The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.Vidal Sassoon (businessman, philanthropist, hair stylist)
As you know, I began this campaign to transform the Joomla! forum (among other things) in response to some challenges thrown up by people who love to talk the talk but are incapable of walking the walk. If you've read my article entitled Before the dawn of the beginning then you will have a sense of these challenges and of the characters behind them. I had hoped that by the end of the year [2019] I would have been able to have donated the “profits” generated from this website to the Joomla! project but, after three months, I haven’t been able to scrape together five dollars. So much for the “millions” of dollars fancifully estimated to come from various crowdfunding efforts, we haven’t managed a downpayment on a cup of coffee at an Open Source Matters committee meeting.
We have collected a few useful ideas that could be implemented at the Joomla! forum if the forum management team had the will to try to make improvements. Over the course of the last twelve months we've seen the gradual erosion of effective forum management and it has been left to a few—dare I say, overworked—volunteers who struggle against huge odds to run the forum efficiently and effectively. There are fewer active forum moderators available now, at the end of 2019, that we saw at the beginning.
Forum spam is increasing; there has been a rise in the number of new account registrations at the Joomla! forum that are used only to litter the premises with rubbish.
So here are a few more ideas to address these imbalances:
1. Restrict the times when new account registrations are available
The Joomla! forum currently allows new accounts to be registered 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. Why not take every seventh day off? This might allow forum moderators a chance to take time off to get their energy back. Obviously, by restricting new account registrations to 6 days a week, this will affect some people who want to use the forum to get that “urgently” needed help but I have not seen any person, so desperate enough, who leaves everything to the very last moment, who could not wait another day to ask a question.
There’s nothing in the forum charter that requires forum account registrations to be available 24 x 7.
2. Nominate to become a forum moderatorGo to https://volunteers.joomla.org/teams/forum-team, login (you may need to create an account), select the Contact tab and write to the team.
People don’t need any special skills to become a forum moderator. The only special “skill” needed is to know someone who knows someone who can convince the one person who’s in charge to give you the additional privileges to keep the forum running smoothly. I know a few people who know that person but I lack the “skill” to convince that person to delegate forum moderator privileges to me. Not that I particulary want those privileges, mind you: being a forum moderator is like walking around with a huge target on one’s dial and I [kind of] like to maintain a “subdued profile”.
3. If you see rubbish on the Joomla! forum, ignore it
It’s bad enough that spam merchants use the Joomla! forum to advertise their wares. One often-used mechanism is to start a thread with the subject “Can I migrate my [Wordpress] website to Joomla?” and then proceed to provide everyone with a link to their website. It’s bad enough that people create these threads (and, of course, they have no interest in any replies that may follow afterwards); it’s bad enough that the forum moderators “redact” the link(s) in those threads instead of deleting them and banning the thread creators from the forum. However, it compounds the felony many times over when volunteer members of the forum community reply to those threads with “advice” about how they should go about converting their successful Wordpress website to Joomla.
I've written about this beforehttps://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=48&t=973882 but, for all the good it did, people continue to give these nonsense threads oxygen and thereby advertise the every other spam merchant on the internet that the Joomla! forum is the place to advertise your wares (even if the advertisement only lasts for a few hours).
So, if you see a topic on the Joomla! forum with the subject, “‘I am thinking about’ migrating/converting/transferring to Joomla” there's a 0.0001% chance that the person “thinking about” this will actually do anything and there’s an even smaller probability that the person “thinking about” this is capable of thinking about anything for themselves.
Best wishes everyone
2019 was has been a year of uncertainties but, I suppose, every year is like that. The year ahead promises even more uncertainties and challenges, especially if the Joomla! 4 project is able to scramble from its current quagmire. If I were to make predictions about Joomla 4.0 being released—in a stable production sense, I mean—I would say that the first stable release will be J! 4.0.5 and it probably won’t be a reality until late Q2/early Q3 next year at earliest. The first five releases of J! 4 will be fairly buggy (and the Joomla! forum will be rife with complaints) but that’s normal.
Happy New Year.
