What's wrong with Drupal?

Dear Steven,
Did it ever come to your mind that not all of us are drupal or even PHP ninjas? Some are quite busy learning, some will never learn.
OK, "subscribing" and "+1" are meaningless comments. So what? Apart from adressing that it is a popular feature request, you can't learn anything from these comments. Be it good or bad.
Making Drupal big means getting used to meaningless comments like these. And hoping people catch up fast so they too can contribute.

What is usability testing, more than "we don't know how drupal really works, but this and that would be a cool improvement or feature"?

If these comments were the only side-effects of Drupal growing big AND having a lively developer community, then we are lucky bastards.

cheers,
TUc *learning and hopefully contributing soon*

I am liking drupal more and more I used it and also learning PHP and MySQL. What would you recommend for a newbie like me that wants to get involved and learn how to develop and help others develop drupal. I like to put back into the community but need some guidance.

Scott,

I would recommend reading through the code that exists in Drupal core. It is a very big asset to learn from. Also, use the developer API as you read through so you can get narrative description of functions along with reference code.

http://api.drupal.org

I'd also recommend creating a test module in which you use and play with many of the hooks that Drupal has to offer to see what they do and how they interact with Drupal.

Best of luck!
Blake

Perhaps the real problem is that you can't subscribe to a node without leaving a comment!

+1
which means you are absolutely right, +1 is exactly that what you say, but I don't really care. It's not my problem, I have better problems to solve.. If you don't like it then do something.. writing a blog post and telling that people are stupid and they will not help you, is not a solution..

Steven you know everyone can influence the Drupal path. You must decide too, are you searching problems or are you searching solutions? this is the same meaningless whining as I read before, stop Subscribing" to an issue..
link: Come on people, STOP IT!

sorry for the arrogance, I really appreciate your work, but you could do better than this..

I personally hate using the Subscribe body to add myself to the email list. Having a way to be CCd without having to add a coment would fix that part.

Also, I personally can and do help with bug reports, however I do not have unlimited time. I would see a +1 Subscribe as saying, "I do not have the time to work on this atm, however is will be useful, and I encourage it being fixed." Something like the voting ability in bugzilla.

So why do you bother? If you really dislike Drupal and the way the community around it works so much as you apparently do, why are you wasting your energy complaining about it?

Why do you persist in your futile crusade to change human nature?
People are self-serving and careless sometimes – some are careless almost all the time. That's just human nature. Deal with it.

Not sure what you are trying to tell us, but the +1s have always been there as long as I know Drupal. I agree with your assessment that they don't lead anywhere, but again: Nihil novi

adding a +1 to a thread does absolutely nothing to help the issue reach completion

I totally disagree. It may not help with coding per se, but it certainly helps with prioritization.

Ideally the Drupal issue tracking system should allow you to vote on bugs, many bug tracking system do that, but this is the best next thing.

I agree completely that a "+1" from someone who never reviews or tests a patch (on that issue, or worse, on any issue) is quite grating.

I would have sweared that it was you who said some years ago that filters are not context aware and that's how they should be. I could be totally mistaken. It would have been a lot easier, of course, if we could ask you. Can we ask you now to comment on an issue or another -- even if it's just "yes good idea" or "meh"? We badly miss you!

"my contributions had been broken and eroded. The things I put special care into were blasted away by careless refactoring and sloppy work." <= of course, this is possible. But, could you please stop us if it's so? For example you stepped in with an incredible search test which helped us a lot. You said it was because otherwise search would have broken -- this is true but this is why there are tests... You might not believe it, but we struggle hard to keep up the quality. That's why, for example, we introduced said testing into core.

While I agree with Steven, it should be noted that "subscribing" and "+1", or whatever other 'meaningless' comment, is, AFAIK, the only way to subscribe to email notifications about a certain issue.

BTW, Steven, the issue you linked to, doesn't have THAT many of "+1". There are other issues with far more "subscribing-signals" than this one (I'd search d.o., but the search is currently disabled due to load isseus...).

Your last contribution to this issue was to mark it "won't fix" with a comment that filters themselves should only operate on the text itself without generating anything dynamic from its outside context: http://drupal.org/node/8000#comment-299531 (I've opened the original issue and contributed a patch which I thought would solve it more then 4 years ago)

Dear Steven, when you left the community it was a great loss. We're glad that Drupal still means a lot to you, and that you still care enough to read the issue queue. Thank you.

Whenever I throw a toddler tantrum like you are doing here, I appreciate in hindsight the people that recognise it for what it is...and leave it at that.

It's also possible that someone is waiting to see how an issue pans out so they know how to proceed with their set of code. (I understand this is rarely the case, but it does happen. In this case, your argument that "subscribing" posts are by people who contribute nothing but noise and no signal has no legs.)

I've never written a Greasemonkey script, but shouldn't it be rather simple to write one that would simply hide every comment div where the contents were simply "subscribing"?

Many people who develop software are not trained engineers. They just haven't learned many of the things engineers know and often take for granted.

I recently looked at the Internet landscape and don't see much out there to teach people what's beyond writing the code itself or using the dev tools.

So, I'll ask... can you have a little mercy on them.

... I still think a more appropriate title might be "Where Project module fails D.O." or even "What's wrong with sheeple?" :D

Steven has clarified that this blog post if not about project module so lets stop discussing it. It is about the paucity of developers who contribute in-depth technical reviews and thoughtful patches.

Jerry Garcia said "When the drag of the scene overwhelms the forward motion of the scene, the scene dies." He said this of the 60's counterc ulture movement but I think it is universally true. This is a real danger for the Drupal community as we grow. We *need* to find ways to make our code contribution process agile and fun. We will lose more developers like Steven if we are not pro-active. When patches get too hard to push through, talented people start leaving. Signal to noise is a real and important issue.

Hey -- isn't altruism part of human nature too? Isn't this what has made Drupal special?

Yes altruism is an important part of human nature and of the Drupal Project, but I think its forces are vastly outnumbered by those of consumerism and middlemanism. One of the side-effects of Drupal becoming so popular is that now more than ever, any goofball who knows a little PHP is calling themselves a Drupal Expert and stuffing their clients' sites with modules they don't actually understand. They aren't really coders and they probably shouldn't be playing with such complex toys on someone else's dollar, so they really have no recourse but to subscribe to the pertinent threads and whine occassionally. Does it suck? Yeah, it does. Will it ever stop? I wouldn't bet on it. Steven is right, but I think the scope of the problem is directly related to the success rate of Drupal itself. Kick it over to the UI people.

I agree with pwolanin and moshe on this (and Steven to an extent, especially in the comments). The issue is less about +1/subscribe, it's about the lack of actual eyes looking at code in depth.

One or two people subscribing to an issue to look at later doesn't do any harm. However this isn't the way the trend is going. Simple issues which could be resolved with say 4-5 iterations of a patch and a short discussion quickly mushroom to 150-200 within a week or two, with almost no discussion of the patches posted, filled with scope creep etc.

On certain topics (databases and users spring to mind) this makes it very hard to get any work done. Most of the time is spent trying to fend people off as they argue about code that's not there, or different issues that are at best loosely related to the one in question, (or having posted a patch, seeing the issue updated a few hours later and clicking on it to find that 5 people have posted without looking at the patch at all - 5 people actuall reviewing the patch could mean it getting committed and out of the way the next day).

I know that with my own patches (none of which are even that big), I've started leaving 'release early release often' behind and only post an issue when I have a pretty good idea how it should be implemented, and ideally a reviewable patch. While I'll discuss things with people on irc or groups beforehand, posting an issue that has any chance of turning into an open-ended discussion can be the kiss of death before it even gets started.

I think we as a community need to do some serious work coaxing some of the +1ers who never do anything else (again if 2/10 posts are +1/subscribe, who cares, it's the 10/10 that bothers me) to actually download the damn patches and try them out. There's over 300 issues needing review against D7, and around 600 including D6 and earlier - the couple of handfuls of people who regularly review patches in any depth aren't going to be able to bring those numbers down easily. Then there's the core++ modules which desperately need both developer help, heavy testing, and issue queue support as well.

Automated testing will hopefully help to cut down on the workload long term, but there's a similarly small number of people involved with that, while new modules that no-one will ever use get released every couple of hours it seems.

I tend to assume that people do want to help, but don't know where to start.

Based on that assumption, I would suggest providing a link on drupal's admin interface (as in all drupal installs), that creates a page with links for each enabled module to their current issues.

Another idea more for contrib modules, are to track who has downloaded these modules, so that they can be contacted to test a patch, etc.

To reduce the signal to noise for core issues, maybe if there was a better rating system that separated core developers from the rest, jquery could be used to hide/show comments from non core developers.

As the first person to "+1! Subscribe!" on the linked issue, I'm afraid you were addressing me :(, or me among others. I am therefore patching the issue to prove you (hopefully) wrong. ;)

1. If the drupal site allowed people to easily subscribe to a post without adding to it, you would stop seeing all these +1 posts. It's a sign of people going "yeah, I am interested in see what happens in this space" for a dozen of reasons, not just your cynical view.

2. The vast majority of people who want to run their own site are not coders. They are interested in products and features, rather than ensuring a specific piece of PHP code that incorporates LDAP lookups functions with the coder module correctly.

3. Why say anything else? God knows, the amount of times I've asked for assistance with a detailed post .. to get four or much more +1 posts .. and zero response from "those that know".

I hate to say it, but the "Drupal culture" has been one of the most "suboptional" that I've worked with and I've been a part of a few groups now since starting working back in the days of Netscape 0.04 ... I'm sick of being told to code it myself. I *did* do that, ended up as one of the coders behind a different open source weblog app. Now I just don't have the time or focus, what with being "the real world" simply not allowing me to dedicate the time to such.

I'd love to get more involved with Drupal. The returning comments and general attitude and culture limits that; leaves me with a bad taste in the mouth most times. Maybe "tough love" should be applied to how drupal customers are treated in the site, as much as with various modules.

Hell, maybe treat them as customers, untapped potential and future friends .. rather than being told "learn to code".

I don’t think I can be as kind as Robert Douglas and others, and I doubt you’ll respect what I have to say because you don’t know me, but…

Steven, I’ve personally admired a lot of the work you’ve contributed over the years. However, your personality tends to expose some of your quirks related to interpersonal interaction - at least within a group community.

At the end of the day, adding a +1 to a thread does absolutely nothing to help the issue reach completion: it does not reveal bugs, it does not improve usability, it does not open up opportunities for polish. It is merely you reading an issue, and passing the buck to someone else.

While all of the items you mention about what it does not accomplish may be true (aside from “passing the buck” - which is an opinion), there are a few intangible things that id DOES do.

It provides community appreciation and affirmation to those who are making the contributions. I can’t imagine that you would fair better in a world without people telling you they appreciate your work - in fact it’s quite clear that you crave it quite a bit. None of us live in a vacuum. We live to have people appreciate us (I’ll make an ass of myself and assume you don’t have children - of course you’ll probably have some retort for that statement too if, in fact you don’t)

Your purely pragmatic viewpoint of what contributes to productivity is more than myopic, it’s simply blind to “human nature” although…

If you really need to ask that question, then either you don’t understand human nature as well as you claim, or you never paid much attention to the people behind Drupal and what they did.

Your statement above reveals at least a bit of truth in my own assertions above. You clearly like it when people know how much you contributed.

Get over your sense of inability to control the whole world around you (specifically with regards to Drupal development) and start to make a difference by contributing in your own way. Not by exclaiming like the little kid on the playground “Na, Na, Nah, Na, Nah, I’m not going to play with you unless you play by my rules.” If you’re going to complain by making posts such as these then you’re simply guilty of the inverse of a +1. You need a kick in the pants and someone to tell you to get over yourself and start being part of the solution.

… and yes I AM ALREADY AWARE of all the contributions you’ve made, you don’t need to reply by saying something like “Well, obviously you never paid much attention to who was making Drupal cool”.

...and y'know I've long since departed direct participation in the Drupal community, but it dawns on me that if you could charge a $1 (or better, 1EU) to add a +1 to a topic, then the dynamics would shift and maybe people would be forced to focus something of greater value than a micro-moment of their attention.

I certainly have sympathy for you, Steven. You were much more committed and deeper in the Drupal community than I ever was (similar to my involvement with Mozilla) but after I moved on from both communities, I still felt some allegiance and held out hope for the community and projects, respectively. I don't think that looking back and offering criticism is necessarily narcissistic or useless; it's the voice of the elder speaking from a position of earned experience.

I remember how many times I've been told "stop complaining, be part of the solution" and I've learned to sigh, "ah, the naivete of youth" (LOL). It's rare that a rush-in attitude will actually make more difference (or be more productive) than a considered position or opinion, even if its negative in its tone. Heck, I was flabbergasted when I saw the Drupal 6.0 pre-release and wrote down all my feedback:

http://factoryjoe.pbwiki.com/FeedbackForDrupal6

I was shocked when the community actually deconstructed my feedback and took to work to fix all my issues. Now, that said, I was never consulted for follow up, or for clarification, so my feedback must have been amazingly clear (doubtful) but it points to a symptom of what you're talking about.

A lot of my feedback was addressing symptoms of what I would argue is a larger usability "malaise" in the Drupal platform. If the system were addressed from a design perspective as a whole, perhaps these symptoms would be alleviated. But that's not how Drupal development works... and so unfortunately, clarity of vision, from a design perspective, may never come fully to Drupal -- and perhaps that's okay -- it's just something to keep in mind and heed when approaching the multi-headed hydra of the Drupal platform.

As for fixing the problem at the bug reporting, reduction and patching layer, well, I don't know if you can get much better without a change in the attitudes and culture of such an open source project. Drupal is more Linux in its roots than Apple and therefore suffers at its core from a lack of superficial aestheticism (that is, on the surface). It may be beautiful on the inside (as was always told to me) but when it came to the outside, well, nothing could be done to sacrifice the flexibility offered developers -- and if you want to be everything to everyone [who can code], you're likely to end up being little to few (unless you're willing to devote a huge amount of effort to grind that flexibility into something more specific and scoped).

So I've ranted long enough on this topic, but the conversation has been useful.