Jan Dembowski 6:14 pm on November 19, 2022  

November 17th Support Team Meeting Summary

Items discussed.

  • Nominations for Support Team Representative
  • Using a Discord server for live support akin to IRC
  • “I have this issue too” replies and how to handle those in the forums

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/. log of the meeting starts at this Slack link.

Nominations for Support Team Representative

The details are here in @sterndata‘s make/support post.

Call for Support Team Representative(s)
Any active Support Person can be a team representative and anyone can nominate a Support Person. Self-nominations will also be accepted.

If you know someone you wish to nominate or nominate yourself then please leave a comment in that post. As a matter of politeness if you do nominate someone, please consider asking them first. We don’t want to put anyone on the spot.

Using a Discord Server for live support akin to IRC

On the official 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/ site, support is limited to the support forums and the #WordPress IRC channel. The WordPress Slack is meant for administrivia and collaboration. It is not meant as a venue for live support.

Alan Fuller raised the idea about using a Discord server and that was discussed. This was actively discussed and pointed out that anyone can use IRC without an account. Discord requires an account to be used; that may not be a bar as Slack does too.

Many opensource projects use Discord as a way to provide live support to users and other contributors. The discussion left off with perhaps someone can try it and report back to the Support Team how that went.

“I have this issue too” replies and how to handle those in the forums

This was a follow up to an earlier conversation about this topic.

The consensus of those attending the Slack meeting was that for 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 topics if the developer is alright with it then let people pile on to those topics as much as they want.

The developers may inform the Support Team when they want the guideline enforced prohibiting that behavior enforced for a forum topic.

There was also some talk about making a determination if someone is interleaving support, meaning they have their problem and are taking over someone else’s topic.

The exception for that is if the “I have the problem too” replies become abusive. Then those may be moderated as any other abuse is currently handled.