Separating plugin Releases & Support

[Devilshakerz]

The way the Plugin Releases forum is currently organized causes the threads to become overloaded with mixed content.
The actual Release information (new versions, changelogs, security issues or any other additional information from the author) get buried somewhere in the over one hundred pages-long threads containing comments, suggestions, user modifications and support requests with replies to them. As a result, none of this can be easily found and the mix of discussions, often happening between users that are not the project developers, makes it hard to communicate effectively.

A vast amount of projects on the Mods site have more than one build with no version information whatsoever; there is no longer a difference between stable and dev marks and the Release threads are the only place to track the modifications. Unfortunately, they cease to be readable after the plugin has gained some popularity.

A few changes would make things easier:

• archive the present content, saving the opening posts only (or moderate the threads in similar fashion),
  
• allow replying only for the OPs or confirmed developers, so that the Release thread would contain the official information only,
  
• make a room for extensions to existing plugins and third party variations/modifications (possibly merging it with Tutorials),
  
• move the support entirely to Plugin Support, allow only one problem per thread to maintain the readability.
  

[Tom K.]

How about, instead, for 2.0, we have a forum inside the mods site? So, same user credentials (same sign in session) you go to the mod page and when you click support it shows you the forum INSIDE the mod page. That way support is self contained for each mod. The number of threads per mod is irrelevant and the mod author knows exactly where to look for new support threads. No more trawling through the plugin support forum. Plugin release threads are then pretty much unnecessary also, and plugin support

[s3_gunzel]

How about, instead, for 2.0, we have a forum inside the mods site? So, same user credentials (same sign in session) you go to the mod page and when you click support it shows you the forum INSIDE the mod page.

So, like phpBB then? https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/exten...ap/support - Just trying to grasp the concept here.

[Josh H.]

I think that's pretty close in concept, Ben.

I had something similar in my head, but with just 3 threads per mod, in forums hidden from the index, for releases, support, development/suggestions. The appropriate threads for a given mod would be viewable from its page.

I like the idea of a forum for each mod though because it would avoid monstrous plugin support threads as we have now.

[Devilshakerz]

[...] just 3 threads per mod, in forums hidden from the index, for releases, support, development/suggestions. [...] it would avoid monstrous plugin support threads as we have now.

The release announcements and suggestions would be extracted, but the support threads would still grow to ridiculous sizes and force plugin authors to juggle multiple different issues in a single place.

The appropriate threads for a given mod would be viewable from its page.

If that would be the only place listing them, the support quality and time to respond would increase greatly when compared to having a centralized place to view new content. Keep in mind that plugin authors are not the only users that provide support for plugins (moreover, cannot be expected to respond to each issue) and an important part of the support comes from random members browsing the forum index or View New Posts.

I don't want to be stuck with something that's actually more difficult to navigate through than the current solution. If the content were split, users could subscribe to release threads so they get info on plugins they use, and all the support and announcements still appear on the recent posts search results page.
if this can be integrated into the mods page - great, but if that would be hard to maintain or lacking the above functions, it would make things worse.

I think a more simple solution would be to keep the plugins support in a single forum and, additionally, allow users to assign plugin tags to threads (Select2 pulling titles from the Extend database). The link on the project page would link to the same forum with the plugin tag selected as a filtering option, displaying threads relevant to that plugin only. Thus the choice of whether to show all issues or only those related to a specific project would be left to the user.