community-health-review

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

1. 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.
2. Find the unanswered questions. An unanswered question is a public signal the community is dying — and it compounds (developers stop asking).
3. Design triage + response SLAs so the answered-question rate and time-to-first-response improve: who watches, how fast, how it escalates.
4. 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.
5. Design the contributor ladder — user → answerer → contributor → ambassador — with recognition that rewards genuine help, not volume (no pay-to-post).
6. 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.