I’ve been frequenting the WPMU forums recently, mostly paying attention to LDAP discussions, to keep up with my work with the WPMU LDAP plugin. I’ve come to the forums as something of a WPMU newbie, so I’ve kept quiet on answering much. Those that are answering though, are showing an unfortunate amount of frustration. I don’t know if this is a recent issue, or if it’s a trend that’s continued through the whole forum.

I blame help vampires.

The forum has a lot of people that appear briefly to get the help they need to get running, and then they vacate. Many times, the help they need could, potentially (more on this inna sec) be handled with a search. And so the moderators and “key” community members find themselves answering many questions over and over and getting rather frustrated. It’s possible that I’m mis-reading it (internet and all), but the tone has seemed almost hostile at times to these poor people that seem to want nothing more than to get their site running.

Being the underdog-rooting, empathic devil’s advocate I am, I can’t help but wonder why these people seem to crop up so epidemically in this community… here’s my thoughts on causes, via questions that I’ve asked over and over while working with the project:

• Where are the Good Resources for people? There doesn’t seem to be much documentation on WPMU around (or it’s hard to find - see below). While WPMU inherits 95% of its functionality, API, etc, from vanilla WP, it’s different. It handles users, blogs, logins, management, plugins, etc differently. It has a slightly different API, with some exclusively WPMU features. It requires different resources and a different installation. I’m not sure where this information is documented, if it even is. If this documentation existed, I think many of the question that arise could be handled differently.
• Why can’t we find these Good Resources? If people can’t find the stuff (through a good search interface, indexes for the docs, etc) it might as well not exist. The search toolbar for WPMU’s forums is apparently something that cannot be changed (it’s managed by wordpress.org apparently), but maybe it can be improved (or we should leave…?).
• Why isn’t there a better FAQ for “issues and troubleshooting”? These questions appear regularly - maybe it would be worthwhile to post these and update them…?
• Why (or where) are the community guidelines? Even in our digital age, not everyone knows how to behave in an online support community. Things like searching for help or what kind of information to provide for debugging still elude many. Even if the information just gets referenced all the time, at least we don’t have drmike needing to ask for more info over and over. :)
• Even server software should not ignore the user experience. There’s a common perception in the community that the software is “server software” and so has a certain level of expertise required. I agree to the extent that, for anything complex or “custom”, yes - one should have the know how to look under the hood. But for a vanilla installation, run, etc - it should be cake.   Expertise should be recommended, but not required. There should be user-friendly documentation, installation, and walk-throughs. For example - Apache, the server software, has easy installation and solid documentation.  Very little “know how” is needed to really get it running, but for those that do know, they can modify, tweak, and customize to their heart’s content.  For those that don’t know (getting back to the first point), that great, searchable documentation gives them an avenue to investigate and learn.  Everyone’s served to the needs they have.

Granted, WPMU is a fairly immature project, with not many contributors in the community, so the lack of polished user experience is expected.  I still believe that it could be improved, largely through the support of the community.  Because the volunteers of the community are frustrated with the support they’re providing, there’s starting (continuing?) to be pushback to the new users.

I’m concerned that they’ll be driven away from the community because of the lack of resources and hostility that greets them in the forums.  I’ve always assumed that folks in the community wanted to grow potential use and support of the software, but the tone that I’m reading from the forums doesn’t support that.  I hope things can change.

-sean

When people ask for help, don’t do it for them - empower them to do it themselves. They’ll feel better about themselves, and you’ll have less to do later.

I work in a position where I’m 25% help desk and 75% developer (well, it’s more like ~40% help desk, but that’s a rant for another time. ;) ). I spend the first few hours of every day working with users on the usual help desk-y items, specifically related to our website and the tools to maintain it. It’s not my favorite part of my job, but hey, it’s a living, right?

When I first came to this position, the help desk part of the job was swamped. They couldn’t keep up with then never-ending flow of items, usually small stuff (e.g., “How do I login to the CMS?”, “Can you do a minor update for me?”, etc). Usually, these were items that the user was capable of doing, but either wasn’t sure exactly how or simply didn’t want to do them. More than half of the support time was spent with these items. The developers on the receiving end of the support line were being used a tools to do little bits of “this web stuff” instead of as a resource. What a waste!

I decided that this had to stop - I was hired as a developer to create applications and tools, not to fix broken links or to update page content. So I started taking the this approach:

If it’s something that a user could handle, show them how to do it themselves. Unless it’s an emergency, do not do it for them.

There was some resistance at first - people were used to just having our department handle these little items. But people started to see where they could search for information (I had to update our public knowledge base to get info out there), as well as other online resources (I commonly point people at Google with suggested search strings). People started to see that they didn’t need us for these small items.

As time went on, people started really appreciating it. They could just get things done themselves without having to turn to Computing Services for support. Not only did this let them get things done faster, they could take all the credit, guilt-free. :)

Now we have most of our users creating and editing much more interesting and dynamic content, with better practices for maintenance and management of content. It’s no utopia, of course, and maintaining the high level of user-education requires diligence. But now, I feel that our users look at our department less as a necessary roadblock, and instead more as a resource to keep them moving.

It’s subtle, I know. Now, though, I’ve got fewer emails in my help desk inbox, and I can spend more time doing my actual favorite part of my job: coding.

-sean