Since deploying the newcomer homepage in May 2019, we've looked at how often different components of the page are used. The page contains two ways for a newcomer to ask a question: the help module and the mentorship module. In the former, the question goes to the community help desk, and in the latter, it goes to the user's mentor.
After several months of usage, the following is how many users have asked questions via the help module and mentorship module (as of 2019-09-09):
This shows that the mentorship module is uniformly more popular across our target wikis -- about 15x more popular. Therefore, to reduce the number of distractions on the page, we want to remove the ability to ask a question from the help module. Specifically:
- Remove the button from the help module enabling the user to ask a question. We may not want to actually remove the code, in case we need this ability again in the future.
- Remove the "Your recent questions" section for all users, even those who have asked questions. The number of users who have actually asked questions is quite low, and few of them are likely to come back and view their homepage again at this point.
