What Joe Mooring Can Teach Us About Top-Notch Forum Support

Joe Mooring is a contributor (among other useful things) over at the Hugo forum. At the time of this writing, if you look at all-time users ordered by likes received, you’ll see he’s in 3rd place.

I used to be in 3rd place (the bulk of my contributions were from 2018 to early 2021), but I’ve been out of the game lately, and he’s been very much in the game. It’s quite fun to watch, actually.

If you do your due diligence and ask a sincere question, he’ll often reply in kind. He is, in my estimation, the king of creating a minimal, reproducible example. Here are a few samples from the top of his activity feed: one, two, three, four, five, six. I could go on.

Notice what he does. He’s got a GitHub repo, hugo-testing, that’s dedicated to, well, hugo testing. And man it’s nifty. The flow is roughly:

1. Determine that a forum question, or github issue, is worthy of reproducing
2. Cut a new branch and do the work
3. Post the steps to test it

git clone --single-branch -b <branch-name> https://github.com/jmooring/hugo-testing <branch-name>
cd <branch-name>
hugo server

How convenient is that?! It’s white-glove treatment as far as I’m concerned.

This page was linked on the Hugo forum. See what kind words other folks are saying about Mr. Mooring.