So, after two years, I've finally gone and done it.

I've unchecked the box that enables people to contact me via drupal.org. It pains me to have to do this, because there are legitimate reasons to use this form to contact me.

An incredibly common complaint about Drupal is in that its terminology is often arcane and difficult to understand. And while the substance of these complaints are actually right, many people come to what I consider the wrong conclusion, and it's this wrong conclusion that is actually the root of what is currently wrong with Drupal's use of terminology.

Let's take a look at some actual problems with terminology.

Taxonomy

Ok, if the first sentence of your comment is "I'm sorry, this isn't really related to this post" I'm going to delete your comment without reading it.

If you are having a problem with a module, http://drupal.org/support -- your resources are there. My blog -- and as far as I know, pretty much all blogs -- are not a Q&A. Nor is my email box, for those of you have forgotten my rant on that topic from last year.

Forums. Issue queue. These are where support requests go. Thanks.

Step 1: Abuse your administrative privileges to post a discussion in a place reserved for announcements and marketing material.
Step 2: Actively insult most of the primary contributors to the project.
Step 3: Use misinformation to back up your salient points.
Step 4: Refuse to stop using this misinformation after you get called on it.
Step 5: Insist that "how things are" is different from how things are.
Step 6: Insist that you're saying something different from what you're saying. Ignore it when people call you on it.

If you're one of those people who wants to help with Views, but you have no idea what to do, and your helping is going to require me to spend more time explaining the architecture to you than I would spend actually getting work done, your help is not valuable to me.

Sorry if this comes off as mean, but right now I'm a giant freakin' obstacle and I'm getting a little tired of having it pointed out to me twice daily, with a whole bunch of people offering to help, but few apparently willing to do things the Drupal Way and just read the damn code, figure out what needs to be done and do it.

In Drupal 6, FAPI 3 is finally getting to the point where it's powerful enough to do some of the things that it's been a real bear to do with it. For one, in Drupal 6 it now has image buttons, and using form alter you can now directly replace a regular submit button with an image button pretty easily. And submit buttons have their own submit and validate functions attached, so it's now very easy to have different buttons operate completely independently. This is a major improvement.

"Jesse", a blogger who apparently has just one article and either wants to build a reputation for a new venture or simply wants to be anonymous (hard to say which) posted a fairly long article on his site called 4 problems with Drupal.

I read this article, and I started out a little annoyed. It makes some false or at least misleading assertions. I immediately commented on one obvious one, and then as I thought about it, I felt a need to address the entirety of his arguments, because they are, in all, flawed.

This started as a comment, and it blossomed and became a full fledged blog post. I was responding to someone who, not wanting to defend people who didn't deserve it, did want to point a little to the otherside. And I'm basically in agreement with him.

I don't really have a problem with the initial email I received. I was a little frustrated because I got a bunch of them at once (and oddly, I've gotten more since I posted this) and I realized that if I didn't try to ebb that flow a dam was going to burst. But the real issue to me was his response to my brush-off.

I understand that Drupal is pretty difficult. I spend a lot of time working to make it less difficult and more flexible. Good UI is *hard* and I haven't really created a good UI for Views, merely a passable one. I respect that. But people who follow my blog know that I've been very interested in Drupal's administrative UI and trying to make it both easier to use and more flexible. Sometimes those are the same thing; sometimes they are not.

This message, with the email address removed out of courtesy, was received this morning. I left in the original he replied to as context.

You get the emails because you created the module. Are you surprised?
There's not great of documentation on how to expand your module, there's
no FAQ, or anything of the sort.

Unfortunately, that's just another thing wrong with drupal. Besides being
overly hard to learn / use, and new (non-backwards compatible) versions
every 6 months or so, there seems to be a huge lack of support for
modules.

I suppose it's an obvious symptom of lacking basic features straight out

As of today, requests for support via email (i.e, my contact form either here or on drupal.org) will be denied.

I’ve received four of them today, and I’m appalled. Normally I do what I can to help people who email me, but this is starting to snowball out of control. I’m not your technical support. There are channels for that. There’s the drupal.org support forums. There’s #drupal-support. If there are bugs or you think there are bugs, there’s the issues queue. But emailing me directly is rather rude. I’m sorry that my software is confusing, I really am. But honestly, would you rather I stop working on it entirely because I’ve run out of resources for it? And yea, usually if I’m in the IRC and you ask me there (publically) I’ll help you out.