So I've been looking around a bit at the documentation other projects have.
End user documentation seems to suck basically everywhere, relying on clever UI's. So I wondered what do we ship with?
Should we do a brief intro into registering, profile and posting?
Should we do a link off like SMF?
Should we maybe do Facebook style wizard guiding you through? Maybe some [?] boxes?
What is a visitor dropping by a site most likely to need to know, in order to use the site?
How can they do that thing?
(this is Trekkie's idea we discussed slightly before: target beginner documentation [at least] to the thing to do, to the "how can I", or "what can I do on this", rather than a dry description of the plain static sections/fields of the site.)
Also... Could we have more "quick help" bits all along the default interface? Those tiny little '?' that popup what is the thing for.
(ETA: you already said that, lol. Yes, lets check the interface... hmm, looking quickly at profile, and post, screens, I can see many places which don't have any, but it's not clear to me if they need any... "Notify me of replies"? "Don't use smileys" - well, if you want it, you probably know what's for? Dunno.)
ETA2: moderation areas can use some, they have almost no documentation/explanation/descriptions.
About docs: I was thinking, just generally related, that with this splitting of drop menu code into layout and eye candy I could easily do a brief screenshots + blurb intro for it. Have pix with arrows pointing at bits, names on the bits, and blurb telling what they do. That should make things even easier, if anyone reads it. I remember years ago when I first started playing with drop menus. They nearly drove me mental. :D