How to make contributing to Meta more enjoyable?

[Tris20 (Tristan)]

Acknowledgement

@Canapin

So, maybe the fundamental question here is: why are your posts not acknowledged as you expect them to be?

This question exists in every community. When you abstract the question, it also applies to the social interactions of life in general. Whether you like it or not, the post probably wasn’t valuable enough one way or another to the reader – especially when compared to the other things they are currently dealing with.

Can I make my Topic more valuable to the people I want to read it?

• Could I remove some fluff?
• Would an image help?
• Is it even beneficial for them to deal with this, or is it going to take a lot of resources which they could have better spent elsewhere?

Meta in General

@itsbhanusharma

First & foremost, anyone who is here on meta for any more than a couple of days is basically here because they love the ambience and are trying to be a part of the community around the product i.e. discourse. Meta isn’t a social network or support group to make the participation sugar coated.

Agreed – in fact this whole post is good

Understanding the user

@Jagster

There is one fundamentalist problem plaguing every developer forum. Developers develop for themselves and therefore have difficulty understanding the needs, reactions and desires of the average user.

One thing to consider, is that the Discourse team are also users.

The Ultimate Dogfooding Story

Resources

The team had about 25 people when I looked in June. It’s now 64. That says two things:

1. They have plenty of work to do
2. They have plenty of work to do

They already had thousands of customers at a size of 25. Speaking from experience, they give really really good support to those paying customers. Especially compared to other companies, and especially when you consider the price. Over the last year I’ve had nothing but exemplary levels of support and interaction from the team. @rishabh in particular has been extremely patient with us.

Priority of Bugs

Paying customers find bugs too: if a bug is breaking something essential for a customer, it gets prioritsed. This happens in our business too – the biggest customer gets priority, because without them we can’t afford the things we need to satisfy the smaller customers. Further, the type of bug plays a massive role:

Example

Avatar has border on Published pages
What happens if this isn’t fixed? There is a blue line around an avatar on a page where the avatar isn’t even that important.

Permissions backdoor regarding flagged topics and title changes
What happens if this isn’t fixed? A bad actor can immediately re-publish content which was deemed confidential/inappropriate. What happens if that happens? Well, a paying customer now has a confidentially breach.

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Contributing is about giving

Anything on meta is free. Everything on meta is free. All of the support, all the contributions, all the community. My enjoyment is from using Discourse and learning. I give back by contributing to the community as best I can.

Every contribution is already pre-rewarded with free and unlimited use of cutting edge software.