An Earnest Request to Suffusion Users

Dear Users of Suffusion,

I have a sincere request for you. As you are aware, I tackle the support for the theme at the forum. Of late I have noticed an incredible number of queries on the forum asking for assistance regarding various aspects of the theme. To provide you some statistics, I opened up the forum in October for public use and the first support request came in on 21st October. Up until this point I have written 758 responses to different queries. Simple arithmetic would indicate that I have posted no less than 11 responses on an average each day (more than 15 each working day). While this is high, intermittently the numbers have been astronomical, with me requiring to respond at least 20 times each day.

To cut a long story short, I would like to request you to note the following before you post:

1. Please search the forums thoroughly. Trust me when I tell you that more than 80% of questions are reposts of issues that other people have had. E.g. if your featured posts are not working, there is a chance that you have defined only one post as featured. If your magazine template is not working, it is probably because you haven’t assigned a post to this template. Questions regarding how to change the font colors etc have been answered not less than 10 times.
2. Please do some due diligence at your end and be as informative as you can. E.g. a question asking “Can you tell me what is wrong?” should be accompanied at least by your blog’s URL. Also, if you have changed the PHP files at your end, that is akin to voiding the warranty of the theme. If something breaks after you have edited the PHP, I would first suggest replacing your changes with a backup. If you don’t have a backup, there is always the official theme release page for download.
3. This is a site for a theme and the forum is for the theme, too. I understand that the theme is lacking good documentation and I will strive towards making it better. However, posting general WordPress questions and CSS questions that have nothing to do with the theme are very distracting. Some of the questions are alright, but make sure that you have searched the WordPress plugins repository for non-standard functionality. Some of the plugins you might find useful are Widget Logic for controlling which widget appears on which page, My Category Order to change the order in which categories are displayed, My Link Order to change the order in which links are displayed, Sociable for inserting social bookmarks in posts etc. I keep adding functionality to the theme all the time, but in the meanwhile, please use the plugins available from WordPress to substitute the functionality.

Please note that I am supporting the theme free of cost. Completely. I seriously doubt there is another free theme with free support that tackles this kind of query volume. Any support query that I have to answer takes time away from development. So please be considerate when you post your support queries.

Cheers,
Sayontan
(Furiously working away on release 3.1.5, while 3.1.0 is still pending approval at WordPress!)

PS: I hope I haven’t alienated any users, but please try to see this from my point of view.