Agenda for May 18th Support Meeting

The weekly support meeting will be held on Thursday, May 18th, 2023, 17:00 UTC in #forums on SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/.. (a Slack account is required)

Headlines / Community updates

This is where news that are relevant or good to know for the team from across the community are brought up and shared.

WordPress 6.2.1

WordPress 6.2.1 was released this week. It had some drawbacks, let’s discuss and see if there’s any notable feedback from the community and users not already being tracked that we should be aware of, or report upstream.

Private moderator channel status

A quick status update that rosetta users have all received invitations, and those accepting them have started funneling into the previously mentioned private moderators channel.

Revisiting the discussion about adding reasons when flagging accounts

Some time has passed, and it would be nice to go through the feedback from https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/6834 and address any lingering concerns, and see if we can reach an agreement on the way forward.

Checking in with international liaisons

This is the section where we reach out to the non-English speaking parts of our community, to see how they are doing, if there’s anything we can help each other with, or just interesting things going on that it would be nice to share with others.

There’s no requirements for previous participation or “fame” to share here, anyone is welcome, and we encourage newcomers to participate!

Unable to make the meeting, or maybe meetings just aren’t your thing? We would still love to hear how things are going in other non-English speaking parts of our community. Please feel free to let us know via the comment section below, in your own time, if there is anything you’d like to share, any questions or concerns you have, or just to let us know you’re doing OK!

We will make a habit of putting this callout with every agenda post going forward, so that everyone has a chance to join in.

For any other items to discuss, please add them to the comments below, or bring them up in the meeting.

X-post: WordPress Contributor Mentorship Program: Pilot Program Proposal

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X-post: Proposal: Retiring Older Default Themes

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Agenda for May 11th Support Meeting

The weekly support meeting will be held on Thursday, May 11th, 2023, 17:00 UTC in #forums on SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/.. (a Slack account is required)

Support and AI-provided replies or resources

AI is all the rage these days, it’s the latest hip thing to mix into anything and everything, and one of the areas where it’s likely to be a noteworthy gamechanger is support (remember those support robots we’ve had for a few years?).

Of course, it is only natural for this to also affect the WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ side of support as well, which is why the topic should be discussed, to ensure that the support team has a unified view on how these tools are used in a support-context on our platforms.

There are both positives, and negatives to using AI to help with formulating replies, let’s discuss things from both sides of it, what are your opinions? What is acceptable use, what is not, where should the line be drawn?

We’d like to hear opinions not only from those who moderate, but also those who use the forums, either by seeking help, providing help, or anything in between; this is a great opportunity to help shape the direction of some potential new guidelines.

Support ticket triage session – May 4th, 2023 at 08:00 UTC 

🪲 It’s time for another bug scrub.

A huge thank you to everyone that contributed to the previous bug scrubs. In this session, we will be looking at the next 10 tickets from the component with normal priority.

This aims to be part of a series of bug scrubs in order to scan the entire support forums ticket component. If you want to help to host a bug scrub, feel free to reach out.

This ticket triage session will be held on Thursday, May 4th, 2023, 08:00 UTC in #forums on SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. (a Slack account is required).

We all love Support Forums – It’s where we learn and help at the same time. In order to make this a better place, we constantly come up with new enhancements, requested via tickets. Some of these need a push forward.

We are putting aside some time to triage tickets, trying to gather some helpful input about what we think about them and how we can help to move them forward. Please keep in mind that our work actually helps metaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. contributors to pick the most needed tickets and work on them.

🌎 As a long-term plan, we will be alternating the time slots for these meetings:

The chosen hour is not friendly with your time zone, unable to make the session, or maybe meetings just aren’t your thing. If the latter, you should still come and meet us – you’ll change your mind about boring meetings. 😊 We would still love to know your opinion on the issues mentioned in the tickets. Please feel free to let us know via a comment on the respective tickets.

X-post: What’s new on Learn WordPress in April 2023

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Summary for April 27th Support Meeting

The weekly support meeting was held on Thursday, April 27th, 2023, 17:00 UTC in #forums on SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/.. Read the transcript at your own pace (a Slack account is required)

Community headlines and updates

This is where news that are relevant or good to know for the team from across the community are brought up and shared.

Facilitating for sponsored volunteers

This weeks chat was primarily focused towards how the team can facilitate for sponsored volunteers, with the expectations this provides both from a team perspective, but also from the sponsoring side.

There’s definitely a place here for a followup post dedicated to gathering input from folks asynchronously, that were unable to attend the weekly meeting, and we will do just that. That gives time to also prepare suggestions for on-boarding and off-boarding routines, and document these.

Having a known schedule for volunteers would help with repeated tasks performed throughout the day on the international forums. It would also help leverage moderation on rosetta forums that may otherwise not have the same level of active volunteers already.

Another important element to keep in mind that we need to ensure that those who are sponsored have the access needed to carry out the tasks that are expected of them.

Some other elements that were brought up (and will be more thoroughly covered in the followup post) were the forum-password-resets email inbox, which is used to help users who are unable to reset their passwords, but is also where banned users are asked to reach out. This is an area where de-escalation experience is worth a lot, and the added benefit of support network sponsored volunteers often have that an individual might not have, would play in.

We recommend reading the discussion in its entirety during the meeting for those who wish to get a full picture of the current suggestions, as a prelude to the dedicated discussion on the topic.


Leonard Cohen – Hallelujah (Live at Glastonbury)

#weekly-chat

Summary for April 20th Support Meeting

The weekly support meeting was held on Thursday, April 20th, 2023, 17:00 UTC in #forums on SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/.. Read the transcript at your own pace (a Slack account is required)

Community headlines and updates

This is where news that are relevant or good to know for the team from across the community are brought up and shared.

Private Forum Moderators Channel

Support moderators have been given a new channel for private discussions. These are for topics that should not be discussed in public for various reasons, such as privacy concerns for users involved, or just to ensure that the team provides a unified response to an ongoing highly opinionated discussion.

The team is slowly rolling this out to include our volunteers on rosetta forums as well, and hope to start sending out invited in the next 1-2 weeks, reaching out first to only invite those who have an interest in it.

Request for input: Support Status

Data and statistics can help guide a lot of decisions, and also give insights into how things are going as a whole.

There is a call for input on what kind of information people would find interesting at https://make.wordpress.org/support/2023/04/request-for-input-support-stats/

When collecting information though, it is important to see it as a whole, and as chance would have it, a great article was shared at https://www.commsor.com/post/how-to-be-a-good-community-data-analyst about this on the same day as our meeting, giving some good thoughts and insights into just that.


Fonzi M – Sincerely (From “Violet Evergarden”)

#weekly-chat

Agenda for April 27th Support Meeting

The weekly support meeting will be held on Thursday, April 27th, 2023, 17:00 UTC in #forums on SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/.. (a Slack account is required)

Headlines / Community updates

This is where news that are relevant or good to know for the team from across the community are brought up and shared.

Opening up for more sponsored volunteers

Support is currently one of the teams where it’s been hard to find new regular contributors, and a previously fairly close-knit group.

With Five for the Future being a driving factor in bringing in consistent participation from sponsored volunteers, let’s look at what this would be like within the support team.

As some of you may have taken note of, we’ve had a really good experience with testing this for a little while now with some sponsored volunteers, and it would be beneficial to extend this.

With sponsored volunteers comes some expectations, both from the team, but also from the sponsor side of things, and this is something we need to take into account. This means it is unlikely to be a reasonable use of time to put a sponsored volunteer to answer forum topics all day (although beneficial to have some focused time to address community ran plugins or theme reviews and support requests, such as anything maintained by the WordPress.org user account), but that they are instead someone with a fixed schedule that can be leveraged for tasks that would otherwise be unfair to burden volunteers with, for example.

This means that we would expect a commitment from those who sponsor time, but we also need to provide those sponsored individuals with the access needed to perform the tasks.

How can we best facilitate for such an intake of potential new fresh eyes and eager participants?
What tasks do we envision would be good to have handled on fixed schedules, that are not currently so?
What are your thoughts?

Checking in with international liaisons

This is the section where we reach out to the non-English speaking parts of our community, to see how they are doing, if there’s anything we can help each other with, or just interesting things going on that it would be nice to share with others.

There’s no requirements for previous participation or “fame” to share here, anyone is welcome, and we encourage newcomers to participate!

Unable to make the meeting, or maybe meetings just aren’t your thing? We would still love to hear how things are going in other non-English speaking parts of our community. Please feel free to let us know via the comment section below, in your own time, if there is anything you’d like to share, any questions or concerns you have, or just to let us know you’re doing OK!

We will make a habit of putting this callout with every agenda post going forward, so that everyone has a chance to join in.

For any other items to discuss, please add them to the comments below, or bring them up in the meeting.

Support ticket triage session – April 26th 2023 at 08:00 UTC 

🪲 It’s time for another bug scrub.

In our last 6 bug scrubs in 2023, we had a look at first 60 tickets with normal priority. 🎉 That is 60%. A huge thank you to everyone that contributed in the previous bug scrubs. In this session, we will be looking at the next 10 tickets from the component with normal priority.

This aims to be part of a series of bug scrubs in order to scan the entire support forums ticket component. If you want to help to host a bug scrub, feel free to reach out.

This ticket triage session will be held on Wednesday, April 26th, 2023, 08:00 UTC in #forums on SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. (a Slack account is required).

We all love Support Forums – It’s where we learn and help at the same time. In order to make this a better place, we constantly come up with new enhancements, requested via tickets. Some of these need a push forward.

We are putting aside some time to triage tickets, trying to gather some helpful input about what we think about them and how we can help to move them forward. Please keep in mind that our work actually helps metaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. contributors to pick the most needed tickets and work on them.

🌎 As a long term plan, we will be alternating the time slots for these meetings:

The chosen hour is not friendly with your time zone, unable to make the session or maybe meetings just aren’t your thing? If the latter, you should still come and meet us – you’ll change your mind about boring meetings. 😊 We would still love to know your opinion on the issues mentioned in the tickets. Please feel free to let us know via a comment on the respective tickets.