Earlier today, I mentioned that Otto would be the man in charge working with the WordPress.org redesign project. Part of WordPress.org and perhaps the most active section of the website is the support forums. Everyone seems to have their own round of complaints regarding the forum but this time around, we now have an official outlet to voice our concerns of what we would like to see improved. Something which I’ve been harping on for a long time regarding the forum is the lack of email notifications for threads I have created or responded to. This will be addressed once the new version of bbPress is released and the support forums are upgraded.
With the support forum mainly being the first stop on the support train and so many people using WordPress these days, how to improve the forum experience for everyone now and into the future is a complex problem. Whatever can be automated should be automated because I think the human element to the forums is the most detrimental factor to them. Humans forget to mark posts as resolved, do not properly categorize their posts and publish them in the correct area, are needed on a full time basis to make sure things don’t get out of hand, etc.
There are a ton of great ideas already presented in the thread that I hope see the light of day such as some type of reputation system and more moderator tools to help keep the forum clean.