFM" (not quite that rude though), I do this when it's obvious that this person has not even looked at the available documentation and not used the search, and is rather rude in their manner (e.g. txt-speak writing) - the alternative would be no response at all, which would also be unfair imho, let him/her know why they didn't get a response. In other cases, I direct them to the correct page and make them aware of the excellent documentation and search function.
agreed. I've bookmarked my tracker page and hardly see responses to my responses.
Oh, I know...
...that my post was too bloody long. Back in the mid-80's I played Infocom games, and learned about "verbose" - I never looked back! I should have written that post years ago, but so it goes.
I can understand when someone's being an idiot saying "RTFM" - or when they're being rude especially. Rudeness begets rudeness, especially on forums. But when someone is actually trying to learn or honestly can't figure out wtf they're doing wrong, saying RTFM is rude at best. I see it a lot in the issue queues, but it's difficult sometimes to tell if the person asking is actually an idiot or just frustrated. I've been guilty of both, to be honest.
As for the WordPress analogy, that was kinda my point. WP is a one-click install, you can install plugins from the admin panel without having to download/upload anything, it updates itself with a little coaxing, etc. It's very much for the masses - and Drupal could be as well. I agree that with the way things are now, if you don't read the documentation or know how to REALLY use Google, you're boned.
My train of thought goes like this - if Drupal implemented email notifications on drupal.org, it would become more accessible to regular users and new users. Those users would be more inclined to come back and offer feedback and input on all sorts of topics if they knew their topics were stirring up discussion. That feedback would in turn make new releases of Drupal and Drupal modules easier to use for the end user. All in all, it would set up a positive feedback cycle that would, over the course of time, grow the community and improve the software by leaps and bounds. There are thousands of coders like me who know enough to help out here and there in our areas of expertise, and are more than willing to help out. All we need is to set up that communication indicator of email.
I realize that the volume of email would be massive. Still, the overall volume would drop (at least initially) as people who are subscribed to whole projects just to track their few issues drop those subscriptions in lieu of single issue subscriptions. There are enough companies and freelancers that make their living using Drupal that I am fairly certain people would donate for this cause. Personally, I would donate at least $100 if it would make this happen on drupal.org.
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too bloody long again ;) sorry its getting late over here.
I don't ever see Drupal becoming such an easy-to-use system as Wordpress. It's just not possible giving the complexity. Though, have a look at the new Drupal7, it goes in that direction.
The amount of emails wouldn't be a problem with a proper notification system in place, you can get daily/weekly subscriptions. Personally, I'd prefer to have an RSS feed of my tracker, I wonder whether that'd be possible?
I am totally stoked about D7,
I am totally stoked about D7, I must admit - although it amazes me that people are already talking about D8! Forward thinking ftw!
Hmm... I would love an RSS feed of my tracker - I could get notifications on my phone with that.... That never even occurred to me! I know a lot of people don't use RSS, but it would be a great step in the right direction for those of us who use this site on a regular basis!
tdimg, you officially win. Your prize is a much shorter post by me!
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Your post inspired me to look around the web for an RSS feed generator for straight URLs. I found one here:
http://www.ponyfish.com/
Works nicely with my tracker.
Google Reader
Google Reader has the ability to create RSS feeds from any URL (hit 'a' for 'add' and enter the URL). I've tried it a few times on D.O but often it didn't work very well as I would receive feeds for complete unrelated items on D.O. There seems to be a lot of different paths to obtain the same content on D.O. and perhaps I picked the 'wrong' one??
In any case, I also agree that email notification is *vital* to a proper functioning forum. If there's too much overhead for instant notification, at a minimum notifications could be batched and sent out at specified intervals. Or alternatively, how hard is it to generate an RSS feed that works (as opposed to my Google Reader experiment)?
Cheers,
Matt
I am new to Drupal and have
I am new to Drupal and have only been using it for a few months. My inexperience plus my lack of PHP knowledge means that I spend quite a bit of time in the docs and looking over issue queues. I have found pretty much everything I need readily available and aside from a few very early, and very lame, support questions have avoided posting.
I know this will aggravate some people, but RTFM seems like a perfectly valid answer to many forum questions and issues. Simply learning how drupal.org is structured and how to use it saved this newbie hours and hours of pointlessly refreshing pages looking for that needle-in-a-haystack answer to a forum post or issue queue. If you can't take the time to do that, I can't imagine why people would be in a hurry to help.
I don't think WP is a valid analogy. Drupal is a much more flexible tool and isn't in the same class. WordPress, despite the glut of plugins, is a blogging tool. Drupal, to me, is much more of a toolkit. In a couple of weeks I went from knowing nothing to creating content types and nodes with tons of CCK fields displayed in a dozen ways with Views. All using images generated from ImageCache presets and bulk uploaded.
This just ain't gonna happen with WP and a one-click install and more importantly, it shouldn't. Not too many other people need to do this exact thing in the same way, and something with Drupal's potential database and CPU intensive functionality shouldn't be bundled with something thrown up on every bargain host in the universe.
Sometimes a learning curve is a good thing.
Email notification of replies...
sickhippie wrote:
Yes, that would be very useful. Dedicated message board systems like phpBB have had this as a standard feature for a long time now.
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there are notification modules available and drupal.org uses contributed modules, so it shouldn't be an issue that drupal core doesn't have that feature.
I can see why it's not in
I can see why it's not in core - that's not what I'm talking about. Drupal is all about modules - just core makes a very limited use site, in the same way a steel building frame with sheet metal on it makes a limited use building. Drupal.org does use contributed modules - and those modules tend to be VERY well supported since they need to handle hundreds of thousands of users. I'm talking about adding Subscriptions module, Notification module, something along those lines to add that functionality to this site (and the other sites that drupal.org is attached to).
ETA: tdimg beat me to it.
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The problem with the 'community' is simple mathematics-- the amount of people posting for assistance far far far outnumbers those that take the time to participate in the forums to help someone else. I'm not addressing you directly-- I have no clue about your participation or lack there of. But its just simple math-- period.
People have all sorts of excuses why they can't help or participate. However, that won't change the math. IMO everyone can help-- even newbies. I came across a user recently that was only a couple of weeks into drupal and had already started posting helping others who knew even less. I also came across a user who had been a member for several years, had pages and pages and pages of posts in their tracker requesting (and receiving) assistance and not one (not one!) post helping someone else. Moreover this user had the unmitigated gall to complain about a recent post not being tended to fast enough (it was not even 24hrs since the op). Unfortunately the latter is far more common than the former.
There are over 750K registered users on drupalorg-- 750,000!!! Do you think there would be so many unanswered posts and issues if even a tiny fraction of those people took the time to answer a question or 3? Even taking into account a number of those users are probably blocked spammers, that level of participation is quite sad.
In any case, a complete drupal.org redesign is currently underway which will address many, if not all, the usability issues of drupal.org (including notifications and module location). Of course, due to lack of resources, it's taking much longer than expected to complete. :-(
And how many of those people
And how many of those people never came back because they didn't know an issue or forum post of theirs had been replied to?
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that's the only thing that occurs to you from my post? That's the least of the problems, lol.
Yes, that's the only thing
Yes, that's the only thing that occurs to me. More often than not, especially on forums dealing with open source software, a person's first post will be a question. If that questions never gets responded to (to their knowledge), they will never return. If they never return, they will never post any help for another. They won't browse through the forum. They won't become part of the community.
So again, how many of those people never come back because they don't know someone has replied? A little less deflecting this time, please.
Good example. I logged in this morning and there were 4 replies to this thread. I had no idea until I came back.
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The point is, if there are no responses to requests, then there are no notifications to be missed. No amount of notification functionality will change that fact.
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In the final analysis, the absence of email notification compels a person who has registered and posted a question on the drupal.org forums to come back to the site to see if there are any responses.
The desire to return to drupal.org in the hope of getting an answer must be a part of this dynamic. A registered user here who posts a question has no other choice.
Perhaps this process was one that the drupal.org founders had calculated in advance.
It seems to me that one could interpret agreement to abide by these unwritten terms as the litmus test of being part of the drupal online community.
The other advantage to compelling a user to return is just that: as the individual gains experience, he/she will see that others are asking similar questions, or are having similar difficulties configuring some aspect of their site, and may/may be motivated to offer some suggestions in response.
At least that is the way it should work. Regards.
"It seems to me that one
"It seems to me that one could interpret agreement to abide by these unwritten terms as the litmus test of being part of the drupal online community. " This is exactly the sort of thinking that causes Drupal to remain inaccessible to most people - even those with knowledge or willingness to help. It's the "exclusive club" mentality - and it's complete bullshit. It drives people away, and closes the community off. That approach stifles true innovation, because it only encourages viewpoints that think a certain way. I really doubt the drupal.org founders "calculated in advance" a closed community, as you say. From the documents, they calculated a completely different model.
As for "The absence of email notification compels a person... to come back to the site to see if there are any responses", no - it doesn't. This behavior is contrary to the way online communities have been run for at least a decade. It compels a person to forget they ever made a post here in the first place, and feeds their frustrations rather than quashing them. I went for well over a year without once visiting this site during a time when I was working a retail job. In the meantime, a 'feature request' I made on a project had dozens of responses. I never knew about any of them. Had I gotten an email notification, I would have come back here and may have rejoined the community and helped out. I had the time, the knowledge, and would have had the inclination. I certainly would have added some feedback onto the issue itself, possibly have helped test patches, debug code, and so forth. Too bad I wasn't "compelled".
You want to compel a user to return? Send them an email with a link to something they are personally invested in - their own posts. The arguments presented here run very counter to the Drupal mission of "Teamwork, innovation, and openness in our community", and against the Drupal principle of ease of use "Drupal aims for a high standard of usability for developers, administrators, and users.". Maybe the elitists here should RTFM?
http://drupal.org/mission
http://drupal.org/principles
If this mission and these principles are what we are trying to uphold through our efforts here, then yes - we SHOULD aim to be more like WordPress - easy to use and accessible to everyone. We should definitely avoid being more like Apple, closed off and exclusive while tooting our own horns about how open and inclusive we are - which is the direction Wordfallz and BWV would aim to take us.
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Frustrations, indeed.
Is drupal inaccessible to most people? Who are these "most people" anyway? I genuinely would like to know; I admit I have not bothered to investigate Wordpress, as I found out about it after I got immersed in drupal and never really got interested. The folks who populate, and participate in, these forums seem not to have an existential problem with drupal, as far as I can tell, and it seems there are quite a number of them.
I see that you enjoy
I see that you enjoy classical and jazz. I do as well, with Mozart and Pastorius as my favorites. To be honest though, I'm having difficulty seeing the point of your post because of your phrasing. In my mind, there is no reason for anyone to use the phrase "seem not to have an existential problem" unless they are intentionally obfuscating meaning. That's probably just me, though, since your other posts haven't irked me like that - so it goes. I'm sure the offense was unintentional, so it's my problem. I'll press on with my thoughts, at any rate.
I actually know quite a few people who won't use Drupal because of the community. I have one friend in particular who chose Joomla over Drupal not because it would be easier to use, but because it was so much easier to get help without having to put up with a tongue-lashing by the bullies of the forums first - and maybe no help at the end of it.
You really should at some point try a demo install of WordPress. It is easy to use, easy to edit, easy to maintain, easy to update, and so on. The user experience as a whole is quite nice even on a vanilla installation. Add in a few plugins and the experience becomes so smooth you'll wonder why Drupal is so confusing and unintuitive. Just for the fun of it, post a semi-tech question on the WordPress forums. Act like a complete php noob and see what happens. See if you get told to "RTFM or GTFO" or if people are genuinely helpful. Chances are good it will be quite the eye-opener for you. I know it was for me.
Basically, I see it like this: there are 3 primary CMS's. There is Joomla, Wordpress, and Drupal.
Joomla is like Windows - a bit buggy, but pretty easy to use. Enough people know enough about it to find help when it breaks, and if it screws up too bad it's pretty easy to wipe it and start over. You might lose some data, but chances are you can keep most of it. Takes a decent amount of tinkering, but not much real work to get it going and functional.
Wordpress is like OSX - solid, dependable, can handle most simple things well and some complex stuff decent enough. It's easy enough for the older generation and non-coders to look at, and the people who use it tend to REALLY love it - almost to the point of fanaticism at times. Everything works together pretty well, and if you set it up right you'll never have to look at the file structure. It has it's own ecosystem but thrives very well in those walls.
Drupal is like Linux - completely modular, very powerful, can really do anything you want it to do. With just the core features it's functional, but only just. To get it to do almost anything you have to install modules with other modules as dependencies, tinker with code, spend hours trying to figure out why something that should work flawlessly (and does on the other 2 CMS's) doesn't, and get talked down to if you ask for help. The learning curve is so steep it could be a ski jump, and there is a real sense of accomplishment in those that have climbed that curve - and deep down they don't want too many others at the top with them. The community behind it will talk about making it for the everyman, but any real progress down that road will be derailed by bickering and infighting, often about trivialities like "do we include this language code because the browser reports it, or exclude it because it's not the 'official' language code, even though it breaks function for that group" - an actual argument I've seen here.
tl;dr - yes, it's inaccessible - as I've been saying. Those people are real people that I know and have seen in various forum posts over the years. Remove "ease of use" and "teamwork" from the mission/principles and that comes closer to the reality of the drupal.org community as a whole. Also, your post came off as uppity and intentionally confusing. Your previous posts were not, so I doubt you meant it like that. In a nutshell, Drupal is Linux and the community acts like it.
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tl;dr - the whole thread is getting too long and complex for me to follow ;-) (another weakness of Drupal.org's forum system imho).
nice analogy there with Windows/OSX and Linux.
I definitely agree with some of the stuff you said in another post here, regarding why email notifications are helpful for getting users back to the site once they posted a question - sometimes it takes time till you get a valid response to your question, or even to get any kind of response, they start searching for answers elsewhere and never return. Also, how many people actually use the tracker the way we do, i.e. revisit it every-so-often?
Aye, threaded forums are a
Aye, threaded forums are a step above the old usenet model of RE:re:re:fwd:adnauseum. But threaded threads take some getting used to...
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@ sickhippie
Thank you for your thoughtful comments. Obviously, every community -- including this one -- has its positive and negative aspects. I have found over the last four or so years that the vast majority of those here with strong records of assisting in the forums contribute in a positive way; there are some (I can provide references privately) whose profiles I have bookmarked because of their incredible knowledge, kindness, and intellectual generosity.
I do share your sentiments about the bullies -- I suspect that the majority of the latter are very bright college grads with tremendous expertise in programming who cannot fathom the possibility that others do not possess their knowledge and skills. On the other hand, I don't think its reasonable to expect a reasoned, thought out response to a post published by someone who, having registered here at 10:15 pm, submits a question at 10:16 pm along the lines of "can u plz help me wit droopal cms cuz i dont know nutn bout it answer now its urgent" -- and I have seen these proliferate with increasing frequency over the last year or so.
Then there are the control freaks. I noticed the thread of a week or so ago in which you offered what I thought was excellent advice about inserting javascript code in a page (the thread was in the drupal paid services section of the forums). The discussion seems to have resolved in an appropriate fashion.
I also share your observations about drupal's learning curve, but I don't think you can dismiss as intellectually greedy all of us who have invested scores of hours in learning how to use it. As I noted earlier, you will find dozens of people who gladly share their experience.
My own opinion about the drupal framework, for what its worth, is that ease of use should not come at the expense of power and flexibility. Spending some time trying to figure out coding puzzles, while sometimes a pita, is not the end of the world. If nothing else, the whole internet phenomenon has given a new meaning to the term "instant gratification." I might have gone on to grad school had the internet existed then; I bet a very small minority of those who populate these forums even know what a card catalog is. ;-)
"...with tremendous expertise
"...with tremendous expertise in programming who cannot fathom the possibility that others do not possess their knowledge and skills" I think you hit the nail on the head there. You're right - not all are intellectually greedy, and some just haven't been around enough to know that not everyone knows the same things.
Yeah, that JS thread is actually what drove me to write this thread in the first place. A combination of mad at the response I got for trying to help (and at my one line of venting some steam), and the frustration that there was a 50/50 chance the OP would never come back to see it got me thinking about the notification thing. I didn't want to JUST blow off steam, I wanted to bring a potential solution and start dialogue.
There are a lot of people who are willing to help, it's true. Drupal as a whole wouldn't exist without people willing to help out. But the control freaks and bullies are very visible, and while I doubt anything will make them go away, if notifications could help make drupal.org a more all-inclusive community, they might at least be pushed to the edges.
For some reason I just thought of Lord of the Flies... Paging Dr. Freud...
I would rather have a
I would rather have a positive reinforcement cycle than a negative. If even 1 in 10 posts gets a response, that is 1 more potential return. Speaking in absolutes like "no responses to requests, then there are no notifications" leads to logical fallacy, since with no responses, there would be no forum or issue queue at all. They exist and there are responses. Can't really argue that point, as much as you're trying to prove me wrong.
Most of us are busy with work and life. Most of us still check our email regularly. I have gone back to forums I haven't visited in weeks or months because I have gotten an email notification. That little tickle of "hey, remember this?" almost always compels me to click the link and come back to the forum to see what was said. The majority of the time (more than half), I will browse around on the forum and read other topics. The majority of that time, I will make a new post on a topic of interest to me.
The upshot is, for me, about 1 in 4 email notifications leads to at least one new post for me. So for the issue here http://drupal.org/node/175555 - that's at least 10 posts of mine that drupal.org missed out on. Other users mileage will vary. Some will be more, some will be less, some will be none. Isn't some return better than no return? With notification, more posts lead to more returns which leads to more posts which leads to.... a positive reinforcement cycle.
Unless you'd rather just continue "changing the math" to suit your "people suck and that's why they don't post" mentality?
Lol. I didn't know that this
Lol. I didn't know that this forum doesn't have the E-mail notification thing as I joined recently. I was wondering if my E-mail service is blocking the notifications. I hope that it will be incorporated soon.
This thought came across my head when I got a reply in the very first topic I started in the forum. Also, bullying of newbies by the senior members is a universal truth in all the forums. However, I must admit that I made a wrong choice to start a controversial topic in my very first thread.
Despite of all this I must
Despite of all this I must say that there are people here who honestly try to help others and give some brotherly advices too. That's why I'm gonna stick around here.
Definitely agree Drupal.org
Definitely agree Drupal.org needs a notification system for issues / forum posts.
I have to say that personally I have found Drupal users incredibly helpful, much more so than the Joomla community, where even commercial developers you'd paid money to were utterly unhelpful when dealing with bugs in their software.
Check out this thread for an example of how helpful Drupal users try to be, despite being confronted by a very rude user who hasn't RTFM - http://drupal.org/node/732212
I think a notification system would help improve what is already a fantastic community. Can't someone just install Rules here? :)
by the way that Ponyfish site
by the way that Ponyfish site works a treat! You need to use the URL that other users would use to track you, not the one available via 'Recent Posts' when logged in (i.e. http://drupal.org/user/605104/track, not http://drupal.org/tracker/605104)
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Yes, it seems that that particular post went right over the heads of some! ;-)
Sort of resolves the notification issue, albeit indirectly.
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I saw it, but 8 hours update cycle is too long and paying for an account isn't an option.
Google Reader now provides a 'page has changed' feed (?)
I haven't tried this yet, but this recent article on SitePoint describes an enhancement to Google Reader which claims to inform you of changes to arbitrary web pages even if they don't have an RSS feed. Don't know how often it checks for changes.
I'd be interested to hear if anyone gets this to work with a Drupal message thread page (like this one :-)).
KR
Alan
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I have tried it and it updates within 5 minutes of posting. Phenomenal. Thanks for the tip.
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thanks, I like that it's also a RSS feed, looks promising.
think I spoke too soon
think I spoke too soon regarding Ponyfish, it doesn't seem to be updating at all.
I have to agree on a lot of
I have to agree on a lot of your points. I have been using Drupal for almost 2 years now. On the software side I have not seen anything that even comes close to Drupal. But on the community side, I have asked several questions, and I cannot remember the last time anyone answered one. So I've sort of resigned myself to using the search option. I'm not sure why this is the case, but fortunately I've been able to overcome every issue I've had, so it hasn't been an issue.
We definitely need a notification system. It's 2010!
To be fair, the Search option
To be fair, the Search option should always be the first port of call :)
"To be fair, the Search
"To be fair, the Search option should always be the first port of call"
QFT!
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but we can: http://drupal.org/user/57936/track