Per the 2014 Leadership plan, one of the imperatives for the Drupal Association is making Drupal.org a great tool for the Drupal community, building Drupal adoptions and developer satisfaction. One very important part of a great tool is great user support. The speed and ease with which users can get help when they have a problem greatly affects overall experience.
As with many other things on Drupal.org, historically support has been provided by an amazing group of community volunteers with a little help from the Drupal Association staff. Recently the Drupal Association staff had to step in heavily during a few intense times, such as after the security incident last May, when we reset all user passwords. Association staff answered hundreds of support requests, 24 hours a day, over the week following the incident.
The site is growing and demand for support is growing as well. Luckily so is the Drupal Association’s tech team. As we get more bandwidth, we are planning to do more in terms of user support. Not just when there is a security incident, but on a daily basis.
What are all the channels where Drupal.org users can get support? There are some old and some new ones:
Issue queues
Issue queues, of course, are the main and most important channel. The ones our team members monitor on a constant basis are:
Content
Webmasters
Infrastructure
Association.drupal.org
The first step for most of the issue queues is cleaning up the backlog. Recently we had our first issue queue clean up sprint. There were 675 issues in the Webmasters, 200 in the Content and 336 in the Infrastructure queue before the sprint. A group of 11 people — community members and staff — cleaned up about 300 issues total.
We still have lots though (398 in the Webmasters, 179 in the Content, 311 in the Infrastructure) and are planning to organize more sprints like that. The next one will likely take place during DrupalCon Austin.
We want to stress that community involvement is at the heart of the Drupal Project. Although we have increased the staff commitment to support, we do not intend or desire to displace the enthusiastic and productive volunteers who have put so much time and energy into supporting the community. We will continue to work closely with volunteers to ensure that we find the right balance of actions for each of us so that we support and enhance each others efforts.
ZenDesk
We first used ZenDesk last May, when lots of people were not able to log in and therefore were not able to open an issue about it. This continues to be a problem. Sometimes people lose access to their Drupal.org account, or they are not able to log in for other reasons. The only way for them to ask for help is create another account and open an issue.
To make this easier for people, we decided to keep the help@drupal.org email account and increase its use. Our plan is to use ZenDesk only for the cases when people cannot actually log in to the site. All the other requests will be forwarded to the issue queues.
IRC
There are a few IRC channels where staff members already hang out and provide support alongside community volunteers: #drupalorg, #drupal-infrastructure, #drupal-association.
Twitter
There are two Drupal.org related Twitter accounts @drupal_org and @drupal_infra, which are used to share various Drupal.org news and announcements. They are also used by the community to ask for tips and help related to Drupal.org.
Site contact form
We are planning to forward requests from the form to help@drupal.org. All requests, which are not related to people unable to log in will be forwarded to the issue queues.
If there anything else we’ve missed in terms of support channels, let us know!
Metrics
There are a few metrics we are tracking in the Drupal Association related to user support on Drupal.org. We are happy to report that last month average response time in Drupal.org-related issue queues went down from 56.65 hours to 16.82 hours! About 90% of issues received their first response within 48 hours after the issue was published. These are the results of a great work by the community volunteers (dddave, nevets, silverwing, WorldFallz, dman, and many more), Association staff and especially Lizz Trudeau (lizzjoy), who joined our team as a customer support coordinator exactly a month and a few weeks ago.
We already can see positive changes and are not going to stop. We’ll continue to streamline tools and processes, so that community volunteers together with the Drupal Association staff could provide better support for our users and improve these numbers even more.