Reminder: Your Email Account Must Be Valid

Since the only way we have to get in touch with pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party authors is their emails, we’re going to be enforcing that you have a valid email that goes to a human being for you plugins.

This simple statement covers a multitude of situations but to clarify, we’re talking about the email associated with the user accounts that have commit access to your plugins.

Go to https://wordpress.org/plugins/YOUR-PLUGIN/admin/ and look at the people listed under Committers. Those accounts are who we email when there’s an issue with a plugin, or when we’re alerting you to new WordPress updates. Those emails must go to real human beings. It can be a shared email box (goodness knows plugins is a shared email box) but real people have to read those emails because without that, we cannot communicate with you.

We strongly suggest you whitelist plugins@wordpress.org

The following email situations may result in your plugin being closed if we can’t find a way to communicate with you:

Invalid Emails

If your email bounces, your plugin gets closed. We can only assume that a dead email means you’re done with things, and since we have no way to contact you, your plugin can only be considered unsupportable. If you notice your plugin is closed and you didn’t get an email from us, check your account’s email. If that’s not right, that’s probably why.

Auto-Replies

If your email has an auto-reply, such as the sort that goes to a support ticket generator, stop it. This makes it nigh impossible for us to communicate with you, we can never tell if a human has read the email, and we get a mail box filled with auto-replies which means you’re the reason plugin reviews are backlogged. We will normally email you one sternly worded warning about this. If it keeps up, your plugin may be closed.

2-Step Verification

If your email auto-replies and asks people to click or reply in a special way to ensure our email gets to you, guess what? Half the time that doesn’t work. We often get expired tokens because it takes us more than 24 hours to get through all the emails in our queue, and once that happens we have no way to get our email to you.

Deceased Authors

This is a touchy subject so I apologize in advance. If a plugin author has died and we can verify this, we remove their account’s access to their plugins (and usually reset their passwords to something random). This is in the interest of security, as doing so will prevent any possible issues if their account is hacked. We do not close the plugins. If there are co-committers, they will be notified. Otherwise the plugin will simply remain in place. Taking over those plugins is a similarly touchy subject, and priority will be given to their coworkers or close friends/family who are also WordPress developers.

#email, #reminder, #repository, #security