Support Team Update for December 4th

Items discussed at this week’s Support Team 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.:

WordPress 4.1 beta2 and testing

The next release is out very soon and there will be at least one release candidateRelease Candidate A beta version of software with the potential to be a final product, which is ready to release unless significant bugs emerge.. If you have not done so already then please consider testing the betaBeta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process.. With the beta tester plugin that’s a very simple thing to do.

We discussed if anyone had seen or experienced any show stoppers. Except for Matthew (@kidsguide) reporting a problem installing the latest beta there wasn’t anything major.

I’ll be posting to make/support a draft of the OMGWTFBBQ post for the WordPress 4.1 release. New items in that post will include things like

  1. Welcome to the Twenty Fifteen theme
  2. Where did distraction free writing go?
  3. What is Focus?

It’ll be a draft so items that I’ve missed can be added.

The Support Team Handbook welcome is more welcomey

@macmanx and @justingreerbbi had some suggestions and after a small talk the changes were made. Meaning that when Justin shared an image of his idea I pounced and made him an editor on make/support.

If you’ve an idea for the handbook then please pingPing The act of sending a very small amount of data to an end point. Ping is used in computer science to illicit a response from a target server to test it’s connection. Ping is also a term used by Slack users to @ someone or send them a direct message (DM). Users might say something along the lines of “Ping me when the meeting starts.” the support team on the #forum 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/. channel. It takes very little time and with revisionsRevisions The WordPress revisions system stores a record of each saved draft or published update. The revision system allows you to see what changes were made in each revision by dragging a slider (or using the Next/Previous buttons). The display indicates what has changed in each revision. it’s hard to really mess anything up. This is how the support team hooksHooks In WordPress theme and development, hooks are functions that can be applied to an action or a Filter in WordPress. Actions are functions performed when a certain event occurs in WordPress. Filters allow you to modify certain functions. Arguments used to hook both filters and actions look the same. people to do work for the community. 😉

Spam accounts and a 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. everywhere button?

We discussed the idea that once a bot is used and blocked in one place then perhaps that should automatically extend to other places such as the Codex, Ideas, plugins, tracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/., etc. Otto pointed out that that may not be a good idea. It doesn’t address the problem necessarily and blocks really are easy to get around.

@mercime did have a list of spam bot accounts (and that that list exists makes me feel better about my own Sock Puppet thing!) and it was agreed that those accounts shall be “banished from space and time”. But no automated button or process, it’s not the best way to work that problem.

Forum Moderator/Admin cleanup

I’m past due doing it but I’ll be reviewing all the existing moderator accounts. If a moderator hasn’t posted in 6 months then their account will be made “Member” and their custom title will not have Volunteer Moderator in it.

This is something that’s done for security (look up the idea of “least privileges”) or perhaps people want to take a break from the forums and moderating. There will be exceptions and anyone who’s access has been downgraded can get that restored in a quick flash.

Suggesting items for the agenda

This was a post meetup item but if you have an idea you would like considered in the next meetup then you can reply to these update posts or the weekly agenda post on make/support. Or in the Slack channel, all ideas are welcomed.

The transcript of this meetup can be found at this link.