Off forum support requests

At the April 21 meeting, we discussed off forum support:

It may be just me, but it seems that there’s an increasing number of author/dev replies to support requests that send the OP directly to the author/dev’s website for support. This may be to get around asking for credentials, but in cases where it’s not, it also seems to me that it goes against the community aspect of support. The (often poorly formed) question is asked publicly and the solution is private. This does not help the community.

Overall, I worry about the forces pulling apart the community (like the MasterWP post suggesting wordcampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. speakers and orgainizers be paid).  Support is a vital part of the glue holding together the community.

Should we always push back when an OP’s first reply is “please contact us via our website” or “fill out our contact form”?

It was noted that there’s a guideline at https://developer.wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-org/using-the-forums/#you-may-request-users-open-tickets-on-your-own-system, but it’s more of a recommendation than a guideline.

It seems that we’ve chosen to encourage authors/developers to provide support in the forums. “Users still have an expectation that support will happen here, so if you’re not doing that, it’s in your best interest to stave on snarky users by documenting [this clearly in your readmes and pinned messages].”

Moderators will post encouragement messages when the dev/rep reply to the OP is immediately “Please contact us on [this private site].”

This led to a discussion of the “resolved” checkmark/status, which creates some anger among users. A scenario was proposed that there will only be two ways for someone to resolve topics:

  • you created the last reply and you are the OP
  • you created the last reply and you are the dev/rep

After a bit more back and forth, only OPs and the dev/rep (and mods) should be able to resolve or unresolve a topic at any time, but a resolved topic is a “closed” topic, allowing replies only from the OP or dev/rep. Wording above the reply box (or the closed to replies message) should indcate that the topic can be re-opened by un-resolving (if it’s within the time-to-close-topics window).

The full discussion is at https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C02RQC6RW/p1650561045439379

Please reply here to discuss before we work this up as a 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. ticket.