Summary for August 3rd Support Meeting

The weekly support meeting was held on Thursday, July 27th, 2023, 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/.. Read the transcript at your own pace (a Slack account is required)

Community headlines and updates

This is where news that are relevant or good to know for the team from across the community are brought up and shared.

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. US 2023

With WordCamp US rapidly approaching, there’s been a call for table leads, and onboarding leads for Contributor DayContributor Day Contributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/ https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/.. The latter being a newer concept.

The onboarding lead would be one, or more, individuals who are available throughout contributor day to help onboarding new contributors, streamlining that process and ensuring availability (which is often hard for a table lead to devote dedicated time to during the day).

We have a few seasoned contributors that will be participating, and will look to share the workload fairly between those who have the capacity.

New (betaBeta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process.) moderator anonymity tool

As some may be aware, and some may not, a new (beta!) feature rolled out for moderators on the forums this past week 🎉

When writing a reply, there is now a checkbox that will allow you to post anonymously (to the users), under a unified “Support Moderator” user. Other moderators may still see who made the post though.

This will ensure that the team is both able to have the backing of “one voice” in difficult decisions, but also ensure that moderators are not required to post as them selves, and becoming potential targets for retaliation or abuse.

Note that the feature is still in beta, so it may still disclose who posted it somehow, until it’s been properly triaged, but it’s there and you’re able to experiment with it.

If you post as an anonymous moderator, you will still receive notifications of replies to the thread, which is also good to be aware of.

New workflows for discussing forum account actions

A new inbox set up for handling disputes and questions concerning things like flagged accounts.

The purpose of having a common inbox is to bring potentially heated or controversial discussions out of the pubic #forums channel, and also to give the users the ability to discuss their flagged status without being put in a negative light. (We all make mistakes, we can learn from them, and then it’s always nice to be able to do so privately.) In addition, it allows moderators to handle sensitive situations while remaining anonymous, which can in turn reduce potential mod harassment, or uncomfortable situations where a specific moderator is being targeted directly.

In addition, it allows the team to discuss information which may be considered private with individuals, without needing to worry about disclosure of private information in public channels.

WordPress 6.3 is near/here

With the upcoming release of WordPress 6.3, the team had a quick brainstorming session about which topics they believe users may need help with. It is shaping up to be a great release at this time, and only one item was brought up as likely to cause confusion, that being the renaming of Reusable blocks to Patterns.

Checking in with international liaisons

None of the teams international liaisons had any concerns or special events/news to share at this time.


Annie – Heartbeat

#weekly-chat