Is magento as small as the forum suggests?

[bcsteeve]

I'm sure someone can answer this in 2 seconds.

I'm new here.  Like... 2 minutes new.  One of the first things that grabbed my attention is that the most popular thread on this forum has roughly 2000 posts.  Magento is supposedly running on some 30% of ecommerce sites while Zencart supposedly harbors < 2%, yet the ZC forums have tens of thousands of posts.

So either this community is relatively dead (and that's not a good thing if I hope to get support) or else the forums get regularly pruned.

So I'm just looking to see how quickly I get a response, and what your overall feeling is on the kind of support you get on these forums.  For example, say I wanted to change XYZ so it said "Black" instead of "White" and I was having trouble finding how to do that, could I expect an answer here in a reasonable amount of time?

Forgive the dumbish question.  I'm recovering from a horrific experience with another software suite because I didn't do my lework ahead of time.  Trying not to repeat that.

[chiefair]

MagEBay upgraded the forum software earlier this year and completely dumped all the old messages going back to the beginning, after having a no-post hiatus for 6-9 months as they couldn't figure out how to stop spamming with the old forum software.

Since people actively needed support, they went elsewhere for support discussions, often of higher quality and better programming calibre as the other sites put a heavy restriction on module vultures and developer vampires that would take over a thread with barely helpful self-promotion and also could successfully fend off longer and larger/credit card/fake documents for sale spam.

With the new software, a lot of that garbage posting was eliminated and we have more active moderators, so support here is slowly coming back online at MagEBay's Magento forums.

Stackoverflow.com is a place where programming questions are actively discussed mostly dealing with php, layout, templates, just be sure to tag it as Magento as there's lots more discussed than just this one sideline e-commerce platform.

Magento.Stackexchange.com is a place where other administrative, setup, programming, etc questions can be answered and is devoted to Magento support.

And that posts in the 100+ range up there at the side, for me was in the thousands originally, so heh, a lot was lost when they dumped all the previous content from all the contributors who spent lots of hours either trying to figure out how to run it, debug it or create new modules/features for it.

[bcsteeve · Accepted solution]

Fantastic response.  Fully explained and the kind of helpful things I'd hope from a support community, especially on the type of question it was.

Thank you.