Support meetup summary for March 12th

Item discussed at today’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.:

Requests for editing forum posts

Occasionally someone will request a post is edited to remove a link to a member’s site. The majority of the time it’s because they’re concerned about search engine hits.

When there is something in a post that is sensitive (email, phone numbers, street addresses, passwords, whole copies of wp-config.php etc.) then that’s a legitimate request.

Posts that are harassment, stalking or contains other abusive behavior should also be edited or deleted. Those fall under the “extreme case”.

But search engine hits? No. That is never a good reason and there are a lot of links in the forums. Requests like those should be politely declined. If the OP continues then please close the topic.

There was more talk about defining and documenting what an extreme case is but the consensus was that doing that would lead to whole discussions about The Rules and Policy™ and that would not be a productive conversation.

The Forum Welcome section will be updated with this inserted into it:

Forum topics will only be edited or deleted at the discretion of the moderators if they represent a valid legal, security or safety concern.

Don’t post things you aren’t 100% okay with being public. We’ll delete them if we agree it’s a big enough deal, but ‘My SEO!’ is never an acceptable reason.

There was also some discussion about short links. It’s not really a problem and sometimes short links can be useful. I don’t like them because it obscures the real link and where you are going. Also they’ve been used in the past for affiliate links and those are not allowed in the forums.

View the meetup transcript in the Slack archives (A Slack account is required)