SimplePie: Weblog » Moving the SimplePie support forums

Moving the SimplePie support forums 31 Jan 2008

In the last post, I talked a little about transition. SimplePie is growing, and is the most popular it has ever been! This means two things:

We’ve got to keep building the best RSS/Atom software available for PHP (and AJAX, and Mobile, and WordPress), and…
We’ve got a LOT of users to support, with a LOT of questions to answer.

Personally, I’m currently in the process of wrapping up some work with the Yahoo! Messenger web team, and then ramping up fast on my company’s WarpShare project to try to have a technology preview ready in time for South by Southwest: Interactive. I’ve been swamped for the last two weeks, then I open up my feed reader this morning, and there are over 70 new SimplePie support requests. Quite frankly, I can’t keep up.

I’ve already reached a point where I’m barely able to do any development on SimplePie because of all of the support and maintenance I’ve been doing, and I really want to get back to developing more. I’ve spent hours and hours and hours writing tutorials, FAQs, documentation, and example code. We moved all of our docs over to a wiki so that the community could more effectively contribute. I know that some of you help answer questions for others, and that’s appreciated more than you know. But as a whole, I don’t know if anyone but the development team is subscribed to the RSS feeds for the forum, and can help answer questions more effectively. And I can’t keep taking on this kind of load primarily by myself.

So… in an effort to more effectively push support into the hands of those who are capable of helping, I’m going to begin the process of shutting down new registrations and posts on the existing support forum (thereby turning it into an archive), and opening up a new Yahoo! Groups mailing list/forum. Yahoo! Groups is pretty good, they’ve got a web-based forum-like view, but most importantly they’ve got mailing list support.

In my experience, those who are subscribed to a mailing list are able to get more information, and are more capable of contributing to the discussions. And that’s what we want: more people contributing to the discussions.

Again my schedule is a bit jumbled right now, so this will probably happen sometime over the next few weeks, but it’s coming. By spreading the SimplePie support load more effectively, we’ll have one more developer who can devote more time to improving SimplePie… and really, I think that’s what we all want.

Posted by Ryan Parman at 11:24 am.

Comment by Bob 31 Jan 2008 at 12:06 pm

I personally dont like Yahoo Groups or Google Groups, because they dont allow for posting of code in a nice readable way. I prefer real forums.

But I understand you can’t handle it all, but surely there is a better way. Maybe someone else can run the forums?

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Comment by ¥åßßå 31 Jan 2008 at 3:45 pm

I know I’m a fairly new member, but if you move to yahoo groups then the chances are that I won’t follow/contribute. Tad negative I know, but better than a “yeah great move ….. *stops visiting*”

I also work on FOSS ( a non-WP blog project … yeah I know, tad tough to believe there’s anything beyond Wp :p ) and our forums are also a tad “developer intensive” but they also have a lot of user interaction. It takes time and effort , but eventually your core users take over most of the support … the hard part is getting core users that can actually follow the code ( particularly tough if you have a small user base ), but eventually you hit a topple over point.

My advice would be to continue your current forums but encourage more user participation. Promoting users that constantly give good advice to moderators and delegating aspects of the forums to them is a huge step forward

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Comment by Ryan Parman 2 Feb 2008 at 11:07 am

Bob — Somebody random can’t simply “take over the forums”. We need people who are familiar with working with and/or using SimplePie who can answer questions for others. From time to time this happens, but not enough to lift the support burden.

Yabba — I’m not interested in the web interface. For those of us who are providing the bulk of the support, we all tend to be more development-centric. The benefit of having a mailing list was very appealing.

Sure, people can use the web interface, and I expect that most will. For those who are willing to be more involved, a mailing list is great because everyone gets the messages, and everyone gets the responses. It has the tendency of making people more educated about the topic, and more people can more easily get involved in answering questions if they so choose.

We had to make a decision that makes the job easier for the people doing it, while still ensuring that people get the help they need. I believe that this will make it easier for people to get the help they need without having to rely primarily on me for support, and it definitely distributes the workload better across all who are capable of helping. Aside from a few people not liking the Y! Groups web interface, it’s generally a win-win when it comes down to the aspects that are the most important.

I’d hate to see you go, but everybody on this earth needs to make the best decisions for themselves. For me, I need to make support easier for everyone to contribute to, and for people like you to get the help they need with SimplePie. Those are the things I care about. Y! Groups might not have as slick of a web UI as PunBB, but the overall benefits outweigh the overall disappointments.

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Comment by Braxton 6 Feb 2008 at 7:35 am

I strongly suggest using Google Groups. You still get the email but the messages are threaded making it much easier to follow conversations. Yahoo is terrible for this.

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Comment by Geoffrey Sneddon 6 Feb 2008 at 12:27 pm

@Braxton: There’s a “group by topic” option on Yahoo! Groups that threads it all. If we were to move elsewhere, it would likely be something that supported Archived-At, and self-hosted.

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Comment by Jon 11 Feb 2008 at 11:37 am

I prefer Google Groups more than Yahoo! Groups myself.

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Comment by hcgtv 14 Feb 2008 at 6:24 am

Ryan,

I think you’ve missed the point of a forum, it’s less about support and more about a place where users can hang out and compare notes.

I’m not up to speed on the code base but I visited the forums on a daily basis. I would of been more active had the forums been less support geared, and more user focused. That big red announcement and the questionnaire that prevented quoting was a huge hindrance.

My suggestion, change forums, find one that has better RSS support and follow it in your favorite reader. Yes, you’ll have to go on the forum to reply but hey, the link will be right there in your reader.

Check out Phorum: http://phorum.org

Oh, if you’re dead set on using email as your conduit:
http://www.phorum.org/phorum5/read.php?16,14081,page=1

Thanks for SimplePie.

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Comment by hcgtv 14 Feb 2008 at 2:29 pm

hcgtv, makes some good points. I have to say I dislike open source projects that dont have good forums.

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