As part of the community summit this year on Tuesday the teams got together and discussed/collaborated in person. That was amazing and productive and several attendees told us that we’re the team that has fun. We are and I don’t deny it.
Here’s what we worked on and completed.
The handbooks have been merged together
The Troubleshooting handbook has been successfully merged into the Support Handbook. The pages at the old URLs have been updated to notify visitors to go to the Support Handbook instead. This involved learning how the original Support Handbook was setup and copying the pages into those custom post types.
The previous troubleshooting handbook has been preserved and every single page now has a note directing readers to the merged one.
Discussion on the support forums
The “Your WordPress” sub-forum has been shutdown. Those topics remain but no new topics there will be able to be created. The sub-forum is hidden and has been effectively retired. This was something that’s been discussed on and off for 2 years and the consensus was that it’s time for it to go.
The question that was asked was this: is there any benefit to “Your WordPress” for the community at large or is it simply a drain on moderator resources?
The decision was made that since the majority of posts were spam or people requesting help with their sites, energy would be better spent assisting them elsewhere. By providing them with a “showcase” that didn’t accomplish improvements to their site’s SEO ranking, which was why most people were posting in the first place, all we did was encourage spamming.
Even though some people had nothing but the best intentions, the majority of the topics were not adding value to the community.
IRC presentation on make/support
The Blue Welcome Box™ has been updated to send visitors to a brief landing page. From there users will be sent to the #wordpress channel via webchat. This is to further the fact that IRC is a viable and important component of WordPress support.
The Slack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. #forum channel
You may have heard that the new team communication medium is now Slack. It’s an impressive collaboration tool and it works well. Please create an account and start communicating with your fellow team members. You can also use it to send direct messages as well; like I said it’s a useful tool.
Before anyone get’s concerned: the IRC #wordpress channel for support is not going away and Slack is the location for team meetings and intra-team communication. Support remains in #wordpress as before.
I’m leaving for home today but I want leave this image for use in the #forum channel.
A special shoutout to everyone who was here and everyone who offered a suggestion in our meetups, the mailing list, and our site here.
#wcsf2014
