CMS Made Simple Forums

Hi all,

I've been feeling pretty frustrated for a little bit, & thought I should just clearly state it rather than stew/hint around.

There is a lot of value in community. I know how frustrating it must be for some people, to see people come in, ask stupid questions, behave rudely, etc. Oh, I know! I've felt frustrated by some posters too.

I've found though that in all honesty, a polite response to them goes a long way. I feel that too often the responses from some of the pillars of the community tend to be more snarky/hostile than need be.

I want to point out a comparison between CMSMS and another cms I've started using. There are many, many more posts in their forums. They don't moderate as heavily as here. They don't post nasty responses. I can find you a dozen or more threads in which they respond politely to someone who has behaved incredibly rudely.

Yes, you are under no obligation to do this, of course! but isn't it better to say nothing, than to say something rude?

At the end of the day, their community continues to grow. The rude person probably doesn't come back, & probably is never a useful member, but you know what?

Other people see the incredibly polite & patient responses, and feel good about the community they are in. They stick around. They help. They feel badly for the people who shoulder this, & help out. As a result they have an enormous community with a huge quantity of modules.

That's where I think CMSMS is lacking. The community has created a "give me more" mentality, unintentionally, by responding harshly & with snark, when a polite word (or, even better perhaps, ignoring rude posts entirely) would have done a much better job.

I totally understand the nature of this project--volunteer--I serve on several volunteer boards in my day to day life--and, the truth of the matter is, while you don't HAVE to do anything, I do really believe it will help your community. I really believe that working on being polite, on responding kindly first, has more value than the very impressive technical work being done.

Instead of badgering or belittling, just be polite I personally am moving on. I feel that without some substantial efforts, this project is in a state of decline. Security fixes & UI improvements are great, but all too often, I see community interest ignored or minimalized by people who have the attitude that they are asked to do too much work. While I sympathize with them, I also think that they could just let it slide, and let some other member of the community take up the work sometimes! No need to be so defensive. It encourages the same problems that lead to the initial rudeness.

What I'm trying to get at is, it's not the person who first posted who you are responding to. It's everyone for all time whoever reads the forums. If they see nastiness, it breeds nastiness. If they see intimidation tactics & hostility, they are out. They aren't going to stick around. I'd really like to encourage everyone who uses these forums to keep in mind that responses set a tone, and if it's a nasty tone, the whole environment is affected.

Best--

You are so right, streever. It is disheartening to see rude, flippant or snarky responses in the forum. Ultimately, it reflects on all of us in the community.

As you stated, saying nothing is better than being rude, authoritarian or condescending. If you don't like the question, or the lack of info, leave it for someone else, or nobody else, to deal with. If there is no response to a poorly worded, rude or stupid question, the questioner will have to work out for themselves what additional info or tone will get them their answer.

I would also like to point out that I certainly do understand the frustration that some of the developers experience when browsing through the forums. I just wish that they would not let that frustration spill over into them.

Nullig

Yes, totally Nullig--I definitely understand their frustration!

I just wanted to post another example--this is what it says when I go to post:
"Any posts without enough information for proper support will be deleted... you've been warned."

It makes me feel like I'm being treated like a child. Yes, many people do post without enough information. Why not just have it say,
"Not getting the response you hoped? Typically developers need a certain amount of information to make informed decisions & help you. Please look here *link to see a list of information that your post should begin with."

It's just a matter of being friendly People will surprise you, if you speak to them in a direct/grownup fashion! Few people WANT to have an argument or start a quarrel .

I totally agree with the issue on friendliness on the part of the devs and forum moderators.  I totally get frustrated when the forum gets into this mode of snarky responses and have made that clear on several occasions.  It's not professional, and say whatever people like, I make a business from this software. If people are driven away from it because of the forum, then I personally take responsibility for that as a potential client being driven away.

However, I will admit that I also personally put that message on the forum new post page.  The one aspect that the community doesn't see are the emails that the devs get when forum posts aren't responded to.  We probably get 10 emails a week collectively from people saying that "you guys give no support".  9 out of 10, it's for a poorly written forum post that didn't give us enough information.  Or a post that basically wants us to do their work for them in order to meet some deadline.  That was my attempt to try and alleviate some of this.  If it's in poor taste, then I apologize.

But, there has to be some give and take here...  answers that have obviously been answered 10 times already and people don't want to try the magic google or forum search really take a toll on us.  It's the same with posts that have 0 information.  If people want us to try, then they need to try as well.  However, the responses to those posts should probably be reserved for a few "canned" responses and let it be.

Let's be honest, CMSMS's growth has been beyond expectations.  It's awesome.  But, we've also outgrown ourselves in a lot of ways.  We need a community manager at this point -- someone to take the load off of the devs, and direct the feel and flavor of the system.  Someone to remove some of the stress and give direction to the moderators -- though they do a great job.  Unfortunately, we don't have people like that.  Because of the market share that we have, we're too big for our group, but too small for 1000s of people making money from the system.  It's a tough place to be in, to be honest.

Smaller communities succeed a lot of times, because the load is just small enough to handle with one or two people.  We're obviously above this.  This is how it worked in 2004 through like early 2007 here.  When the 2007 explosion from the first Packt awards hit, this stage was behind us.

Larger system's communities succeed because there are more folks that NEED it to succeed in order to stay in business.  They're income depends on it -- sort of like mine does now.  We don't have enough people in my situation, though...

I wish I had a good answer to this problem, but I don't.  We try and use the resources we have as best as possible, without burning folks out -- but people come and people go in open source.  It's the nature of the beast.  We have a damn fine system here and it would break my heart if people bailed on it.

On a personal note, I didn't make time for the forum for a long time and I apologize for that.  I'm personally trying to make a concerted effort to at least respond to support questions that I know answers to in the top section of the forum.  I'm trying to keep a good attitude and be helpful while I can be.  I'm still going to say when there isn't enough information -- though, if I'm low on time, I'm going to skip over the post -- as I can't just keep saying "Give me more info" again and again.

Do I wish other people were doing this instead?  Sure.  I'd rather be coding in my free time then answering questions.  But, it's true, if the community goes south, then all my coding work is useless.  *sigh*

Anyway, streever, thanks for the intelligent conversation.  Making this a well thought out post instead of a "u guys sux0r" post made it worth responding to.    Obviously, with my rambling, it's something I've been thinking about a lot lately -- so it's timely.

Streever, I can understand your reasoning behind your post but you have to keep in mind there is ALWAYS a second side of the story. You have obviously been offended so you do not include the other side in your posts.

The response could be more friendly but after having to respond to 95% of new posts with "Can you please provide more information" you become tired, weary and flat out frustrated which causes you to be less polite. Can we not respond? Yes, but then those posters complain and make posts just like you have stating that this is a terrible software because there is no support. If we didn't respond asking for more information (which we shouldn't have to) there would be hardly any responses at all. That is also a reputation that the community and software doesn't need (lack of support).

You mentioned that "it's not the person who first posted who you are responding to. It's everyone for all time whoever reads the forums." I agree with you, but in the same token if we don't respond we are also doing a disservice to the others at the same time.

I am not going to deny that there could be more politeness and a more considerate attitude could be shown to the posts that lack "detail" in the forum, including from myself. But the forum needs to be considerate at the same time of those that they are seeking help from. In fact, I will go out on a limb and say that the developers and "rude posters" were more considerate than the rest of the forum to begin with. There is a reason there are "READ ME" topics, "How to post so you get help" topics, hundreds of posts from developers that do politely ask for more information and other posts that discuss this very thing we are talking about. However even after we provide help, tips and insight in how to get proper support people come on here and spout off without even taking a few seconds to look at the suggestions that were given. Once the forum is more considerate of the devs I think the considerate attitude that they used to have will return.

Hi,

I think that there is a closed cycle. The teams of devs and supporters are not big enough and they try to teach people how to write questions in right way. However, the methods how it is being done are not good  (as streever mentioned) - it makes an image that the community of CMSMS is not friendly. This leads to that people who can potentially join the dev and support teams just stay away.

Vilkis

vilkis wrote: I think that there is a closed cycle.

I agree.  I'm looking for ideas on breaking the cycle.  How do you keep the forum friendly but keep it from turning into lawless madhouse? 

I am sure the positive actions work better than negative. Almost all good recommendations are in this topic:

1. I agree with stever - place "Not getting the response you hoped? Typically developers need a certain amount of information to make informed decisions & help you. Please look here *link to see a list of information that your post should begin with." instead of "Any posts without enough information for proper support will be deleted... you've been warned."

2. "...saying nothing is better than being rude, authoritarian or condescending. If you don't like the question, or the lack of info, leave it for someone else, or nobody else, to deal with." - this rule should be followed by dev and support team as those persons are considered as the core of community.

3. If somebody of dev and support team sees a user of forum who potentially can be a member of dev or support team he/she should invite the user personally to become a member of dev or support team. If you do not invite personally but just say in forum topic that the team is too small - it does not work.

My impression: when there were no such tough negative rules in the forum I felt myself better and had more motivation to contribute.

Finally (maybe off topic, but related) - what is the requirement to become a member of dev? If my code was deleted from this forum as totally wrong - it is mean that I can't become the member? As I know the better part of my solutions work well.

In any case, I like CMSMS very much and I will continue to help if I can.

Vilkis

I'm glad to see talk  on this subject... This is My2Cents.. sticky this topic on the top of each area... it may help people understand the screen is and that we care enough to talk about it ...

I know I have saved a lot of people from throwing in the towel and tried to keep them here... Heck even after I was about to leave 3 months ago... I was pissed off that a misunderstanding got me banned... but I cooled off and remembered that I played a part in that too... I just wonder how many have given up before they’ve seen how cool CMSMS really is... how fun it is to use it... My clients love CMSMS... it's fun to them... But I shield them from the community out of fear that they may get beat up... 

For what it's worth taking a look at how forums like http://www.kirupa.com/forum/ handle this issue may be a good start...

May-be re-think the karma system... I hate getting smite just because I can't help someone... sucks a little out just because I was not able to lol...

In short... I believe this is a great place... reworking things are only a sign of growth and growth is good...

Cheers to all the dev team and everyone else here...

jeremyBass

Hello Community,

Ted wrote: ..., streever, thanks for the intelligent conversation.

Yes, thank you (and others). I like FOSS, I like CMSms and I care the subject of a happy community.

My 2 cents : I'd like to testify about the support role, I mean my view on the forums.
-may be newcomers don't realize the support team filters spam and bans spambots with the devteam and the forum administrators.
-may be forum users don't realize the support team tries to keep the (spam filtered) signal to noise (S/N) posts ratio high with usefull answers (to keep users happy, to make their searches fruitfull).
-may be some don't realize the forums are plenty of "Yeah ! thank you, that was it ! [solved] I love CMSms" grateful users.
-may be 2M pages viewed per month means there are even much more "solved without need to post" of grateful users.
Sorry for the "may be" tone (I don't want to be condescendant) but I'd like to state :
Fact : So far I've only received ONE "moderator notification" complaining about rudeness. All other are about spam.

streever wrote: ...another cms I've started using. There are many, many more posts in their forums. They don't moderate as heavily as here.

Do they have a usefull S/N ? Or do they cope with a much larger support team ?

streever wrote: I feel that without some substantial efforts, this project is in a state of decline.

Forum stats, download stats and modules activity don't say "decline" but rather "growth".

tyman00 wrote: The response could be more friendly but after having to respond to 95% of new posts with "Can you please provide more information" you become tired, weary and flat out frustrated which causes you to be less polite. Can we not respond? Yes, but then those posters complain (...). That is also a reputation that the community and software doesn't need (lack of support).

Yes, I sometime feel that "tired" and "frustrated" : how a newcomer in a community could not be himself polite and read READMEFIRST and play by the rules of the community ?

tyman00 wrote: You mentioned that "it's not the person who first posted who you are responding to. It's everyone for all time whoever reads the forums." I agree with you, but in the same token if we don't respond we are also doing a disservice to the others at the same time.

Yes, most of posts demonstrate that most newcomers are cool rules readers. By reading directives in previous posts they make good posts and get good answers for all the members of the community. (remember the 2M above)

vilkis wrote: 3. If somebody of dev and support team sees a user of forum who potentially can be a member of dev or support team he/she should invite the user personally to become a member of dev or support team.

Yes, this is exactly how Calguy has "invited" me. There have been more people "invited" since that.

I agree with all about politeness and happiness. I'd like to underline how easy it is to join the forums/wiki/forge and contribute answers, doc, modules, bug reports, etc. As tyman00 points it, please don't forget the working side of things.

Now, my controversial blahblah about community : why is CMSms 2.x only (not 1.x) on github ?-)

Have fun all with CMSms

Pierre M.

Some suggestions from forum moaner:

1. Remove Wasteland (sorry calguy!). But I have already given my opinion to it http://forum.cmsmadesimple.org/index.ph ... #msg110778
2. Delete or configure Askimet so that the topics and answers do not disappear immediately after posting.
3. Make it clear how new developers can participate, see the post of vilkis. Or if the participation is not desired, say it.
4. Quality Assurance revival (especially for 3rd party modules) is needed. I can try to make it.
5. Replace smf with user friendly forum, e.g. phpBB I know it is easier said than done. Or try to find someone who can set up properly (I can not )
6. Do not send users to dev.cmsmadesimple.org, svn or IRC. They are afraid of it, it is a kind of stuff for programmers only.
7. "Be polite or write nothing" -> is the most important. Ignore if you do not like - it's clever.

Awesome guys, thanks for the responses.  This is good stuff.  Long post...

vilkis wrote: 1. I agree with stever - place "Not getting the response you hoped? Typically developers need a certain amount of information to make informed decisions & help you. Please look here *link to see a list of information that your post should begin with." instead of "Any posts without enough information for proper support will be deleted... you've been warned."

Agreed.  I removed it for now, but will make it strictly informational.

vilkis wrote: 2. "...saying nothing is better than being rude, authoritarian or condescending. If you don't like the question, or the lack of info, leave it for someone else, or nobody else, to deal with." - this rule should be followed by dev and support team as those persons are considered as the core of community.

Sonya wrote: 7. "Be polite or write nothing" -> is the most important. Ignore if you do not like - it's clever.

Agreed.  But this isn't perfect either.  There will be situations where we have to get information out of people, or people are just downright ignorant. These will be dealt with on a case by case basis, but I'll stress that we should keep that attitude generally.

vilkis wrote: 3. If somebody of dev and support team sees a user of forum who potentially can be a member of dev or support team he/she should invite the user personally to become a member of dev or support team. If you do not invite personally but just say in forum topic that the team is too small - it does not work.

We do try to do this, but it's within reason.  People that hang out on irc generally get noticed more because of the social nature of the platform.  Now that I'm reading the forums more, this might change somewhat -- though sometimes it is hard to get someone's personality from forum post replies.

JeremyBASS wrote: May-be re-think the karma system... I hate getting smite just because I can't help someone... sucks a little out just because I was not able to lol...

Think?  I mean, the general consensus is people giving good karma.  The # of actual bad karma clicks is very low.  To me, seeing someone with a high karma score means they're consistently helpful.  Having a large # of posts doesn't anything except that they talk too much.    *hides # of posts*

Pierre M. wrote: My 2 cents : I'd like to testify about the support role, I mean my view on the forums.
-may be newcomers don't realize the support team filters spam and bans spambots with the devteam and the forum administrators.
-may be forum users don't realize the support team tries to keep the (spam filtered) signal to noise (S/N) posts ratio high with usefull answers (to keep users happy, to make their searches fruitfull).
-may be some don't realize the forums are plenty of "Yeah ! thank you, that was it ! [solved] I love CMSms" grateful users.
-may be 2M pages viewed per month means there are even much more "solved without need to post" of grateful users.

All good points.  As negative as some things are on this forum, there are a lot of positives.  Again, I see this from looking at the karma system -- there are a lot of people with a lot of high scores with comments that basically say "great tip" or "gave excellent advice", etc.  It's easy to focus on the negative (and I do it too), but there is some great work going on out there.  It would be nice to show some of the aspects from a moderators point of view and what they have to deal with in order to keep this place moving.

Sonya wrote: 1. Remove Wasteland (sorry calguy!). But I have already given my opinion to it http://forum.cmsmadesimple.org/index.ph ... #msg110778

I've hidden it for now.

Sonya wrote: Delete or configure Askimet so that the topics and answers do not disappear immediately after posting.

That's kind of out of our control.  The Akismet module is pretty basic -- and honestly, the false positives are pretty low.  It stinks that we have to monitor it for them, but you should see some of the nasty porn spam that comes through.

Sonya wrote: 4. Quality Assurance revival (especially for 3rd party modules) is needed. I can try to make it.

Yes, please!  Every attempt at QA and documentation has fizzled out before it's started.  I'd love for both aspects of this project to be running, but it just never seems to work out.

Sonya wrote: 5. Replace smf with user friendly forum, e.g. phpBB I know it is easier said than done. Or try to find someone who can set up properly (I can not )

Are there particular features that would make this a good idea?  When we started the forum, the other option was phpbb2 -- and it was a security nightmare.  It's obviously not the case anymore.  But I wouldn't move unless there was a killer feature on something else that made it almost necessary.  Right now, I'm not seeing a point.  Honestly, I'd love to move to SMF 2.x -- as that's what I'm using on the Silk Framework forums.  But, we'd need to reskin and some of the mods aren't updated for the 2.x series yet (like Akismet).

Sonya wrote: 6. Do not send users to dev.cmsmadesimple.org, svn or IRC. They are afraid of it, it is a kind of stuff for programmers only.

Well, we have to send people to the forge for bug reports.  If not, then they get lost.  We can't guarantee the mod developers are reading all the forums all the time -- things disappear.  Agree, svn and irc aren't necessary -- but people not using svn have to wait for real releases.  Not much we can do about that.

And last but not least...

Pierre M. wrote: Now, my controversial blahblah about community : why is CMSms 2.x only (not 1.x) on github ?-)

Because 1.x isn't supposed to be in development anymore. 

---

Keep the comments coming.  I'm hoping to come up with a long term plan for this stuff in the coming weeks.  I need as much input as possible in order to figure out exactly what to do.

Thanks!

Ted wrote:

JeremyBASS wrote: May-be re-think the karma system... I hate getting smite just because I can't help someone... sucks a little out just because I was not able to lol...

Think?  I mean, the general consensus is people giving good karma.  The # of actual bad karma clicks is very low.  To me, seeing someone with a high karma score means they're consistently helpful.  Having a large # of posts doesn't anything except that they talk too much.    *hides # of posts*

Oh I  didn't mean get rid of it... just that there are other ways too... like a button for solved tied to each post/reply would hand more power to the asker... plus give more to tie to for finding the good solutions.... then you can get "points" "karma" or something for solving the question... I get 1 karma for every 50 solves I swear lol... It was just a minor thought... I see this solved button in the big big forums (ASP.net, experts-exchange etc..) and thought it'd be good to re-think it some time... but I understand there are bigger fish to fry.... but I can think of 10 more things you could do with that one button's results/data...


The one other thing I personally think would help out is a top question area, or better search.... most of the time the information is here, but it's hard to find...

I'm excited...  hope everyone's day is well...

Cheers
jeremyBass

Ted wrote:

Sonya wrote: 4. Quality Assurance revival (especially for 3rd party modules) is needed. I can try to make it.

Yes, please!  Every attempt at QA and documentation has fizzled out before it's started.  I'd love for both aspects of this project to be running, but it just never seems to work out.

OK, I have some ideas about QA and I try not to be the next who doesn't seem to work out I see QA as something between user and developer. If module is deprecated or abandoned, it might not be in the repository for "ordinary" user -> Module Manager. Alpha versions might not be in the module manager repository as well. You will spare a lot of time when such modules are not available for installation. "Ordinary" user is not able to get them running and a programmer would not ask any questions but just correct it for himself. A programmer would also be able to find module in dev.

Modules has to be marked as deprecated if latest release is elder than 1 year or bug requests are not handled in any manner within some months or no files are released within some months after module approval. If developer of 3rd party modules follow some rules it can significantly reduce number of questions and improve the usability.

1. Each module has to be tested with $config['debug'] = true; before release. No errors or warnings.
2. Modules have to be documented in the same manner.
3. Abandoned module can be "inherited" by another developer interested in further development if the original developer does not handle join requests within 1 month.
4. Modules can be marked as stable if they support search function (see API), friendly url (see API), templates (no html in source), are tested with non-English characters . Otherwise they are not stable and can not be recommended for production environment.
5. Maximum version for module has to be mandatory. The information must be shown in Module Manager. However, maximum version do not have to prevent installation if someone would like to make it on own risk. Just be informed before installation and be aware of difficulties.
6. For popular modules, such as Frontend User Management or Album, sub-boards can be maintained to separate them from other modules.

What I can do?
- write down the rules for stable modules (native speaker has to correct them).
- apply the rules to existing modules and mark them as stable or abandoned. Who will add it to repository? I just do not have any access.
- communicate with developers to check if they are alive Give them feedback according to the rules above and the tips to API how to accomplish the steps to stable version.
- add bug requests from board to dev if user is not able to do it himself.

However, documentation is not the part I can pretty good. My native language is Russian and I am pretty fluent in German but it is difficult for me to write in English. German is well documented, I am trying to do my part in Russian.

Ted wrote:

Sonya wrote: 5. Replace smf with user friendly forum, e.g. phpBB I know it is easier said than done. Or try to find someone who can set up properly (I can not )

Are there particular features that would make this a good idea? 

Yes, I do not like the software It's pretty personal. I have ported 2 large communities from smf to phpbb3 and am happy have done it. SMF is just not nice. Templates are difficult to create since code and design are not separated there. Database is not normalized (Pain for me - I am a database developer). And I do not like their license.  It's just my opinion, but I have not looked into SMF 2.0 - probably it is better. Forget the point

I would appreciate any other suggestions to QA or opinions what QA has to be in CMS Made Simple?

@Ted:
I've noticed your increased presence here on the boards lately, and it's made a very positive impression on me.  I understand you have many other responsibilities, and I'd rather have you cranking on 2.0 rather than answering "how do I unpack a tarball" questions, but to know that you're there and that you care about your community is most excellent!!

For CMSMS to take the next leap, I think documentation and QA are absolutely vital.  I love Sonya's suggestions about removing pre-release modules from the Repository.  I would suggest perhaps 2 repositories - one that contains only mods that have been QA'd and have been approved by the dev team, and another that contains untested/unapproved mods to "install at your own risk".

I think the "official" mods should be required to have release notes.

I would love to see the level of "Help" documentation within each module increased, as well as the quality/quantity of documentation for the CMSMS package as a whole.  My level of involvement can't be what I'd like it to be, but I enjoy writing "helpdesk" information, so I'll try to step it up.

Thanks for turning out a great product, and thanks for caring enough to not be satisfied with the status quo!!!!