[wp-docs] Leveraging the forum

[Tor Bjornrud]

One way that could work, maybe, is to take a cue from the Star Wars 
Galaxies forums.  They had a community relations manager, whose job was 
simply to monitor the forums, and move the top issues directly into the 
bug tracker, meet with devs, and report progress and plans to the forum 
users.  This highly visible user served to quell much of the confusion 
with the game, and at the same time harvested much valuable info from 
the forums.

Podz seems to do a great job of this, but it might be useful to appoint 
some deputies to his sheriffness, and somehow make these users more 
visible.  Sony Online creates visible users by making a "Dev Tracker". 
Essentially a list of pointers to the most recent developer posts.

examples:
http://eqiiforums.station.sony.com/eq2/tracker?role=Dev
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/tracker?role=Dev


> A wishlist for documentation-forum interaction:

Great idea. I seem to remember a variety of customer service software 
packages who treat forums as a bug-resource.  Their names elude me.

> A mosquito-like handling of forum threads should occur.  Each new thread 
> is an open issue.  Each post is a new note.  

I think this is a bit much, as many threads aren't support requests.  It 
  would be useful though, if it were easy to mark a thread as a support 
issue.  Once done, it creates a bug in a new project in mosquito 
"Support" and these bugs can be linked/moved to the "wordpress" project 
if they are new bona fide bugs.  Threads marked support immediately 
create a mosquito bug, and the forum could query the mosquito db to 
check on status. Posters could cross pollinate comments/threads as 
needed.  When a issue is resolved in the forums the bug tracker closes 
and the forum has a little area that updates accordingly.  Something 
akin to badges I think would work best to display this.


That's how I see it being easy to use.
~Tor