The success of an open-source project such as Drupal largely depends on the quality (and efficiency) of the support that community members offer to each other. Although Drupal offers support through various channels, the Support Forum on drupal.org probably is the most important 'gateway to help' for most users.

My personal feeling has always been that, generally speaking, the support on the forums is fast, efficient, and almost always leads to some kind of solution for the problem being discussed. However, after following this thread, I started wondering exactly how well we are doing in the support forums, obviously staying neutral concerning the actual discussion in that specific thread. One way to express that, would be to calculate the forums' response ratio, being the percentage of topics to which at least one reply was posted. This of course doesn't account for the responses' quality, but it gives an idea of the forum activity.

The following table gives an overview of the response ratio of all forums in the Support Forum (situation on 27/09/2005 at 11.00 GMT).

Forum
Threads
No response
% unresponded
Response Ratio
Pre installation questions
457
91
19.9
80.1
Installation problems
3208
666
20.8
79.2
Upgrade problems
360
96
26.7
73.3
"How do I-style" questions
6342
1848
29.1
70.9
Converting to Drupal
79
21
26.6
73.4
Services and hosting
82
20
24.4
75.6
Module development
1708
533
31.2
68.8
Theme development
797
201
25.2
74.8
Total
13033
3476
26.7
73.3

Considering the fact that all of this support is being offered on a voluntary basis, I would say we can be proud of ourselves!