[development] #drupal and #drupal-contribute split (Was: Re: Proposal: Move all dev support off this list to new StackExchange site)

[Charles Mattice]

personally, if you move everything online such as a drupal "facebook" it 
might help, then again it could blow up in drupals face. Yeah, it would 
be great to have a place where we could go and get relevant information.

I started with drupal around ver 4.5 with the civicspace version, I had 
looked at drupal earlier but at that time was a infant with portals and 
php-nuke was the best thing out there for quickly getting a site up. 
Nuke went through the same thing drupal is experiening, rapid growth, 
developer burn out, the consumers, and then the arrogance of what we at 
drupal call ""core developers"".  Got to say drupal's ""core 
developers"" are not nearly as bad and this issue is nothing more than a 
growth spurt.

In my early days people were more open, if you had a question it was 
generally answered fairly quickly. It may not be what you wanted to here 
but you were directed to a resource that did in fact have a solution. 
Since then the whole drupal project, including contrib, has skyrocketed. 
Instead of a few hundred modules there are a few thousand. Yet at the 
same time the ratio of new developers to lets say core developers for 
lack of a better phrase has not even come close to matching  that of the 
skyrocketing community.

I would say one of the reason for this has to deal with the response, or 
lack of response, to these lists. For instance, in working on the 6.x to 
7.x update functions, if I would post something I could almost guarantee 
who would review it. Typically sun or catch and maybe chx or damz, and 
yes I learned alot for working with it and the comments I received. but 
there were other times as well when I would post something and get 
totally shot out of my seat as I was a bother and didn't know what the 
f*uck I was talking about and didn't understand. Of course these 
responses usually came from names I did not recognize but all in all is 
this the reputation we want for drupal. A couple of times I came close 
to saying screw it do it your self.

  Do I have any commits? NO!, Did I contribute? YES!, Was it worth it? 
YES and why? I might have been able to contribute back to a community 
that I have benefited from. Drupal is unique in that anyone can be a 
""core developer"", yes there is structure there has to be and for any 
community to thrive it must be structured accordingly. Success comes 
from the top down in business or in a community the leaders down. Their 
impact on the success (or failure) depends on their involvement and how 
they interact with people.

Now getting back to a facebook drupal and possibly subsites. This could 
be a good thing to distribute the load, but there still needs to be this 
list and others so we, who have precious few minutes to contribute may 
prefer to use. I believe at one time this was brought up (civicspace 
days) and a bunch of drupal information sites started to crop up, then 
came the tug of wars on who had the better information and drupal.org 
itself started to suffer with the newer information lacking behind. 
hence whether official of not, it was decided that it should be 
drupal.org that was the main source for information. I think this was 
right before Dries legally took ownership of the drupal copyright.

If drupal becomes another "Facebook", how soon will it be before the 
same issues crop up, ie; can't find what your looking for , can't get a 
decent support response, blah, blah, blah.... How soon will "Drupal 
Facebook" become "Drupal MySpace"

If subsites crop up to help with the load, whose going to be the main 
repository, drupal or the subsite if that's where everyone starts to go. 
Social networking is great for some, but I have seen many sites come and 
go. In the end it all boils down to the individual, what they want, how 
they learn, and whether they are willing to give back to the community, 
even if its only to say "Hey you might want to give drupal a shot."

As someone once said "everything matters", how we deal with "everything" 
will eventually determine the outcome of drupal and whether our 
community thrives.



On 3/19/2011 9:34 PM, Randy Fay wrote:
> I agree that drupal.org <http://drupal.org> becoming "facebook", where 
> both real-time and support interactions would be welcome and managed 
> well would be fantastic.
>
> And we could do that with subsites that don't need such careful 
> supervision.
>
> Why couldn't we let members of the community launch subsites like 
> support.drupal.org <http://support.drupal.org> and make of them what 
> they could? Or launch a chat site specifically for support that had 
> far more sophisticated features than IRC?
>
> IMO this is good thinking.
>
> -Randy
>
>
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