Summary for the October 8th support meetup

Items discussed at yesterday’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..

Should the the wp-forums list go away?

Lately the wp-forums list hasn’t been very active. The few emails there could have been handled in the forum or the 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/. #forums channel. After some discussion it was decided that while people are encouraged to use the #forums Slack channel and the list will remain in place.

The use of that list will be discouraged (Slack really is faster) but less technical users and those who can’t use Slack will/can use it. If there’s a conversation that needs to take place and easily accesible to all then the make/support P2P2 P2 or O2 is the term people use to refer to the Make WordPress blog. It can be found at https://make.wordpress.org/. should be used.

The Meetups sub-forum

We voted the Meetups sub-forum off of the island.

It’s not really useful and people have sometimes mistaken that as the forum to arrange for in-person support. A meta ticket was submitted and the idea is to direct people to use http://wordpress.meetup.com/ instead.

Community Summit Agenda for Support

So far the agenda items for the community summit are these:

  • bbPressbbPress Free, open source software built on top of WordPress for easily creating forums on sites. https://bbpress.org. 2.x forum upgrade (complicated, and much thanks to those who are working on it)
  • HelpHub participation by the support team

Here’s a few more that came up

  • Annual audit of the Support Handbook
  • Clearing out stale forum admin and moderator accounts (already in progress)
  • How do we as a team invite and encourage more people to volunteer to help users

That last one got everyone excited. The support team is sometimes asked by forum members “how do I become a moderator?” but the answer really should be “why do you need to be a mod?”

Just about everyone who is a moderator finds themselves clearing the spam queue, dealing with run away topics and abusive or just misguided forum members. Answering support topics often gets pushed down on their to do list.

While performing those admin tasks is useful, we really want to work out ways to encourage and welcome people to help users first.

That idea will be kicked around some more and @bethannon1 shared a very cool support handout she made (a Slack account required is required to view that PDF file).  This idea will be definitely worked on at the next meetup; welcoming and encouraging people to support others is a cool idea.

Not quite in the meetup notes

@abletec mentioned that she’s had some good a11yAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) results with Firefox, Slack and NVDA and at my request she emailed me those details. I don’t know what those things are exactly, but the draft post for Slack and Instantbird could be updated and included in the handbook. Documenting how a11y users can participate is a good thing. 😉

If you are a moderator then you may want to look at @keesiemeijer‘s Moderator Tools. He’s made changes and incorporated ideas from @anevins and @clorith. My favorite new feature is that it highlights hidden links in posts. That’s a common spammer practice and his script makes admin’ing the forums much easier.

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

#weekly-chat