Agenda for October 25th Support Meeting

General announcements
Checking in with international liaisons
Links in reviews
- We don’t allow links to websites in reviews, as they’ve been abused for spam etc in the past.
- We do inconsistently allow links if they are to the 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/theme’s own site/resources
- Should we stop allowing “official” links, or consistently allow them?
Time permitting: Open floor

For any other items to discuss, please add them to the comments below, or bring them up in the meeting.

The meeting will be held on Thursday, October 25, 2018, 17:00 UTC 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/.. (a Slack account is required)

Jan Dembowski 3:20 pm on October 25, 2018

tl;dr: Please do not permit any links in reviews, official or not. That has been abused too often in the past and should not be permitted.

I won’t be able to attend the meeting but I just want to explain about the reviews. Please do not permit links in reviews; it would make my task more cumbersome.

Every night I run a script on a schedule to process all the reviews with that script. It goes back a ways and reports on any reviews that has a link in it.

That script just reports and does not archive or flag any user. In the morning I review that report and examine each review. The majority of those are people looking to game the reviews with “link magic”. I archive those reviews, flag the account with a note.

The majority of those users do not come back, which is why I do not educate the user. It’s light spamming and not 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. worthy. If they do come back and/or ask then I (or another moderator) will explain, their review gets the link removed and they learn.

If the user comes back and does not repeat that then after a time I remove the flag. There’s just no reason to keep anyone flagged for a long time for that.

When it’s someone who is spamming as in they just leave their link as the review or they do it 10 times in 30 minutes, then yes, they get banned and their reviews are archived. Spamming is bad.

Occasionally someone will leave a useful link to illustrate an issue. This happened recently with a githubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ link. In cases like that I backtick the link. That way the URLURL A specific web address of a website or web page on the Internet, such as a website’s URL www.wordpress.org is still there but the link will not show up in my report.

If those are left as links then they’ll show up in my report for at least a week. I intentionally have that overlap to catch people who put the links in later.

(I also scan all of the reviews for a specific 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 or theme periodically for that reason. Akismet, Jetpack, Yoast, W3TC and most of the popular plugins are my honeypot that way. I get a lot of great data from that.)

Reviews should be text based about the user’s experience. That text should not take users anywhere else and if that is permitted then it will open the door to “but you let them do it” conversations. I think the moderators should be consistent about this and just do not permit links in reviews.

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Agenda for October 25th Support Meeting

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