A lot of things have gone dormant this year, especially with the effects of the Coronavirus. John Overall is even considering shutting down his weekly podcasts at the end of this year, after nearly 500 weekly episodes.
Rearranging the deck chairs is probably not going to bring in a deluge of new forum members here. I think there is just not enough interest in WordPress/ClassicPress, as John is finding out himself.
Why, I don’t know. Whether it’s people using other platforms or they just don’t care enough to get involved is hard to tell.
When I mentioned the classicpress.club forums being dormant, I was referring to the last post being made nearly a year ago. Your blog still remains active. I suspect there was a desire for such forums, just not an actual need for them. Nonetheless, your effort is commendable and I hope it eventually does become well-trafficked.
Re: the podcast, it’s been in decline for a long time. If you look at the viewing stats, the vast majority of the videos get fewer than 25 views and, looking at the dates, you can see that is a very longstanding pattern. I can list at least 5 possible reasons for the low viewership without putting much thought into it, however, enumerating those things is not my intent here; the effort is commendable either way and I wish him the best.
When you joined the forum, the very first message you got in your forum inbox was from @discobot. It contained an interactive tutorial that walked you through a whole series of forum tasks.
Because it teaches you how to do a variety of basic forum tasks without having to read the manual.
The process of bringing a new person up to speed with how things work. It’s a general term, not necessarily just a forums thing. For example, when you start a new job or hire a new employee, there’s usually an onboarding process.
This last bit of discussion brings up a point. One thing I think would improve the forum is if things were more obvious.
So the home page could have a link to the Onboarding. But instead of calling it by an obscure name, call it “How to use the forum” So in order to find you don’t have to somehow magically know (or remember) to send a message to somebody called discobot.
Also a link to rules/guidelines. I found them the other day and they are really well written and useful. But I can’t remember how I found them and I can’t find them now.
In fact there seems to be quite a bit of obscure terminology such as meta and governance. Those are categories which need to have a description to tell you what those terms mean. I would be infavour of just using straightforward plain English or it just seems like jargon.
There’s no need to guess what discobot is… It is explained in the welcome message that every user receives. It also put a notification on your avatar to make it more obvious that something was waiting there. You may have deleted or overlooked it.
Open source communities revolve around software and, since that isn’t your primary focus, there’s going to be terms you have to look up. It would be the same for me if I picked up a saxophone and wanted to play it and have it sound anything like music. I don’t know every term mentioned in every post here…but, if I’m interested, I look them up. Those terms you mentioned – onboarding, meta, and governance – are a prime example. You may not know what those things mean, but, looking them up will reveal that they’re actually common terms and are not specific to forums, or software, or ClassicPress.
Let me try to give this some perspective.You teach sax, right?
If you had a new student, I presume you wouldn’t refer to a saxophone as “that golden horn with all the pretty embellishments”? More likely, you’d call it an alto saxophone (or whatever) because that’s the term for it. It’s up to the student to either already know it’s a saxophone before they contact you for services, or, at the very least, to look it up (or ask) and find out what it is. It’s the same thing here…we call things what they are…and some of us have to look things up from time to time.