Joomla! Forum Moderator Blog

We are currently updating the forum software, it should be back up soon. Apologies for any inconvenience.

The Site & Infrastructure Team

Our Forum will be down for scheduled maintenance on Sunday, August 17, 2008 at 18:00pm UTC (Time and Date). The downtime is estimated to be about 2 hours. For updates see the announcement on the forum.

JoomlaCode.org will be down for scheduled maintenance around Sunday, August 17, 2008 at 5:00am Brisbane time (Time and Date). The downtime is estimated to be about an hour. For updates see the announcement on the forum.

Appologies for any inconvenience, the Site and Infrastructure Team

Most likely if you've been hanging around the Joomla! forums for any amount of time, you've seen or heard of Brad Baker.

Brad is the Sites and Infrastructure Working Group Coordinator on the Core Team. As well as filling that role, he has also been our
Forum Administrator since the forums' begninning nearly three years ago.

As the Joomla! community and project continue to grow, the responsibilities of the Sites and Infrastructure team increase. Brad has decided to take a broader approach to all S&I endevours, leaving forum moderating and administrating to the Forum Workgroup that he has helped largely to foster and grow.

As a forum moderator, I cannot possibly count the amount of times an obvious solution to a forum issue has been "Ask Brad."   And always with a quick and sensible answer, he never left us hanging.  Thankfully, he has taught us well and we have all learned a lot from his leadership.

For what its worth, I'm not even sure if he ever actually stood up and volunteered to be this Great Leader.  But he was.  And are we ever lucky for that!

We'll miss Brad on the Forum Workgroup for sure, but he won't be far away:

"I intend to keep working on S&I stuff.. but keeping a general role, rather
than focussing on something like the forum. I still intend to be around of
course." ~ Brad Baker

Make no mistake, he is not leaving Joomla!, or the Core Team. And we will surely still see him around on the forums.

Brad, thanks.

You may have noticed something a little different on the Joomla! Forums the last couple of days. A little restructuring has been going on. It seems like every few months, the Global Mods put their heads together along with the other Moderators to try to make the Forum more effective. I can say that this time, I think we have done just that.

How many times have we seen that written in the forums, in one way or another?  And you know what, I agree.  Every last one of them.  Wait, who is the Joomla Support Staff?

That's right... there isn't a support staff.  New users to the forum frequently make the mistake of blaming unanswered posts on the failings of the nonexistent "support staff".

Sure, we've got forum moderators and administrators.  They are tasked with making sure the posts are in the right forums, that the posts follow the rules, signatures are in line with the guidelines, etc.

But while forum moderators frequently take the time to answer questions in the topics they moderate, that is merely a bonus.  The forum moderators are not responsible for answering support questions.

The Joomla! forum is entirely the responsibility of the community itself.  Every individual forum user has the ability to answer a question or two.  The more questions each user answers, at their own ability level, the fewer questions are left unanswered. 

I encourage everyone to read and answer as many questions as they can, because quite frankly that's the best way to learn.  Answering the questions you know and reading the ones you don't will eventually make you a Joomla! expert.