Forums a great but should be divided between users and developers.
The forums right now caters developers with feature request and ideas that is great but most likely too detailed for the regular user.
The user forum should be about how to setup, use, and get help when needed, but be directly related to running their website.
Anyone?
As @Aussie noted, he created ClassicPress.club to be a place for non-techies to ask questions. Of course, it canât be ignored that there are already all those same forums right here and theyâre for everyone.
The thing is, lots of end-users have technical questions that require technical answers. There are always going to be occasions where a user (or developer) asks a question and finds the answer completely over their head â happens to me all the time. However, this is where that person must take the initiative to ask follow-up questions or do some Googling. I donât believe that superficial or incomplete answers are a helpful response to technical questions.
The forums donât cater to developers, those are just the people youâre going to see more of because (between the group) we can answer virtually any question. Technical questions are going to receive technical answers.
In fact, Iâve seen many plain olâ end users participating all over the place. When they donât understand something, they follow-up or make an attempt to learn more on their own. Putting in some personal effort (to learn more) is part of successfully working with open source software; itâs not just about posting a question and waiting for an answer that may or may not be understandable.
This is exactly what the Support forum is for. And, thereâs also the Plugins and the Themes forums.
I set up the forum at classicpress.club as a peer-to-peer forum for everyday users. It is not my role or intention to personally answer every technical question.
It is the forum members who will provide the answers, and anyone is free to join. Even James, the CP lead developer is a member.
John Overall from âWP Plugins A to Zâ, mentions it at the end of each of his weekly podcasts, as he can see where it can serve a useful, and possibly necessary, function.
Mum and Dad website owners who are only looking for a way to avoid the Gutenberg mess at WordPress could very well find the official forum overwhelming or a bit intimidating. I certainly feel uncomfortable when visiting forums owned by the software developer.
My forum was never designed to replace this one. Each has its place. There are plenty of privately run forums for WordPress support and other CMSâs. Just because theyâre not official, doesnât mean they are second class or pointless.
Iâm not saying your forum is second class or pointless. I also registered at your site to help your user numbers and even left a comment on one of your articles. My point was simply that users will sometimes have to take initiative to learn, and that adding more forums here isnât an answer to that.
Well, you have to expect and plan that there will be users starting fresh with no WordPress experience at all. That is why the forum should be divided for users and developers.
It is not an absurd suggestion rather to simplify and organize the whole support forum from the beginning.
A user oriented subforum (kinda âI need helpâ) in Support section could solve that probably. It should be a starting point for all site specific questions. And if a question appears more common (e.g. core/theme/plugin bug found) it may be moved to a proper section manually by moderators.
This actually has been expected and planned for.
Again, this is the goal of the Support forum â to provide a place for anyone and everyone to ask questions. If a user is uncomfortable asking questions in front of others for whatever reason, thatâs a completely different issue that wonât be solved by adding more forums.
Youâve hit the nail right on the head. Couldnât have explained it better myself.
Dividing subforums by roles is a bit artifitial. Devs are users, users are devs sometimes. (The same problem as being an âemployerâ and an âemployeeâ on a freelance sites at the same time â things are not determined strictly in real life). Threads differ by a question scope/target/goal, not by a user role itself.
The most universal and scalable method of solving this is using any âInboxâ-alike folder to collect all unsorted input (GTD analogy) and then processing each item depending on itâs content. This is much more flexible than trying to predict all needed ârolesâ/âcategoriesâ/âquestion typesâ and force users to follow that unnatural devisions.
In this particular case (support requests) it is better to build structure depending on real incoming data flow rather than trying to fit undefined requests into predefined structure. E.g. if you recieve 100 questions about green unicorns you just make a subsection âGreen Unicornsâ no matter if those questions were asked by devs or by users (or even by unicorns 
This is also closer to the real usage scenarios, as the main method of getting this kind of data is searching it by keyphrases (topicstarters roles doesnât matter). Hierarchical trees are not suitable to navigate through chaotic dissimilar input, so itâs more like tagging or clasters.
I did not say that. I said divide the the forum in two:
One for users of CP about setup and support of problems with live ClassicPress sites.
The other for developers / contributors to the future advancement of the CP software.
This would organize forum information better and make live users able to find answers on the forums more quickly.
We have subforums for development-related topics, which I think addresses this suggestion without introducing the overhead of managing a separate forum.
ClassicPress is also developed directly on GitHub, all individual code changes and discussion about them happens there.
This is the solution I like more.
Maybe linked from the main site home, like the download buttons so wanted here.
It could be a nice message⌠download or migrate and know that if you get in truble we are there.
I feel difficult to divide users from developers. I canât even categorize myself 
If there is another subforum that should be created here, we can do that. However at this moment I donât understand what it would be called or what purpose it would serve apart from what we already have. It would also be nice to be able to point to a few existing threads that should go under this new forum, in order to make it very clear that itâs actually something that fills a need we have.
Yes, exactly -
Support Forum:
The Support Forum are based on CP version then Subforums such as I Need Help, Report a Bug etc.
ClassicPress v1 - I Need Help, Report a Bug
ClassicPress v2 - I Need Help, Report a Bug
Developer Forum:
You get the picture
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