I am a massive Roots fan and I love this forum (despite being a little quiet here for a while). I really respect the people here and love to hear their thoughts and opinions on how to use Roots effectively. From time to time we get a few questions from people which are slightly less Roots specific- for example more generic WordPress or CSS issues. Most of these questions get answered but are quickly closed with a “This topic is now closed. New replies are no longer allowed” message. I totally understand we need to keep things specific to Roots here otherwise it will get cluttered.
However, it would be great if there was a place that Roots people could ask slightly less Roots-centric but web dev questions. For example best practices for WordPress in general or web dev. Sure there are many other great forums such as StackOverflow, but I’m interested in what the community here thinks on the matter. There have been a few times when someone asks a great non-Roots question only for it to be closed.
This isn’t a criticism. The main forum does need to be specific to Roots and should remain so. I just wondered whether there was the possibility of a kind of sub forum where those of us who’d like to chat about more general web dev stuff could be.
Please feel free to disagree- not that I need to say that!
It is criticism, but it’s constructive and therefore welcome. Thanks.
It’s always going to be a bit subjective as to whether or not a general question will pass the “interestingness threshold”. I try to keep the interesting topics open, but if you can point me to where I’ve been overzealous, I’ll happily reconsider.
I may even use the auto-close in future, allowing for a little reconsideration time. I’m sure the other mods will take the comments on board too.
The main issue is that Discourse is flat, so we can’t have a sub-forum. It would have to be a separate category and that category would be mixed in with everything else. It’s far from ideal because, as you recognised, the forum needs to remain Roots-centric.
Maybe an off-topic category with a week long auto-close is a fair compromise? I don’t like it as a solution, but I guess that’s why it’s a compromise. I don’t know how Ben, Scott and Chris will feel about it though.
I’ll admit to being biased about the topics I’ll close, but for good reason. I’ve left open, and replied in threads about topics we care about like deploying WP or Vagrant, etc. Some of them haven’t been Roots/Bedrock specific but we’re trying to help people learn these tools so we’ll leave those threads open. On the flip side, we aren’t here to teach people the basics of CSS or Bootstrap, especially since those topics have way better resources all over the web. So they’ll usually get closed.
I’m all for encouraging good discussion, but it’s usually those basic CSS ones that don’t promote it either. @iagdotme: do you have any examples of threads that you thought shouldn’t have been closed?
OK, it’s constructive criticism, but it was more of a discussion starter than anything. At the end of the day unless you have forum rules it’s going to be fairly subjective as to whether you close a thread or not. You can have rules such as “please only post content related directly to Roots” but how effective that would be I don’t know.
It’s a shame that Discourse doesn’t allow sub-forums. Since that is the case I think that the forum should remain Roots-centric. The off-topic category with the week long auto-close is an interesting idea although I am not sure about how effective it would be.
@swalkinshaw raises an interesting point about leaving posts about deployment and Vagrant. This is basically where I am at. I, like many here, want to improve their development and learn best practices. The Roots forum seems the best place for this- mainly because of the expertise of everyone here. I’m eager to improve the way I work with Roots but also WordPress in general and if we can discuss general best practices of deployment, vagrant, Grunt, Roots, WordPress, HTML5, CSS3, Javascript, jQuery and so on I’d love it. Maybe their could be sticky threads on each topic, eg Deployment, Vagrant, Bedrock, General WP best practices that might work? Of course it might just be me who would find this helpful. If so, please feel free to ignore!
iagdotme…I agree with you on a massive respect for these Roots people, along with a desire to bounce some other WP specific questions. I didn’t get into WordPress until last year, and after looking at Roots, Bones and Underscores, I dove into WP with Roots, and have since built about 20 Roots sites since. To me, Roots and WordPress are inseparable, and the ability to ask WP questions would be cool.
But seriously, this can’t be a place for general WordPress questions — those should be posted on the WordPress StackExchange. We’ve also seen lots of generic CSS/JS/Bootstrap questions. Most of the time the questions are easily answered by either the Codex or a quick Google search.
I see four posts just from today that don’t fit in. If we didn’t have to deal with these types of threads it’d be a lot nicer around here!
Hey Ben, sorry I was one of the four that made an inappropriate post but as a coding newbie I didn’t even know what other resources to use – My apologies. I agree that it should be Roots mainly, but I like the idea for workflow ideas, tips and tricks, etc that the “Pros” (because you guys made something amazing) are using these days. I’ve been teaching myself PHP and JS for the past week now, and just looking through this site has helped me get a site up and running with Roots. Understanding what Composer, Capistrano, and Vagrant will be next weeks learning for me… Hope it’s not too difficult and useful. Thanks again!
