Top awards for most unhelpful and helpful CMS teams and users

Not sure if it's just me, but do you ever find that with some CMS dev teams and long standing forum users that it would be easier pulling out your own teeth than getting a straight answer to what you want and that, in some cases, they are downright rude, snooty or snobbish.

On the other hand there are some CMSs whose dev teams and users are uber helpful, polite and always explain things to their users without using crptic clues, links to other threads that have links to other threads, or deride your reasons for asking in the first place?

I'll start out with a bad example of a dev team, though this is my opinion so feel free to disagree:

Coppermine Gallery - I hardly ever post questions there because reading through replies to other members makes me cringe, they seem like the most surly bunch of snobbish devs I've ever seen. Every time I google a Coppermine related issue I find a thread with some poor guy asking for help and some Coppermine dev putting them down, asking why on Earth they would want to know whatever it is they want to know and generally acting like they're the stupidest person in the world for not knowing how to decipher their explanations.

Please give other good and bad examples.

 

The only one that comes to mind is typo3 - I've never seen such rude, unhelpful a-holes in my life than in their community. Their refusal to have a community message board like normal human beings have been doing for 15 years just astounds me.

As for best community, I'd have to vote in vBulletin and Wordpress.

 

I've never been invloved with typo3, so I'll take your word for it. I agree I think the VB guys are mostly helpful, which you think they should be seeing as you're paying - but you'd be surprised (or maybe not) how many of the surly devs are connected with stuff you have to pay for.

I think I must be one of the only web guys on the planet who's never been on the Wordpress forum to ask about anything, but I imagine they must be doing something right in that department.

 

The Wordpress community is probably just as helpful as the Digitalpoint one

 

Yeah, the DP community is very helpful. There is a slight problem here though with people spamming repeated answers to questions for no reason sometimes, mostly to get their titles out of the pale green.

 

The Drupal community is rarely rude, but getting an answer is sometimes hit 'n miss. I have had one great experience where the developer really stepped up and helped me - all on a sunday morning..

 

Yeah, the Joomla forums can be like that. A lot of members are really helpful, but it's so busy your post can often be washed away with the tide. Having said that some of them do go fishing for unanswered posts quite regularly, which is something I like to do my self on my own message boards and here on DP sometimes.

 

just buy a good book, and forget about forums.

i'm getting more and more depressed about CMS forums,
the only good ones are for commercial products, and even
in that case i've seen lots of sh..

 

Exactly right. Any given day in joomla forums atlest half the questions go unanswered as most of the unanswered questions will be repetitions and people don't care to answer them.

 

That's true also. I used to help out on the osDate forums and there's this bit of text called the 'welcome text' that's in a template file, so there's no way to edit it from administration... so every day there'd be someone asking how to edit the welcome text, often with 2 or 3 threads with identical titles on the same page. I don't know if they ever did it, but I suggested to the programmers that they should make it editable from the admin page to make it easier, and to stop all these people asking all the time. For me it was more frustrating at the time that they wouldn't do it, or even acknowlage that it needed doing - depsite dozens of requests per week for help with editing this little bit of text. Anyway, that was ages ago so I guess they must have changed this by now!

 

My suggestion is that some threads which answer common questions should be made sticky.

 

There's a sticky thread in Business>Content here on DP called Writers Please Read, telling everyone not to post their writing services. No one reads it and dozens of people post their service offerings in that section every day.

 

I would like to give an example for great support. Phoca.cz (photogallery extension for joomla). Jan and cargo out there rock. You can post a question there and be assured of a reply.