Concerning forks and recommendations on the forums

With the recent release of WordPress 5.0, some users have found them selves puzzled or confused by the new interface, or have plugins and themes that introduce conflicts with how the WordPress editing experience is now presented.

In light of this, we’ve seen many great works from the community both with plugins to address this, but also various forks of the project it self to better suit their various scenarios.

The WordPress support forums are a place to help users with WordPress, and if the best approach to their problem is through any non-official 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 a fork that better serves the user, we are happy to accommodate such suggestions.

What we have unfortunately seen after the release, is an increase in fake or angry users setting out to promote these solutions in manners which do not comply with the Support Guidelines (specifically “Do not spam”). This includes, but is not limited to, copy-pasting links to multiple topics without anything other than a link and no real “purpose” and multiple accounts from singular users using proxies to avoid spam protection.

We wanted to address this, as such behavior not only gives a bad reputation to those who have worked hard on other solutions but are not behaving in nefarious ways, but also to the volunteers who are tasked with keeping the forums helpful to all.

It all boils down to this:

If there’s nothing nefarious behind the recommendation of using a WordPress fork or unofficial plugin, it will be left alone, we may chime in about it if it appears premature to change to another solution, but we won’t moderate it.

If at a later date we find the user to be doing it in a nefarious manner, we will moderate the previous entries as well, but the user will be informed about what is going on.