Being as close as we are to the the San Fransisco Bay area and the regional Drupal dev concentration that it is, I often wondered if there are any active Drupal developers, implementers and users in the Sacramento, CA region. If there are enough we could probably pull a local meet up or something together.

Leave a comment if interested.

I am taking the week off from Drupal.org forum support. Maybe longer for a bit. Don't know yet.

A lot of new people install Drupal and I and others try and help them. I and others try and give them links, support documentation, and bring them into the community. Show folks how to effectively contribute.

Often some new folks post demands or 'tell off' the community without bothering to familiarize themselves with the Drupal project, it's history, it's mission or it's principles When you try and explain the 'why' something is done in a certain way or how to contribute effectively, you are accused of being rude, arrogant, smug, condescending and elitist. Some people instantly assume that those working on a complex project for years know nothing about it.

The accuser so obviously hasn't bothered to spend the least amount of time learning about the project. That alone is the height of arrogance and indicates the contempt they hold for people they don't know, haven't met and haven't bothered to introduce themselves too... Still you try and help them. Explain further with more words and more links. Sometimes this works and folks begin to see a path forward for them which is great.

Lately though, some have accused me rather offensively about things I did not say or do across several forum posts and calling me rude, arrogant, smug and condescending. I don't know about anyone else but I do not come home from work, play with my kid and then sit down thinking... 'ha ha ha I can talk down to people now!'. How many more words do I have to use to explain something without some stranger accusing me of doing something offensive? Often these folks don't bother trying to find out how to contribute. When you answer them. No matter how verbose or nice you try and be. No matter how many words you try and use. They come back and accuse you of things, out of context or things I did not say at all. It's hard trying to filter years of knowledge and history of a complex subject/project into a post to answer someone who hasn't bothered to listen or learn but have someone else just do for them.

I fully expect my critics to step up and fill in the gaps of support as obviously they are much more cordial then I am.

I have other things I could be doing. I think I shall do them. I shall do these other things for the people that want to learn get involved and contribute effectively.

Earlier this year I turned on comments and I've heard back from some nice folks. I had all the comments from anonymous go into moderation. This was a little time consuming but not to bad.

Last week I got around 80 spam messages in the moderation queue. That was annoying so I did what I had been putting off for a while, installed the captcha module and turned it on. I am using the math captcha check and so far it seems to be working nicely. (knock on wood).

Let's see how long that lasts.