| name | community-health-review |
| description | Diagnose a developer community by the metrics that matter — answered-question rate, time-to-first-response, returning contributors, and sentiment — not member or follower count. Use to assess a forum/Discord/Discussions/Stack Overflow presence and design ops that fix unanswered questions. |
Skill: Community-health review
Score a developer community by whether developers get unblocked and come back — not
by how many people joined. A community is a garden, not a megaphone.
When to use
- You don't know whether your developer community is healthy or dying.
- Questions sit unanswered and you need an ops design to fix it.
- Leadership is tracking member/follower count and missing the real signal.
Procedure
- Measure the health metrics, not vanity:
- Answered-question rate — % of questions that get a useful answer.
- Time-to-first-response — how long a question waits.
- Returning contributors — people who come back and help others.
- Sentiment — tone of threads (frustrated vs. productive).
Member/follower/message counts are context, not health.
- Find the unanswered questions. An unanswered question is a public signal the
community is dying — and it compounds (developers stop asking).
- Design triage + response SLAs so the answered-question rate and
time-to-first-response improve: who watches, how fast, how it escalates.
- Capture canonical answers back into docs/samples (route to
devrel-content-engineer) so the same question isn't re-asked forever, and route
recurring pain to developer-advocate for the product-feedback loop.
- Design the contributor ladder — user → answerer → contributor → ambassador —
with recognition that rewards genuine help, not volume (no pay-to-post).
- Capture it in the
community-health-review template.
Output
A scored health review (answered-question rate, TTFR, returning contributors,
sentiment), an ops design, and a contributor-ladder plan.
Anti-patterns
- Reporting community health as member/follower count.
- Letting first questions go unanswered (the broken-window effect).
- Pay-to-post incentives that reward volume over genuine help.
