I was wondering something about Drupal support. I know it's a pest to support a product when the questions are dull or when the people who ask the questions don't read up on the site about the problem first, but, the current feeling I get (not sure of anyone else) is that people become sort-of intimidated by the thought of sending to the support list, because of the fact that they will either NOT get reaction, or the reaction would be something to make the submitter feel stupid. As I said, the visitor is however often at fault for not reading the documentation before submitting a fault/support request, and I myself have done it before.

While I understand that support is a best effort, I think we should really get a structure on support for Drupal. This was discussed briefly in the mailing lists a short while ago (I don't know exactly when, but I am sure the people interested in it will remember) - but it seems the discussion died out - while I think that it should actually become priority.

I am going to refer to a recent support request, but not going to use any names, as I do not want to step on any toes, but I can almost guarantee you that the person who asked for assistance is totally lost for Drupal. He's going back to MT or whatever else he was using, or if he was using nothing before this, he is going to research his alternatives.

He is also not going to recommend Drupal, and many newbies on the support/devel lists will see how this was handled and will also be skeptical about Drupal. People who have established their "relations" with Drupal, like your first members (like me and many others) and your experienced members (those active in developing - unlike me!) will not be affected as much, but for newbies this could be a crucial decision-making aspect on whether to use Drupal or not.

I don't know how important a huge userbase for Drupal is, but I suspect it's not as important in this case as it is for a person working with "real" customers, so people might get the attitude of "we don't care", but I believe if we nurture people with questions by at least handling each request professionally, we can actually build that userbase instead of harming Drupal's reputation among newbies, plus the added benefit of these users becoming really involved in Drupal after all their "growth pains" are sorted out. There are MANY areas in Drupal one can contribute to, and coding is just one of them.

This "structured support team", if it ever sees the light, is one of those areas where I can help, even though I will stick with basic questions I feel I can answer for now.

I am sure that you will agree that sometimes you feel comforted by a sincere attempt from someone to assist you, even though it doesn't solve your problem - it makes you less skeptical of the people or product and helps a lot to establish trust in them or their product.

Some ideas I have for a structured support system like this (and I have tried to arrange them in order of importance as I see it):

* FRIENDLINESS - E-mails also have their own "tone-of-voice", and many people don't realize that.

* TIMELINESS - Answer requests as soon as possible.

* ACCURACY - This is often not as important as the first two, because a friendly smile (yes, E-mails even portray those in your response to a request) can help you "win" that "customer". However, this is still important, because, ultimately the problem must be solved.

* FOLLOWUP - If an attempt was made to solve someone's problem, the person who helped him or her should attempt to follow up if that person doesn't let you know that the problem is solved.

* FAQ - Even though Drupal has a FAQ and quite extensive documentation, the culture must be breed into newbies to actually go and read it. Instead of feeding the person who asks for help with a spoon, you should give him a significant hint as well as the correct URL to the documentation, but ONLY if said documentation is ACCURATE and will solve his or her problem.

* ARCHIVES - As for archives, we could also maintain an archive with support requests. While the support-mailinglist archives are a good start, it's often difficult to find information in there, because you don't know what to search FOR. If you could, for example, maintain a page or section with moderated content - making sure only relevant information regarding the request is posted, users can often return to these pages and find a solution to their problem there. If this is implemented, I will vouch for maintaining it.

* FEEDBACK - Give the person who requested help an easy way of providing feedback. People usually like giving feedback on something whether it was done to their satisfaction or not - If the feedback was good, it could eventually be built into a testimonials section, if you want to go that far, and if the feedback was bad, it can be used for improvement purposes.

That's about all I can think of for now, and I hope this post will spark a discussion to lift out ideas about this concept that I haven't thought of yet.

Cheers,

Kobus