For quite a while now, this forum has been receiving alot of traffic that is not directly related to issues with CMS Made Simple.  We've seen posts about unix permissions, about layout problems "how do I center a div?", about mysql and apache issues, and many issues that don't have anything to do with a problem in CMS Made Simple, or how to do something with CMS made simple, it's a generic php, mysql, apache, html, css or other issue.  Today we received a post in the forum 'how do I create a database'. 

We aren't here to support mysql, php in general, phpmyadmin, or any other packages or technologies.  We expect that people using our package have a basic understanding of how to do things, and can also use google to find out what they don't know.

The 'Signal To Noise' ratio in this forum has gotten so bad that the owner of the project and other senior dev team members don't want to read the forums, or don't read them at all.  Thereby diminishing the future of the project, and the support for those of us that are actually posting well thought out, researched, and relevant questions.

Well, we're going to start fixing that.  From this point forward, forum posts and IRC questions will be more tightly controlled.  Threads that are not related to CMS Made simple directly, aren't asked in a polite way, or don't provide sufficient information can and will be deleted.  If it is a long standing member, probably that user will get one friendly reminder before his/her post is deleted but that is it.

Support team.... please ignore questions that are not directly and specifically a CMS Specific issue or post a standard reply indicating that the question must be related to CMS Made Simple, be politely worded, and provide sufficient information before any meaningful response can or will be given.   

This tactic may seem harsh, and may irritate some of the users who are abusing the system, but after a while they will either learn to post their problems in a well researched way with sufficient information, and only about CMS topics, or they will go away.  Once this 'cleaning' occurs, we can begin to provide better support, and with a reduced amount of 'noise' we will have more time to deal with the user, and to further the product.

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My 2 cents...

While I can understand your concerns regarding maintaining a high "signal to noise" ratio in the support forums, I think that this is somewhat of a "cutting off your nose to spite your face" kind of solution.

One of the main reasons for my adopting the use of CMSMS for web development was the amount of activity in the Forum. I read through a lot of Forum posts to get a "feel" for the community, before making my decision. What I found here was a tremendous amount of helpfulness, a real sense of this being an "open source community", without a lot of the "sniping" and "elitism" that you see at many other sites. In short, the Forum was the attractor for me.

I know that I've asked a lot of questions that were not strictly CMSMS related and I've answered a lot, too. I also don't expect that my questions will be answered by one of the developers or support team members, either. There are a lot of knowledgeable users in this community who field a lot of questions.

If the concern is one of lessening the load for the support team, or making it easier for them to identify CMSMS related issues, without having to sort through everything, why not create a separate Forum section for non-CMSMS issues, where members can help each other out and the support team/developers don't necessarily need to concern themselves with the postings in that Forum. This seems like a reasonable compromise.

Nullig

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I rarely post questions to the forum (I almost never *need* to post, as the search function is my friend ), but I read it almost everyday.

I've also noticed the increasing number of off-topic and rude posts - but I've also noticed the community responses getting sharper, at times verging on rudeness, probably as a result of the frustration people are feeling. This is sad for me to see, as I also started using CMSMadeSimple in part because of the really friendly and helpful responses I saw on the forum. I think that someone reading the forum for the first time now would get a very different sense of the communities attitude towards "noobies". This is probably just the result of growing pains as the system becomes more popular.

I like Nullig's idea of a sort of "Related Issues" forum that those who have the time/inclination could assist on, while the development team saves their energy for questions that require their expertise.

In addition, it seems like if a questions irritates you and you don't want to deal with it... you just shouldn't answer it. Leave it for those who haven't answered the exact same question 80million times before.

This is all, of course, IMHO. Please don't take it as criticism of anyone/anything specifically.

I agree we will be doing this (ignoring alot of posts).... we'll also be locking, and/or deleting any rude posts as well as posts that are off topic and/or ill researched (SMF doesn't have a monitoring process to allow automating this, I've looked into that).

One of the biggest problems are that some people visit forums like this and post questions to get answers because they are too lazy to do the research themselves, instead they expect others to do the leg-work for them.  And then, some of those people have the gaul to complain when they don't get the help they think that they are entitled to.  All of these posts along with posts that are not related to the product, posts by people who who are trying to get something for free that they would have to pay for elsewhere (without even giving something back somewhere), and posts by people that really should be using a package like frontpage have made it so that a number of the senior developers to this package no longer want to contribute to the forums, and in some cases don't even read them.  Now that's pretty sad.

I've taken it upon myself (with approval btw) to start enforcing a bit of quality in the forums, to try to keep things on topic, to try to make sure that people are posting questions from a position of knowledge, not from a position of 'it doesn't work for me, and its your fault', and to prune out the people that can't understand that.

If this quality control doesn't start to happen, I would consider walking away from the forums myself.  I no longer want to read posts from people that don't know what an httpd error log is, or what 'phpinfo' is, or those that can't spend 1/2 an hour in the forums or in the wiki or even in google doing a search to figure it out for themselves.  This is an 'all to real' example of what happens here on a daily basis. 

In a recent online development meeting we agreed that CMS Made simple is not for webpage noobs.... it is for people that understand what a content management system is, understand what unix permissions are, what an error log is, CSS, XHTML, etc.  It is for professionals that know the output that they want to get, just not necessarily how to get it with our package.  Now we have no problems supporting people that don't necessarily know everything but are willing to, and have already done significant research and post well thought out questions.  We do and will continue to support people that have done the research, and are talking from a position of knowledge, and who's posts illustrate that and give us sufficient information to work with. 

A deciding factor in this meeting was manpower.  We simply do not have enough manpower to answer everybody's question, and be the 'google to the lazy web developer', or to assist my grandmother in developing a website.  It just isn't possible.  I could be in here answering alot of ill thought out, ill researched, and sometimes impolite questions, or I could be writing and supporting my code.  I don't have enough time to combine the two to do each of them satisfactorily.  Neither does anybody else.

To that end, we will be undertaking a 'restructuring' of the forums to illustrate what forums are supported and those that are not, possibly removing one or two, and we will be doing a significantly increased amount of 'filtering'.

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To respond to Nullg's comment:



I can only say, I wish it would work, but unfortunately I know it won't.  IHave you taken a look from the top down in the forums lately and seen how many off topic questions are posted in ANY of the forums.... there are tonnes.  and for the ones who's subject is not off topic, there are many more that are ill researched, provide insufficient information, or are (as I said above) posted by people that are not our target audience (see my comments about frontpage). 

We've had posts like 'how do I create a database',  or questions in the channel like 'how do I center a div'.  and often enough these posts are in the wrong spot.  Hell, do some reading you'll find alot of posts with english subjects, and german, dutch, french, or some other language posts in the 'Modules'  forum.  Some users will post in whatever forum suits them, or where they think they'll get the best and fastest answer.  As well, (even though I wish there was) there's no way for me to 'filter' the posts forums I don't want to see automatically.  Therefore I've got to read every subject line and watch every forum area sometimes there are like 5 and 6 pages of them, just to find the ones that I may want to read (I keep up on the forum for the most part).    Again, the signal to noise ratio is too low, and there is no real good way of dealing with it, except for occasionally being somewhat harsh.

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Perhaps you need to change the name of the CMS to something else, then?

I understand your frustration with the signal to noise ratio, but I think you're being pretty harsh here; you also perhaps risk the growth of the community.

Perhaps the solution is not to start deleting threads that don't meet your quality control standards - after all, you guys have been doing this for a long time and your knowledge level is significantly higher - but to get some volunteers to move threads to the relevant boards, request clarification, provide warnings/tips where possible, and nominate for deletion where necessary.

I'd gladly put some of my spare time towards this; anything rather than see community growth stunted by a heavy-handed approach.

I have to chime in here...

One of the recent topics that was Unix Permissions related ( http://forum.cmsmadesimple.org/index.php/topic,12743.0.html ) could have potentially been deleted based on the new tougher rules that are being suggested.

But the end result of that "off topic" Unix Permissions issue was that it was finally discovered that CMS actually had faulty coding centering around the $global_umask that was incorrectly setting permissions.

I shudder to think what would have happened had this "off-topic" discussion been scuttled because it wasn't directly dealing with CMS.

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About a year ago, I made this same point. It drove me nuts that key developers were spending time on the forums answering the same questions over and over instead of developing new features. It was nice of them to do, but a waste of their time and skills.

The problem is that long ago the forum became the primary information and support mechanism.

The wiki -- which should be the first source for information -- is not complete and has minimal contribution by the community. It's easy to verify. Check the "special pages" in the wiki for recent changes; there aren't many. I've noted the reasons for this in several places and volunteered to Ted with recommendations for a major update to it about a year ago. My recommendations are still posted in a sample wiki. I never heard back about it, so I moved on. Many of the helpful posters I used to see all the time don't post anymore either.

Here's the issue, as I see it. There are two main information systems for CMSMS: the wiki and the forums.

The wiki is harder to use for seekers and contributors than it should be. As a seeker, tips and tags are scattered around, and most are organized by the solution mechanism (user-defined tag, etc.) rather than the problem to be solved. And that leads people to turn to the forums for everything. I’ve seen far too many repeat-topic forum posts since I started working with CMSMS.

In the forum, reusable tips -- those that can benefit lots of users, not just fix an individual’s issues -- scroll away too quickly. Sometimes the best tips are in threads you’d never think to read or search in. Later, if you remember seeing a tip, you’ll have to hunt around to find it again. If you do a forum search, there’s way too much hay to search through before you find the needle. It's easier to just create a new thread.

If the wiki were more complete and captured more of the tips and repeat questions/solutions, it would go a long way towards eliminating this issue. Conscientious users would find what they want through searches; lazy users could be referred there and their thread closed.

The wiki hasn’t kept pace with some of the potentially great core features like the Events Manager trigger capability. The one example on the wiki page “sends an email when page content is changed,” but doesn’t show anything about how data on the changed object (page title, user who made the change, etc.) would be accessed and manipulated.

As a past active forum and wiki contributor, I’ve sometimes seen or come up with good tips, but it’s never been clear exactly where I should post them in the wiki, where they would be easier for others to find and use. Many times, rather than take on the additional task of figuring that out too, I didn’t bother. Wikis, in shunning hierarchies, need extra editorial guidance to set up intuitive “spaces” for users to add information. Create those 'blank pages' so users have a consistent place to add content. Link related topics using the wiki categories so users don't need to know the solution -- like using UDTs or GCBs -- before they do a search for the problem.

As a suggestion, recruit members from the community to capture the "best of" the forums on a weekly basis and fold those gems into the wiki. Every module -- core or not -- should have its own page/sub-page for users to contribute tips, workarounds, and caveats. Tap the documentation team to set up standardized and logically-consistent wiki pages and placeholders for information so contributing to the wiki is easier. Incorporate the documentation that's included in the default install "sample pages" somewhere in the wiki -- it's some of the best documentation, but is one of the first things that's removed from the install when building a site.

chead: I agree with you 130 percent..... infact I'd bet everybody on the development team will agree with you too.  Our problem is manpower.  We don't have enough of it.  Even when we hold a dev team meeting, and divy up tasks, the 'full time schedules' get in the way of every member, and not much happens as a result.

I don't know how many times somebody has asked 'how do I remove the numbers from the menus'... I can't count that high.  there have been other topics repeated just as many times.  People like Cyberman, Pierre, mark, and others have been doing their best at support, but even they have limited resources and seem to be (by the content of their posts) getting frustrated.

I'd love for somebody with some time and resources to take charge of the wiki.... find a couple of other team mates to help out, and keep it up to date.    We could all decide on a structure for the wiki (we're really flexible) and move forward).  Everybody would benefit.

But with limited available time, there isn't much we can do other than to teach users that if their posts aren't topical, polite, well reported and well researched they'll get removed or go unanswered.  We do realize that we'll alienate some people by doing that, but unless more people start stepping up with as much time as they have suggestions, there's little else we can do.

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Hello,

I've been reading this thread and decided to take a good look at the wiki and have a few questions.

1. I read somewhere that my login for the forums is the same as the wiki, yet I don't see to be logged in when accessing the wiki.  Why?

2.  Are we tied to the system currently up?  I'm new to using wiki's so I'm just wondering about options.

3. I also noticed this at the footer of the documentation pages: This site is currently running CMS Made Simple 0.13-beta2.  Is anyone assigned as the site admin for the CMSMS project?


I want to start giving back the CMSMS project.  I come from a system administration background and have learned lots from the CMSMS project on web developement and web standards.  I'm not a developer.  Can the project use me in some way? 

TJ

afaik, the user account on the forum and the wiki are tied, though you may have to login again.


No we're not explicitly married to this wiki system, though the user conversion thing is important, and before we were to change we would need some significant commitment by somebody in order to make it worth while.


I think that this is just a copy/pasted string, as the main website is reasonably up to date.... but tsw is the leader of the website project  and if you've got time to offer, I'm sure he'd be happy to hear from you.

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Hello forum,

I agree with Calguy and chead. Yes, it would be better if some more manpower took time to improve the wiki using forum content, hence reduce repeating basic/unrelated questions. (and the wiki may migrate to another CMS software... say a cool v2... with appropriate modules... hehe hehe...)
It already happens : if your see the history of pages you can find some with several contributors and improvements.

I'd like to testify something to TJ_IN_AK and ALL other friendly CMSms fans who "want to start giving back the CMSMS project". I'm not a developper. I have been "hired" as an official support team member after I had (lonely) started to try to support people in the forum and to write/update some pages in the wiki.

As everybody with a forum account can log in the wiki, I'd like to suggest the following to fans wanting to give back, contribute and experience the nice CMSms international free software project :
-even minor layout updates of pages in the wiki helps. If you are somewhat good at wiki markup, you are welcome.
-even minor typos/language updates of pages in the wiki helps. If you are good at language, you are welcome.
-even minor content updates of pages in the wiki helps. You are welcome to make up version numbers, dependencies...
-start a wiki page about the project (rather than the product), the teams (see blog), "how to contribute" >> "welcome, take care of the wiki !"
-review the [solved] forum issues and update the corresponding wiki entries or create them if they don't exist yet.
-review the "this has already been answered several times" forum issues and update the corresponding wiki entries or create them if they don't exist yet.
-improve the troubleshooting section of the wiki, include diagnose tests to it (http logS, phpinfo...), using answers from the forum.
-start dedicated sections for each module ?

Improving the wiki is very rewarding. It is read more than you think, example :
There were once lots of problems with corrupted FTP package uploads. I added two lines to the wiki entry of the FTP agent and the flow of problems vanished in the forum. And now (see the history of the page) somebody else has corrected my bad English. The page is efficient and pleasant

La vie est belle

Pierre

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Want to contribute to CMSms ? Improve the wiki with your forum account.

I can't log into the wiki to make changes.  I've tried the same credentials that log me into the forum with no luck.

Wiki says my account does not exist.  I've email tsw - awaiting a reply.  Any suggestions?

TJ

haha haha

I had the same, because I was "pierre_m" before being "pierrem" and I've been changed for the same reason : the wiki doesn't like underscores in user names. Silly it. I suggest you ask the admin/doc team to change your nick from TJ_IN_AK to tjinak or whatever.

Pierre (M.)

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I can sympothize with the lead developers in this project.  They want to see the project move forward and are not necessarily unwilling but are maybe uninterested in answering some of the basic questions found over and over again in the forums.  It is just not fun for them.

There is nothing quite as boring or brings about feelings of uselessness to a programmer than when they are not 'creating' something.  They should be creating and if we want to see this CMS grow into something we all want to brag about, then certainly the top developers need to be relieved of trivial matters and their energy focused on new development.

However, I do agree with a few of the previous posters commenting on the 'heavy-handedness' this situation seems to provoke.  I am not sure this is the best approach either.  The result of such an approach could kill the moral of a flourishing community.  The snippy remarks and responses certainly do nothing to promote the 'made simple' and 'feeling like taking a holiday' type feelings I believe the project creator wants around here (presumption).

SUGGESTIONS
1 - Maybe a small restructure of the forums is in order.  I haven't really taken an overview look at the whole thing.  I am pretty new here.

2 - It might be better for the top developers to ignore the comments that are mentioned in previous posts.  Simply don't answer them.  Some of the other forum members and those that hangout here should answer them.  If they are so elementary and go unanswered, the user is likely to go to find the answer themselves.  After all, this is open source and free system.  No promises of support on anything.  All the support that is found here is icing on the cake, not the cake and we should be thankful.

3 - To encourage the newer visitors with their elementary questions, the top developers could drum up some quick short replies that POINT the thread into the right direction.  Maybe a 'Try googling for strftime for more details...' or 'Check the wiki at http:// to find more information...' type of response.  This is likely to have several benefits.  1) The top developers don't spend so much time answering elementary questions.  2) The newer visitors are not turned off from a snippy answer.  3) Encourages visitors to do their own research on matters not directly related to CMSMS. 

After all, the point is for the community to grow.  If they read responses like, 'this is not directly related to CMSMS, sorry no answer here', they aren't going to want to stick around.  I realize this might seem babyiesh but everybody was once one and until they are walking, they need some direction.

I hope some solutions are found, the community grows and we all flourish in being able to create awesome websites with CMSMS.  Looking forward to the future.

DMW