Hi @julianprice,
Your proposal is respectable, but unfortunately I do not think it will have a big impact on visitors to this forum. Most of them just ask for help, not for explanations and certainly not to take lessons! The explanations are (mostly) on Codex (thxs @mercime, @hnla) and the plasters for big and little sores are (sometimes, thxs contributors) on the forum.
I reply to your message because this is the second time you propose this type of approach and this is obviously a topic that you would like to heart. But this is about you, your views and your motivation. In front you have a diverse audience, ranging from amateur to pro, between noobs and specialists, from many different countries, with very different mentalities and very different social behaviors. And as you can see by browsing the forum, topics are usually short, sometimes poorly worded and often unanswered. Hard to read ? No, it is only the BP audience in his whole variety !
The reasons are multiple, irrespective of audience: lack of product knowledge, panic facing an unidentified problem and therefore inability to articulate, language barrier, and much more serious, lack of time, real or perceived problem, given to the treatment of a case. We are in 2014 and on the Internet, where each ms. count !
As already said, the helpers community is small, very small compared to buddypress downloads ! Personally I would have difficulty establishing a Helpers Top 50, despite my six years of attendance in this forum.
Anyway, all of this is common to any support forum, at least I observed. This support forum is not a discussion forum, is not a course forum, is not a philosophy forum. And IMO, it is allright so.
You want to educate ? Ok ! But does the BP audience want to learn ?
Learning is a complex process, on an individdual and collective point of view.
Learning suppose some basics, such as a thematic unicity, volonty, curiosity, motivation and, at least, a handfull of humility.
Educating. Wow ! There is so much to say about that… Ok. Let us talk about educating over BuddyPress… What part we address first ? PHP ? HTML ? CSS ? MySql ? Server administration ? SEO ? Usage ? BP is only a shell, not a unic thematic like a math course.
Ideally, educating needs some talents, a robust knowledge of a subject, a natural disposition to teach and a lot of time and disponibility without any guarantee of results. You certainly need also a good dose of self-denial and a large space behind you to be able to step back in any circumstance. And a handfull of humility. Too !
Now, let us consider John Doe. The supposed to be educated user.
The majority struggles when asking for help to strangers. Asking a question on a forum is more like a message in a bottle as a grammatical demand between four eyes to your English teacher. How many people read only on forums but never ask anything because of this feeling?
And which attitude to adopt when we receive a response, good or bad? Must we say thank you if the help doesn’t match our goal? Should we rephrase with the risk to be considered as a profiteer? Should we hook in a topic believed to be identical to our problem and already written (time spare is time spare!!!) or open a new tread? This are so commonly questions, that the world wide forumers needed to create from scratch a web specific phenomenon: the troll!
Askink for help under these conditions and with such uncertain issues is not easy at all.
Receiving any kind of answer is not easy, too.
Receiving a circonstanciated answer, with various explanation, examples, links and tutti quanti, from an unknowed person, personally, voluntarily and without consideration, is very very stressfull and really difficult to accept. Take a minute to consider this point, because we are all, and all over the world, habituate to handle such a situation with money, not (no more or not yet) with our felling. Consider also that we are all dependent and in varying degrees of mood, touchy, selfish, proud. This is more or less our daily reality who, when on a forum page, we opposite to a disembodied screen readed text. It’s very unnatural, no ? And so difficult to digest for any normally constituted human for sure ! Affect against computer. EOL.
Do you really want to <i>Educate the General Public</i> about BuddyPress ? Do you want to proselytize or advertize ? Create a dedicated site, do your stuff, and maybe with a few chance, great patience and a lot of perseverance, you will come to aggregate in a few years a cute pretty lttle buddypresser community.
Dan. Paris. France.
