Happening: January 30-31, 2016

Welcome to the 20 Questions Challenge, our support teams’s first global contributor weekend! The goal of this weekend challenge is to make it easy for anyone to become a volunteer contributor 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/ support team, which includes the support forums at wordpress.org/support and the #wordpress IRC channel on irc.freenode.net. For the sake of simplicity, the 20 Questions Challenge this weekend will be specifically in the WordPress.org support forums, not in IRC (though we welcome help there, too!).

If you are able to provide the correct solution/suggestion for 20 questions over the course of the weekend, that would be amazing, but there is no minimum commitment — even answering a questions or two to get your feet wet is a helpful contribution! We will tally the results of this weekend contributor drive both individually and per local meetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. group, so getting together with some other folks to work on support questions together is a great way to participate and have fun.

Here’s what you’ll need to participate:

  • A WordPress.org account. Log in at wordpress.org/support. If you don’t already have an account there, create one.
  • A WordPress.org 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/. account. If you are not already on it, join the WordPress.org Slack instance for contributors. This is the group chat room application we use for all WordPress contributor teams, and is where the support team will be available to answer questions if you get stuck. It’s also where the action will be reported as we periodically tally how many questions have been answered over the weekend.
  • An internet-connected device, of course. 🙂 Computers and tablets work equally well. You can also participate using a mobile phone, but there may be some overlap issues with the display.

Here’s what to do when you are ready to start the 20 Questions challenge:

  • Add yourself to the tracking spreadsheet. Pick an empty row and enter your name, wordpress.org username, slack username, and location. If you belong to a local WordPress meetup, also enter the URLURL A specific web address of a website or web page on the Internet, such as a website’s URL www.wordpress.org of your group’s meetup site (this is how we’ll track which groups had the most participants). If you are not on this spreadsheet, we won’t have a way to credit you for your participation, so this first!
  • Join the #forums channel at https://wordpress.slack.com/messages/forums/ and introduce yourself to the support team to let them know you are getting started.
  • Open the forum rules and the support handbook in a tab so you’ll have quick access to the main reference for helping in the forums. It also contains replies (we call them predefs, short for predefined replies) to the questions that get asked most often so you can copy/paste to save time when it’s appropriate.
  • Open the support forums at https://wordpress.org/support/ and find a support request that you can answer. Answer it, and add the tag 20Q2016 using the Tags widgetWidget A WordPress Widget is a small block that performs a specific function. You can add these widgets in sidebars also known as widget-ready areas on your web page. WordPress widgets were originally created to provide a simple and easy-to-use way of giving design and structure control of the WordPress theme to the user. in the right hand column. This tag is how our support team volunteers will be able to check answers and give you credit for correct responses over the course of the weekend, so make sure you use the tag! Subscribe to the post so you can follow up if there is a reply from the original poster.
  • Pick another question, and keep going. See if you can answer 20 questions!

Avoiding overlaps

  • With lots of people working on unreplied threads, you may run into overlapping answers. To avoid this, you can add the 20q2016 tag to the thread first to “claim” it, even before you’ve posted your answer. (Just make sure to remember to answer the thread!) If you see a thread tagged with 20q2016 you can assume someone is working on it, and move on to another.
  • Another way to avoid overlaps is to use this browser script, which alerts you if someone else using the same script is viewing the same thread you’re viewing. The script is available as a Chrome extension or Greasemonkey script for Firefox.

How will we assess your answer?

  • If the user replies with success or marks the thread as Resolved, your answer is correct!
  • If it’s an answer any support team member would have given, your answer is correct!
  • If your answer is incorrect, don’t worry, you might find a support team member stopping by with a different answer and some helpful information. In this case, your answer won’t count toward your final tally, but you will have learned something new, which is one of the most valuable things that happens when you contribute to the forums. We all learned most of what we know thanks to the mistakes we’ve made.

Who’s running this show?
There are often a number of volunteers in the #forums channel on Slack (as mentioned above, you’ll need to create an account to interact there) who can help if you are trying to solve a problem for someone and have hit a troubleshooting wall, but we have lined up some volunteers for specific times for the challenge to try and have a wide coverage that weekend:

What counts as “the weekend” for this thing?
On January 30, we’re covered from 2am UTC through midnight. On January 31, we’re covered from midnight through 1am February 1. If you participate outside these hours, as long as it is January 30-31 in your time zone, your support responses will be counted. After we’ve caught up with checking all the responses that have come in from the end of the challenge, we’ll tally it all up, and we’ll post the results here on our team blog. The results will also be published to meetup groups in the February email from the community team, and in a post on wordpress.org/news.

Here’s some advice from the support team:

  • Don’t reply if you can’t help! Requests are filtered by “no-replies” to find those who need help — replying makes them harder to find.
  • Check out https://codex.wordpress.org/Forum_Welcome and https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/ especially the predefs.
  • Not able to answer questions, but still want to help? Look for requests without tags and add them! This makes the topic easier to find for others with the same problem.
  • See spam or someone being a jerk? TagTag Tag is one of the pre-defined taxonomies in WordPress. Users can add tags to their WordPress posts along with categories. However, while a category may cover a broad range of topics, tags are smaller in scope and focused to specific topics. Think of them as keywords used for topics discussed in a particular post. it “modlook” for a moderator to check it.

It’s really Global

The Support Team is bolstered by the various locale/language communities so if you’re looking into contributing in your own language or locale, look at our list of Support Forums in your own language page

Currently, we know that following communities are joining in the fun:

If your community is joining and is not listed, please simply drop in #forums or message @kenshino on Slack

Currently, we can only promise that the Support Team will be monitoring the English forums, but this is all about contributing to WordPress and helping others, so please feel free to help where you can!