That sounds a lot like my experience - I originally volunteered to code on the archive, but had to learn ruby first. I got stuck on the tutorial, and, well, I love coding but I really lack internal motivation, so if no one ever asks me how I am doing, I tend to drift off. I basically resigned myself to never being able to work on an open-source project because you have to fight your way uphill to get in, but I was hoping the OTW would be different, since they put so much emphasis on being welcoming to programming newbies. Alas, it didn't work out. About a year later a call for feedback wranglers went out on the coders mailinglist, and I volunteered for that instead. Got a mail saying I was taken as part of the team and to go start wrangling, but I couldn't find out where the comments to be wrangled would be, so I sent a mail back asking for details. After a week I still didn't have a response, so I went to the chatroom to ask there, but no one there could help me either, and someone said "I think they get sent to the team via mail", so I sent another mail asking for clarifications again, and hoped to see bug reports pouring into my mailbox at some point. After sadfacing at my empty mailbox for a month I just gave up all hope of the OTW ever wanting any of my contributions.

Now, I really don't blame the OTW because, literally, STORY OF MY LIFE - and if I have the same problem over and over, obviously it's my problem, not theirs - but it still means that my overwhelming impression of the OTW is one of cold indifference.