I’ve been wondering why we get so many Academic theme users asking questions here rather than the authors. It’s in the README (https://themes.gohugo.io/academic/):
I don’t know the authors or use GitHub, could someone suggest or patch that to point to their issue queue, instead? Or their community site?
@maiki I agree with you. I will tag the theme author here. Hopefully we will get a reply.
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We had this discussion before.
Can you please amend your theme’s README to remove the Discourse Hugo forum link for Academic theme support?
Unfortunately we cannot keep up with the volume of support requests for your theme.
It is a very complex theme and the GitHub issue tracker seems like the best place to solve the various issues.
Please do let us know.
@bep created the Themes forum for theme questions such as a subset of the messages which you appear to be referring to (the others being related to Hugo itself).
When users post on these forums, they have a choice to post either a general Hugo related message or a message which is specific to a theme. It’s up to users to judge the most appropriate category to post in. For example, a number of the Academic posts on here are actually general questions on how to install and use Hugo as well as Hugo bug reports. Academic is one of the largest Hugo communities, so embrace it rather than rejecting all those users 
Perhaps there is an opportunity though to rename or emphasise that the Support category is intended strictly for Hugo itself and not Hugo modules or themes.
The influx of Academic theme questions is too much for us to handle, and I want to continue support rather than sort and filter which questions I can assist with. Please remove or change the link. 
It was actually a user of Academic who originally proposed the creation of the Themes forum to @bep for theme specific questions, including those relating to Academic. And as above, @bep created it for this purpose. It’s a community Themes forum, you have absolutely no obligation to reply to any messages here
And no, we do not link to the Hugo Support forum for theme support, as you implied. We link to the top level of the forum where users can choose to ask a Hugo related question or a Theme related question. The majority of Academic users are in academia and haven’t actually used Hugo before, so a number of questions are actually related to Hugo and not specific to Academic.
That’s a really great way to think about it. 
Maybe the About post in the Theme category could be written to make this clear. I’d assumed the Theme category was for discussion about creating or modifying a Theme, rather than using a particular theme.
I have renamed the category to better reflect this.
I think the problem here is that
I suspect there are themes (e.g. the Academic Theme) that have so many features that they require some kind of forum other than GitHub, and it would not be cost effective for them to set up their own Discourse.
I think be should somehow get this to work, and rethink it if it blows up…
On one’s preferences sidebar there are two links under Notifications, which allows one to track or mute categories or users.
Cool word! And I’d say I fall under that descriptor. However, the crux of my advice was missed. The Academic theme’s README does not provide guidance to users. It doesn’t link to the Jupyter or RStudio communities, or quantify the types of questions to ask (we don’t teach web dev).
It makes sense to make that link more descriptive or make it more thorough. As the theme author isn’t receptive to our feedback, I’ll just adjust my approach as moderator, and ensure Academic users get the links they need to answer their questions. I’m sure it will work out.
@maiki One idea would be to amend the Requesting Help topic for Academic theme users to give them the links you suggest and/or also edit the About post in the Using Themes category.
Fact is that we have a theme here that moves its support into the Hugo Discourse. The fact that their own instance of something reminiscing of a support forum is named “chat with the community” as opposed to “ask a question on the forum” linking here should speak for itself. The psychology of “ask” vs. “chat” is clear.
I’ll prepare a sarcastic answer for future support requests for this theme. I learned that this is a community place and there is absolutely no obligation to react to any of my responses then.
On a related note: for some years now I see a development online, where people, who don’t have a clue of the things they are doing, create things in this realm (like themes in WordPress) branding themselves with numbers of installs but somehow defer support either to paid services or those that are “built by the community”.
I wonder if there is a term for that.
Other than that:
Thanks for your reply.
However I am locking this thread now because this is not the place for a flame war.
In the future please refrain from comparing what people do with Wordpress themes vis-à-vis Hugo themes.
Thanks for the understanding.
