Themes

Yes, Fernando would, Gareth would, I would, Mary would - what about all the other themes who have developers who are no longer active on the forums, but they are still in use and require support? Who is going to moderate and manage those if they are not in a single forum. Or who would dip in and out of the Essential forum if Gareth was on holiday, or ill, or the Adaptable one if Fernando took on another project (eg BCU is now without effective support beyond 'upgrade to Adaptable')

What about all the queries that don't relate to a specific theme - or that are identified as a theme issue, but so often are not, or are 'I'd like to, but how', or 'what theme should I use for cloning/developing', 'what's happening in themes with regard to BS2/3/4/less/sass/javascript/yui/jquery/.../.../...', 'I'm trying to develop a theme, how do I...?' These would all still require moderating, managing, etc.

If people would properly follow the instructions and raise their individual issue, identifying their theme, moodle version, and relevant info in the post, then it is not difficult to manage, or organise, or search the way it is organised now (in my opinion), but when I try to follow the unread posts after a day or so away and I am faced with several different 'sub-thread conversations' within a single forum discussion thread - that is confusing!

Those discussion titles become your folders and nested folders and organisation, they don't (in my mind) need, or benefit from entirely separate forums.

What I would suggest is asking people - where it is relevant - to add the theme name to the discussion thread they start, but my personal preference would be to remain with the process of a new discussion for a new query. I think it makes the forum much much easier to browse as a user (and I do hope my first thought is as a forum user rather than as a developer/moderator and the way most people come to use the forums)

Browsing the forum for issues is becoming harder when the only title we have is something like 'ThemeName - General' or 'ThemeName - CSS' (Browsing, not searching! - its how I learned most of what I did in my first few years with Moodle, not searching for specific answers to specific issues, but browsing and reading)

It would certainly make it more ordered, like Gareth said we already have Moodle tracker for contributed themes that hardly any one uses, basically because they don't know how to or cannot be bothered. In which case perhaps that section of Moodle tracker should be scrapped, and Theme forum enlarged with some sub-forums?

As for helping as a Moderator Emma the best is to talk to Helen as we really need others from around the globe to cover different time zones. I would be very happy for you to join us as a Mod.

Thanks for offering.

Cheers

Mary

Thanks everyone for your comments and ideas on how best to provide theme (and other plugin support).

As several of you mention, the comments section for each plugin in the plugins directory doesn't really provide the opportunity to discuss the plugin in the way that a forum does, however I understand that improvements to comments functionality are planned, such as being able to reply to a particular comment, which will make it easier to use in future.

At various times in the past we've considered whether to create new forums for plugins in the plugins directory. The main problem with creating more forums in Moodle in English is that it would make the list of forums even longer, and more confusing for newcomers to figure out where to post.

One possibility, if there is sufficient demand for it, would be to create a new course for plugin forums. However if someone posted in the wrong place, their discussion thread could not be moved to a forum in a different course.

For now, I would follow Gareth's and Richard's recommendation of including the theme name in the discussion subject line / post title. Moderators can help by editing posts and adding the theme name where necessary.

Finally, a forum improvement that we can look forward to soon is sticky posts functionality, coming in Moodle 3.1.

Richard, the start point is that we use a forum to provide support. And a forum is not the best way to do it. Then we must try to improve the workflow to get the best of the solution we use.

You know that many users post questions in wrong forums, questions are not related to the plugin or simply ask questions that are obvious if you take a look to the plugin. Even worse, they enter a simple title that don't show where an what is the problem.

It is really strange a new thread with a correct title. So give the users this capacity is jnot a good idea because maybe for mods is valid but not for developers. It means we need to read all the messages (that do not include images or screenshots) or forum posts and then reply those that we mantain.

I would need to spend some time to give this support when other clients that pay for support will not attended. And this take me again to the same question: Why to publish in moodle if it could be a heavy workload?

The idea of subforums is the best because each plugin (or at least the most used) can have several categories to post questions. Anyway, I thing this solution can be applied to themes only. Other plugins are much simple and probably will not need this kind of structure.

The idea of threads by version is not very interesting because many questions will be common for all the versions. Then could be difficult to find a solution.

That will better for users seeking support and for mods and devs that provide it.

From here, what other solutions?

For example, something we use often in 3bits. A Knowledge Base. Using a glossary activity as a FAQ and linked to the first post, we can have questions and answers so it should be easy to find a solution for the most common questions. The Knowledge Base is commonly used in IT departments as a part of the ITIL. And from my point of view, as a former Service Manager, this is one of the most useful tools you can have to provide support.

Developers can add and maintain the Q&A. This feature can be enabled only under dev request and must be the responsible of it.

We are working in this solution, and also some other, for our clients and we can share it when done in the moodle forum. But keeping in mind that will be an external resource to moodle.

I think that we need to define what kind of support can give from moodle (devs and mods) and then find what tools included in moodle we can use for it.

For the moment I'm very happy with the solution provided by Mary and hope it works.