Focused topic – this forum, too many unanswered posts

[Tony G]

The sticky post that Jane started seemed to be about the direction of the software but many valid comments were made about this forum. The topics are related but separate. I’d like to focus on comments made about this forum.

I’ve been working with WP over about 3 years as a user/admin. When I have a question I come to this forum and almost without fail someone will have asked the question before myself.

Of course many questions here are answered. They are answered by people like ourselves who are just using the software, not employees paid for their time. This is a generous community of people who volunteer their wisdom for the greater good – and we see that WP has benefit from this snowballing popularity.

But many questions are not answered – check for yourself but I’d guess about 9 out of 10 aren’t flagged as resolved. I literally spend hours going through threads that lead nowhere, notes from people asking for help in a void. Most of the time I end-up going off-site to try to find answers – and may spend hours there too. Perhaps no one knows the answer to the questions, maybe people don’t have time to post detailed responses to every query, or maybe the volume is just too great and people miss questions they might be able to answer.

Part of the problem with runaway volume of queries and useless search results is that it just encourages people to post a new thread, and that only exacerbates the problem.

I know many people here look for unanswered questions to answer, and some people bump their threads in the hope of getting an answer (thus making it look like the question may be answered). People need to play a game of patience and decide whether they need to wait or bump. This isn’t the way to run a Q&A resource.

So my questions are:
1) Who “owns” these forums in terms of making code changes to fix the problems? Let’s get into a discussion with that person or group and fix this condition so that we can all live a bit better.
2) What’s the process for requesting changes to this forum and getting those requests put through a decision process?
3) I’d like to propose features like more information in search results like:
a) the number of postings to a thread (only one posting generally means it’s an unanswered question),
b) sort search results by date and/or by WP version,
c) allow thread authors to bump without a new posting, and to mark threads closed,
d) allow people to separate unanswered threads from answered ones in search results,
e) allow people to rate threads as to how well they were answered (the author might say “good answer” when no one else understands what happened, and that just leads to more new threads)
f) Allow us to see how many people have looked at a thread (if a hundred people read it and there are no answers, maybe it’s time for the author to re-word the question or for someone to notice that a popular topic has gone unanswered),
4) Why isn’t this forum resource running common FOSS forum software where plugins can be imported for features … similar to the WP model itself?
5) From what I’ve read elsewhere, I’m guessing that a lot of people will want to keep an eye on this discussion. Can we sticky this thread so that people know it’s open – and so that maybe we don’t let another few years go by before something is done?

Of course it doesn’t end there. I think a strong dialog between the people who maintain the forum and the people who use it could lead to some small but significant changes that will help everyone.

Thanks for your time.

[Les Bessant]

A lot of what you’re asking has been asked many times..

Without suggesting the discussion should be taken away from the forums, can I suggest you join the WP-forums mailing list:

https://lists.automattic.com/mailman/listinfo/wp-forums

People who can make changes do keep an eye on the list, while they may not see your post here.

[stinker]

The www.remarpro.com team should consider ways to provide its community with a better subdivision of its forums. The “How-To” forum behaves more like a stock ticker than a place to get questions answered.

The “How-To” forum is a victim of its own success.