The Home Assistant team announced on 29 October 2026 that all of November will be the Month of "What the Heck?!" (WTH). For one month, anyone can post on the community forum about what makes Home Assistant hard, confusing or annoying. The event runs once every two years, and this edition has a different target audience from the previous ones.

Not only for tinkerers

The announcement, signed by Frenck, admits that earlier editions mostly heard from people who write YAML for fun and know what an entity ID is. This year the team explicitly asks three other groups to speak up:

  • new users, who still remember what confused them during setup,
  • people who do not see themselves as technical and just want things to work,
  • household members who live with Home Assistant that a partner, parent, room-mate or child set up. The post calls them the group the team hears from least and can probably learn the most from.

This fits what the Open Home Foundation has been working on this year: making Home Assistant usable for everyone in the home, not just the person who set it up. Frenck's own example is profile pictures. Until Home Assistant 2026.10, only an administrator could change them, and now every user can change their own.

Homework for admins

If you run Home Assistant at home, the team asks you to talk to the people you live with. The post suggests questions such as what annoys them most, whether they can find what they need on the dashboard, whether they understand why the house did something unexpected, and what they would change if they could change one thing. Ideally, they should post their answers in their own words.

Rules for posting

  • Posts go into the Month of "What the Heck?!" category on the forum, and you need a free forum account.
  • Search first, then vote. If someone has already described the problem, vote for the topic and add your story.
  • One WTH per topic. You can create as many topics as you like.
  • Describe the moment, not the solution. What happened, what you expected and why it bothered you, without technical vocabulary.
  • The forum is in English, but you can use a translator or AI. In that case, say so and include the original text in a hidden details block.
  • The mobile app, the documentation and the website count too. Requests for new integrations or apps do not: they belong in a feature request on GitHub, and bugs belong in GitHub issues if you are comfortable there.

What happens to the posts

The team promises to read all of them, but not to fix them all, and votes are not a ranking that guarantees work on a topic. In earlier editions, contributors fixed some reported issues while the month was still running, and the post encourages them to do it again by linking their pull request in the topic.