February 18th Support Team Meeting Summary

WordPress 4.4.2

No new common issues to add to the 4.4.x Master List, but we did remove a slightly confusing “also” from the description of the lingering pagination issue.

Moderators for Plugins

Recently, the Plugins Team has made a security-focused push to ensure that plugins do not have any non-committing committers.

Possibly in response, we’ve noticed some Administrators promoting pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party support personnel to Moderator, mostly so they can retain the ability to mark threads as resolved and set sticky threads. This really isn’t a great solution, as it gives such a person nearly full control over all of the WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ Support Forums without adhering to the established expectations. It’s a bit like trading one security concern for another.

The good news is, @otto42 was on the case and swiftly resolved Meta Ticket 1413 before the end of today’s meeting. This resolution allows plugin contributors to mark threads as resolved within their plugin’s support forumSupport Forum WordPress Support Forums is a place to go for help and conversations around using WordPress. Also the place to go to report issues that are caused by errors with the WordPress code and implementations.. The ability to set threads as sticky was skipped for now, as it’s really not a common necessity, and the Support Team will not mind being pinged in #forums on 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/. to request that a thread be stickied.

Considering this, we kindly request that all Administrators please stop promoting plugin personnel to Moderator (and demote any who were back to Member), and instead list them as contributors in the plugin’s readme.txt file.

In addition, if anyone supporting their plugin notices something in need of our intervention, please tag the thread with “modlook” and add a second tag to clarify the reason, like “spam”, “abuse”, “sockpuppetSockpuppet A sockpuppet is a false online identity, typically created by a person or group in order to promote their own opinions or views. On WordPress.org, they are generally used to create multiple reviews or harass users.”, etc.

Gamification

By unanimous vote, the team will not be pursuing gamification of the WordPress Support Forums at this time, but we will strongly consider the ability for the OP to mark the most helpful answer (StackExchange style) after we’ve upgraded to bbPressbbPress Free, open source software built on top of WordPress for easily creating forums on sites. https://bbpress.org. 2 (largely depending on available developer resources).

If gamification is ever considered, the team also unanimously agrees that the priority focus should be on the quality of support received by the user.

IRC Stats Update

@clorith has completed the reporting tool, and the report sent to Slack looks something like this:

wpbot-slack-rich

There was a change since the screenshot though. The final verbiage is now “IRC assistance requested in #WordPress – See logs,” and if a note is attached, “IRC assistance requested in #WordPress [User provided note] – See logs.”

We are awaiting a 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.” from the MetaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. team when they are free to deployDeploy Launching code from a local development environment to the production web server, so that it's available to visitors. this and process to promotions as well.

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

#weekly-chat