Great scott!

Do you want to see what a mass exodus looks like?  Check out the trackbacks on this entry over at Mena's Corner.

Today Six Apart, the company formed by bloggings Dynamic Duo Ben and Mena Trott, announced the immediate availability of Movable Type 3.0 Developer Edition.  Oh and they had another small announcement; new license and usage restrictions.

Apparently the idea that if you have more than one author and/or three blogs, you must pony up a rather large sum of money has not been met with the accolades and cheers that one would expect.  Oh no, in stark contrast to that assumption, the announcement has been met with loud rumblings of "What the f**ck", and "Wow, thanks for that knife in the back!" and my personal favorite, "My wife and I have an MT family blog for friends and family.  Two authors equals $100!!!  We're moving to WordPress."

On the WordPress IRC channel #wordpress, photomatt, aka Allusion, aka Matt Mullenwefjkdsjfk (or something along those lines.) had this to say:
* photomatt is not prepared for the coming flood of users
And of course we had many good and useful suggestions:
photomatt: get a raincoat photomatt: build a levy learn to swim

We just love to be helpful.

But that does raise an interesting question, how are we as a community going to handle the influx of new users that this announcement is going to create?  WordPress is probably the fastest growing Personal Publishing System in use today, and for good reason.  We have some of the most vibrant and dedicated developers and support community that money hasn't bought^TM.  Because of this we have been able, in a short amount of time, to create a world class system that is almost infinately extensible through a very easy to use plugin system, standards compliance and semantic elegance.

The numbers of active users is going to explode in the next couple of months, and with that the need for better documentation and a dedicated team of volunteers to act as a support clearing house.  Some very talented and dedicated people are already on the job improving the documentation, a tip o' the hat to Cena and Craig; so I would like to take this opportunity to suggest that we in the community who are inclined to user support band together and form a team much like the doco team to help better enable the developers to live up to their title, and develop.

Basically we would be tasked with trolling through the Support Forum answering questions, and point people in the direction of examples and tutorials on using WordPress.  We would also need to write the aforementioned Tutorials of course, but that is neither here nor there.  There are already a number of us who are doing this, so I would think that it would be a logical step to make it somewhat official and structured.  Something like have one or two (depending on category size) member(s) of the team responsible for a given area of the Forum, e.g. Bob would be responsible for answering questions in How to & Troubleshooting, while Joe is in charge of answering quandries in Installation.

This is of course just an example.  We could just have a support free-for-all, where questions are answered on a first come, first serve basis.  Doesn't matter to me.

So what say you?  Is there any energy on this topic, or am I off in left field as usual?  Leave some comments and let's talk about it.