tobifjellner (Tor-Bjorn “Tobi” Fjellner) 12:36 pm on March 5, 2025  

About the Spectator role in the WordPress support forums

The WordPress forums is a space where people communicate with each other to request and provide support. If a company or brand use a branded account as the owner of a 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 (or theme), such an account usually gets the support role “Spectator”, which means that this account is NOT allowed to post in the forums.

In February-March 2025 this situation has been emphasized more than recently, after the Plugin Directory started linking the “Plugin owner” field to 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/ Profile of the plugin owner.

In order to post as an official representative of a plugin in our forums, each person must use their individual account. They are welcome to use a pseudonym if they don’t want to show their real name. It’s important that people DON’T SHARE accounts, and that nobody uses more than one account in the forums. This is primarily for security but also accountability. If an account gets suspended for guideline violations, this will only affect the specific individual and not the full team behind a shared account, something that might completely blockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. an organization’s access to provide support in the forums, while at the same time you might not know exactly who violated the rules on behalf of the team.

Under the “Advanced” tab of a plugin, the plugin owner can add individual accounts as “Support representatives”. When these contributors post in the support or review forum of the plugin, their posts will be marked with a special badge. (Currently, March 2025, we still don’t have such functionality for themes.)

More information:

Nick Diego 3:10 am on December 12, 2024
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X-post: Make WordPress gets a refresh

X-post from +make.wordpress.org/meta: Make WordPress gets a refresh

Nick Diego 4:46 pm on December 10, 2024
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X-post: The Photos Directory gets a refresh and is now powered by blocks

X-post from +make.wordpress.org/meta: The Photos Directory gets a refresh and is now powered by blocks

James Huff 5:43 pm on November 22, 2024
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X-post: Hello, WordPress Community – Let’s Chat!

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Marius L. J. 4:33 pm on November 12, 2024  

Support Team Meeting – October November 14th

The weekly support meeting will be held on Thursday, November 14th 2024, 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 6.7 – How are we doing

With WordPress 6.7 (hopefully) just released, let’s focus on what is happening around the release, things to be aware of, information to share, get the knowledge out there!

Support Tools

Some of the team tools have been updated recently, while others may need to change a little.

Topic highlighter

The Topic Highlighter got some love and care the past weeks, with new moderator highlight rules for archived content, and the ability to consider replied to reviews as “resolved”.

Flagging accounts

Firstly, a reminder that any account that is flagged should have user notes added to them, from the offending post/topic so that there is an automatic link back to the content that led to a user being flagged. User notes must be clear enough that anyone can understand why the user is flagged (remember that user notes are global across 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/, so moderators on other language forums can see them, and so can users with access to HelpScout, our ticketing system for reviews, escalations, etc.). This means they should be consistent, descriptive, but don’t write a whole novel. One should also be mindful of the fact that during a data export request, this text may be provided to the user.

In addition, with WordPress.org’s size in mind, and the majority of its content being user generated, there are new regulations we should discuss.

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.

Kaito Hanamori 11:26 pm on November 4, 2024
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X-post: Training Team Updates – November 2024

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James Huff 2:18 am on October 17, 2024  

Support Team Meeting – October 17th

The weekly support meeting will be held on Thursday, October 17th 2024, 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.

Troubleshooting and Site Health Tools Update

These decoupled from Health Check two weeks ago, let’s check in to see how that’s going.

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.

Hari Shanker R 6:58 am on October 8, 2024
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X-post: Announcing the Third Cohort (2024 Q4) of the WordPress Contributor Mentorship Program

X-post from +make.wordpress.org/community: Announcing the Third Cohort (2024 Q4) of the WordPress Contributor Mentorship Program

Marius L. J. 6:08 pm on October 2, 2024  

Support Team Meeting – October 3rd

The weekly support meeting will be held on Thursday, October 3rd 2024, 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.

Troubleshooting and Site Health Tools plugins

The Health Check 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 has now been “decoupled” (the features are still there, but they will live standalone moving forward).

This means that the Tools menu has been moved to the appropriately named Site Health Tools plugin, while Troubleshooting Mode has been so lucky as to snag the (surprisingly unused) Troubleshooting plugin name.

So moving forward, we should recommend them over the Health Check plugin. Take note of the required WordPress and PHPPHP PHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. https://www.php.net/manual/en/preface.php. versions, these have been updated, so the Health Check plugin will be kept as a solution for those unable or unwilling to update for now, but we give no guarantee or promise of their continued long term support.

Crowdsourcing /support

As discussed earlier, we would like to look at options for a landing page on the top level for WordPress.org/support, so let’s crowdsource some ideas!

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.

Marius L. J. 10:09 am on September 15, 2024
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September 5th Support Team Meeting Summary

The weekly support meeting was held on Thursday, September tth, 2024, 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)

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//support page

Currently, if you visit https://WordPress.org/support, you are redirected to the documentation page, this also goes for https://WordPress.org/forums.

The quick fix to this would be to just move everything on wordpress.org/support/forums up one level, but that leaves the forum listing duplicated as well.

There is a desire from the team to be able to do more with a proper landing page, so we will create a collaborative outline of what we wish such a page to include, so that those unable to attend the meeting are able to participate asynchronously as well, the team will make a dedicated make/support post for this purpose.

WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. US 2024

We do not at this time have ad dedicated table lead, but know that there will be participants available who may be able to help newcomers in a more “unofficial” manner.

Checking in with international liaisons

None of the teams international liaisons had any concerns or special events/news to share at this time.

#weekly-chat