Christine Rondeau 8:27 pm on May 16, 2013

Time to ditch Your WordPress?

The section Your WordPress on the forums might have made sense at the beginning when few of us were using WordPress, but now that it’s so popular, there are better avenues for someone to “Strut their stuff” and get feedback.

These days this section contains mostly spammers and moderators tend to give that section less attention. In my opinion, this section is not worth keeping, but I may have not considered something.

Care to voice your opinion filling out the survey and/or leaving a comment?

mrmist 8:34 pm on May 16, 2013

Very yes.
WebTechGlobal 8:43 pm on May 16, 2013

Voted yes however I would prefer something more advanced in its place…

It could be 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 that sends information about the blog to this site i.e. theme, plugins, website name etc. Along with that the webmaster can describe their site, it’s purpose, the team and have questions that help us to determine why they use WordPress.

I think in short my idea is a community moderated portfolio. Effort would be required to get the WordPress on this forum. Screenshot of the WordPress should be included. The plugin rating system could be used especially now that it is tied into a review approach.

Is this not something worth considering so that people do have a free place to show off their WordPress on an official WordPress domain and it is done in a way that spammers wouldn’t have time for?
- Amy Hendrix (sabreuse) 8:46 pm on May 16, 2013
  
  What you’re describing is the Showcase — and there’s no move to get rid of that!
  - Christine 8:51 pm on May 16, 2013
    
    Indeed.. I should have clarified, I’m suggesting that we remove this section – https://wordpress.org/support/forum/your-wordpress
    
    not the showcase – https://wordpress.org/showcase/
Andrew Nevins 8:46 pm on May 16, 2013

If we don’t scrap them, we could introduce more strict guidelines on how to post.

Forrst.com is a website that dedicates itself to a community a review system. People can post their work and review other people’s work. Forrst deals with the same sorts of crap but they resolve it by allowing users to mark work as:
“Needs more work. Forrster hasn’t put enough time into their post for community feedback to be useful.”
“Overly Promotional. The post doesn’t contribute enough opportunity for the community to learn.”
“Lacks purpose. Forrster hasn’t asked for specific feedback, highlighted successful ideas, or shared insight into their work.”

We could take their guidelines as criteria that users must meet when posting their own work. Then if people don’t meet those guidelines, we could delete their threads.

I can see how introducing these guidelines would mean moderating the Your WordPress forum more, but the frequency of threads opening up there is really low, so it may not need too much moderation.
Jan Dembowski 11:32 pm on May 16, 2013

Voted “YES!” I think it’s time for the Your WordPress sub-forum to be shown the door.

Occasionally you’ll get some really good posts (I’m still impressed with Bea’s site) but the majority of the posts are people attempting to get Google Juice out of posting the a link.

Many of those are just plain awful and as Andrew used to point out not different from the theme’s demo site. It’s not really serving it’s original purpose anymore.
- Andrew Nevins 8:41 am on May 17, 2013
  
  Yes, pretty much all of the sites I have reviewed on there since I can remember have been exactly the same as the themes they derive. Basically people want others to review their actual content, which of course does not contribute anything to the community. I often now reply, “I think the developers of theme X have done a really good job” when people try to take credit for them.
Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 5:57 am on May 17, 2013

More rules/guidelines won’t help. If people don’t read the ones we have, and they don’t, it won’t change the pain that is both that forum and the Meetups one.

I vote to dump. It was a great idea when WP was a smaller community, we’re a bit mammoth 😉
Les Bessant 6:15 am on May 17, 2013

I think its time is long gone.
Rev. Voodoo 11:22 am on May 17, 2013

Granted… due to full time school+work, I haven’t been super active in the forums (I’ll be back!), but since I started hanging out on the forums, I’ve seen that section kind of devolve. It used to be a bit useful, a meet and greet, and beginners really looking for input – heck I was in there when I made my first couple of themes from scratch (man, they are ugly). It just doesn’t really serve that, or any, purpose any longer.
Mvied 3:40 pm on May 17, 2013

I think something outside the forum with a formal submission process would be a much better idea if the community wanted to keep something like this around at all. That way the moderators could create guidelines as to what can be submitted and a lot of the mess will not be published.
Siobhan 5:15 pm on May 17, 2013

Any chance you could just 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. it to new submissions? It’s pretty useful to me at the minute while I’m researching WP history.
- Christine 6:00 pm on May 17, 2013
  
  ah ah… I knew there would be something I hadn’t thought about. Good point.
  - Jan Dembowski 12:18 pm on May 18, 2013
    
    That would be good. Put up a sticky on that sub-forum with “No more submissions etc.” and leave it for historical purposes.
    - Andrew Nevins 9:34 pm on May 18, 2013
      
      Can we delete advertising/ spam/ lacking purpose/ lacking detail threads to make room for the good ones on the first page?
      - Jan Dembowski 12:00 pm on May 19, 2013
        
        It’s tricky. If someone’s spaming any forum then *ZAP! Buh-buy!* that post.
        
        But so much of Your WordPress is just “What do you think of this site?” and that’s kinda/sorta permitted provided it’s actually a WordPress site.
        
        There’s one guy who every few months posts his client work link. The sites are WordPress and not bad per se but those posts don’t really serve a point IMHO. It’s just really an attempt to get a link.
      - Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 3:32 pm on May 21, 2013
        
        The problem there is the manual work involved. Frankly, I have no interest in curating that. I’d rather actually help people 🙂
songdogtech 3:16 am on May 24, 2013

Kill it and grill it. (Well, maybe not grill it.) But I think it is time for it to be turned into an historical archive, as suggested above.
- Andrew Nevins 8:29 pm on May 28, 2013
  
  Yes please, I’ve never wanted it gone so badly
jeffr0 1:17 pm on May 29, 2013

I’m all for the idea of just archiving that section and disallowing any new threads to be created. Or hide the forum from the public view, make it private.
Samuel Wood (Otto) 4:53 pm on May 29, 2013

I voted no, and figured I might as well say why.

Basically, I think it serves as a good introduction point for new users to the forums. If you look around at various internet forum with relatively decent communities on them, most of them have some sort of “intro” place, where new users are encouraged to post, mess up, learn how the forum works, that sort of thing.

The “My WordPress” forum may not have any particularly valuable content there to others, but it serves enough of a purpose for getting people to register, learn to post, etc. I’m not too concerned about the spam in it, everything is nofollowed and such.

Just my 2 cents.
- Samuel Wood (Otto) 4:55 pm on May 29, 2013
  
  Additional: If spam is the real concern, I’ll happily noindex that section entirely as well.
  - Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 7:28 pm on May 29, 2013
    
    It’s spam, but it’s also people posting for help in the wrong place, and moderators wasting time (IMO) wrangling things that are essentially worthless. If we’re not there to moderate and help teach them how the forum/community works, then they don’t learn and mess up (in understandable ways) elsewhere. If we DO sit and moderate, then I feel it’s wasted effort when we could be helping people with problems.
    
    I don’t care about the spam. I personally totally ignore that forum because there are two types of posts I see as being valid and ‘correct’ in that forum:
    
    1) “Check out my cool site!” This I ignore because there’s a limit to how much time I have in a day, and no offense, but I ignore random links from my wife, so yeah, I ignore random links from strangers too!
    
    2) “Please suggest things for my site!” This I ignore because I strongly feel your site design is subjective . That is, ‘good’ ideas for a site purely depends on what you want.
    
    The rest of what we get in there is similar to “This review is really a support request” which would be “This is my site! Why does the menu look bad?” And here you’re in the wrong place, and because of that we ignore you, which makes the community look like we don’t care about people and are ignoring them, which I know I am because they done posted wrong on accident, so they get unhappy.
    
    That’s why I don’t like that forum.
esmi 5:56 pm on May 29, 2013

I don’t have any strong opinions either way. Yes – you do get new topics that seem to have no other purpose other than getting a link published for a site but then there are topics that obviously serve a very real purpose. All in all, I’d class it as “Mostly Harmless” – though I’d endorse the suggestion to no-index that section.

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