Support Team Summary for January 29th

Items discussed at today’s 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.:

Support team t-shirts

We still haven’t figured out how to get t-shirts in a way that is fair to the community.

We all like the idea of getting them but doing it the right way is tricky. If there were support t-shirts in the swag store then that may be different because everyone could buy one if they wanted to. That’s not an option at this time and for now the topic was shelved.

Introductory videos for new support joiners

Many people learn visually and having video presentations could provide a real benefit. Perhaps existing WordPress.tv recordings of 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. presentations or Google Hangouts? For example a learnup can be scheduled via hangouts, recorded and shared showing how support handles and replies to topics.

There was some interest about how to perform a specific task as a moderator and that discussion will continue via email.

The “no replies” are below 500 pages!

One metric for seeing how the support forums are doing is to look at the number of topics that have no replies. With a lot of work that has been reduced from 523 pages (or more) down to 498 as of a little while ago.

It’s good to reduce that number and a lot of forum members are getting support. Those pages go back 12 months but after a 60 days a reply may not be needed any more or the original poster has moved on. One way to reduce that number may be to start at a number of pages into the no-replies and work your way back to page one.

Adding the IRC link to the Support drop down menu

A meta trac ticket was raised to add a link to the #wordpress IRC channel for support in November and that was discussed at this meetup.

IRC remains a slightly tricky support venue. Many of us are savvy enough to use IRC and have a reasonable expectation of how that support works. IRC is not a live helpdesk but many new users may mistake what it is for. It may not be helpful to have new users potentially end up in IRC without them understanding how it works.

That’s not to say IRC support is not valuable; it is very valuable and many have been helped there. But it may be too advanced for new WordPress users who make their way there. The menu at this time will not change but I do want to understand the reservations and this will continue to be discussed.

Read today’s Slack #forums meetup transcript (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 required).