Installing and upgrading help

You are most welcome to vent - however, I do beg to differ. If you watch these forums people post from all over the world nearly every minute and others from elsewhere in the world answer -nearly every minute. Frankly you could not get better assistance from a paid service - one of the main "plusses" of Moodle is its massive support system - run by volunteers. I'm sure some people do make a killing charging for Mooodle assistance -but what do those people do when they get stuck on a question? Come here and ask on the forums Please tell us again what your difficulties are and those with the technical knowledge will try to help. I know I miss questions posed sometimes because they go further down the list when new ones come up.

Did you ask a Moodle Partner to help?

"Moodle Partners require that you host with them before they will help you and they charge a bundle."

....certainly not generally true. Charging a bundle is a matter of perspective of course. I would also say that the Moodle forums are *remarkable* value - especially for free.

If you're still stuck, please list what your current issues are (I see you have a few) and I'll certainly try to restore Moodle's tarnished reputation.

@Ron: a quick fyi - I've changed the forum thread title bcs I couldn't disagree with you more!

Moodle rewards those who are patient, persistent and polite. If the idea of paid support from a Moodle Partner is unappealing, then, there is plenty of free support here in the forums. moodle is a generous community - be kind to it & it will return the favour. you need to be prepared to ask the right questions, teach others and help yourself - if you want to learn.

The forums are a basic building block for social constructivism. what that means to anybody serious about education is, we can learn from each other, through exchanging ideas, observing discussions and trying to explain things to others.

http://docs.moodle.org/en/Philosophy

Happy moodling. Chad

I love the Moodle.org community! One feature that could improve communication is the ability to subscribe to a particular thread. That way you can follow the status of your questions and/or questions you have provided help on. Instead I get a massive email with every thread.

Sometimes I go through the forums and find "dead questions" (questions that were never answered) and if I can help, I post. However, the original questioner probably doesn't know that their question has been answered 2-3 weeks after they posted (which could be adequate response time for many issues). I often send a message to the original poster letting them know (because they may have unsubscribed from the overall forum). Maybe we should have a checkbox for the original poster (or moderators) to say "question answered". This would turn these forums into a more of a "help desk" forum even though Moodle itself is a learning platform. We could even have a filter to view all posts with no responses (or all posts which are unresolved).

Because Moodle.org is so huge it is possible for questions to get lost in the mix. However, a good explanation of the problem and some persistance (reply to your original post with "Still looking for help") usually gets the job done.

I have also found it useful to go to my profile page and click on Forum Posts. Then I can go back through my old posts and see if there is any new information on my questions and on the questions I have helped answer.

Moodle.org is the best online community but it is good to think about ways for it to improve as Moodle use grows EXPONENTIALLY!