6th June Support Team meeting

The support meeting will be held on Thursday, June 6 2024, 20:00 UTC (20:00 UTC, June 6) 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) or at https://make.wordpress.org/support/chat/.

Just a little reminder that this is a new time. We’d love to see you there – but if the timing means you are unable to attend – feel free to leave any thoughts or discussion in in the comments of this post.

Support Team challenges

Let’s spend a little time sharing and discussing the challenges we see in the forums, and in the tasks performed by the Support Team.

Support ForumSupport Forum WordPress Support Forums is a place to go for help and conversations around using WordPress. Also the place to go to report issues that are caused by errors with the WordPress code and implementations. opportunities

Let’s also have a little think about opportunities we see to make the Support Forum experience better, more helpful, or more compelling to WordPress users.

Checking in with international liaisons

This is the section where we reach out to the non-English speaking parts of our community, to see how they are doing, if there’s anything we can help each other with, or just interesting things going on that it would be nice to share with others.

There’s no requirements for previous participation or “fame” to share here, anyone is welcome, and we encourage newcomers to participate!

Unable to make the meeting, or maybe meetings just aren’t your thing? We would still love to hear how things are going in other non-English speaking parts of our community. Please feel free to let us know via the comment section below, in your own time, if there is anything you’d like to share, any questions or concerns you have, or just to let us know you’re doing OK!

We will make a habit of putting this callout with every agenda post going forward, so that everyone has a chance to join in.

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

#forums

James Huff 9:40 pm on June 6, 2024

Meeting Notes

(WordPress keeps eating my formatting, ironic, so we’re going a bit basic this time.)

Support Team challenges

We had a good discussion about the challenges we see in the forums, and in the tasks performed by the Support Team.

Dwindling number of non-moderator volunteers. (WCEU is coming up, hopefully we can attract some attention.)

Growing entitlement in general amongst questions. A lot of forum users think that we are paid to answer them, and it ties in with how a lot of people think they are “paying for WordPress” too. (Perhaps a notice somewhere that answers come from unpaid volunteers?)

Sockpuppets! (Work is underway on a locally run Python detection script which is absolutely incredibly accurate, but perhaps that could someday be a server-side thing for easier use).

We need to unflag accounts from moderation as liberally as we flag them. (Doing that will improve both the user experience on the forums and our experience on the forums.)

It was mentioned that, as us long-time volunteers grow out of developing with WordPress, it’s harder to help with more modern development questions. (Hopefully bringing in more volunteers in general will help with that.)

Support ForumSupport Forum WordPress Support Forums is a place to go for help and conversations around using WordPress. Also the place to go to report issues that are caused by errors with the WordPress code and implementations. opportunities

We had a good discussion about opportunities we see to make the Support Forum experience better, more helpful, or more compelling to WordPress users.

We need to unflag accounts from moderation as liberally as we flag them. (Doing that will improve both the user experience on the forums and our experience on the forums.)

It would be interesting to see what folks in Stack Overflow, Reddit, and Facebook say about why they don’t use our forums. (Unfortunately, no one in the meeting today used either of those.)

Images on the Forums

This was part of the “Support Forum opportunities” section, but we devoted a lot of time to getting down to an action item, so I wanted to highlight it separately.

The problem with hosting images is ICIM. People could just upload stuff and not post it on the forums, making 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/ their free storage and bandwidth ICIM distribution platform.

To manage that, we’d need staff, legit paid staff with resiliency training, to review every single upload. So, it’s better to offload that onto a third-party that is already equipped for such things, but we can definitely make the overall flow a bit clearer at the very least.

Action Item

When I can, I’ll get a page up here on Make/Support listing the image embeds that we do support with instructions on how to use them here.

Once that’s done, I’ll file 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 for a custom 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. that shares the Image block’s icon but is actually a custom Embed block with a URLURL A specific web address of a website or web page on the Internet, such as a website’s URL www.wordpress.org field and text that referrers to the Make/Support page for instructions.

The expected outcome is that people will click a familiar block to add an image, learn how to do it here, and then do it.

Project Opportunity

If anyone here is looking for a fun project, shout out to https://make.wordpress.org/training/2024/05/29/proposal-learn-wordpress-content-maintenance-process/

We may or may not leave a video tutorial in a thread from time to time, so making sure those are up-to-date by simply removing the out-of-date ones sounds like a worthy cause. 🙂

Checking in with international liaisons

Italy, Sweden, and Russia all reported in as doing well!

Open Floor

The team is quite happy with the new forum design. All of the critical bugs are gone, and we’re used to all of the other changes now. 🙂

A question was raised about how many non-English forums are actually active. We didn’t have numbers in the moment, but if anyone has time to peak through the list, that would be appreciated! Hopefully WCEU can inspire some new volunteers in that regard.

@tobifjellner and @alanfuller will be at WCEU this year, with @cristianozanca running the Support table there. All three are looking forward to meeting both existing and prospective new team members!

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Welcome to the official blog for the WordPress Support team.

Want to get involved?

Weekly Meetings

6th June Support Team meeting

Support Team challenges

Support ForumSupport Forum WordPress Support Forums is a place to go for help and conversations around using WordPress. Also the place to go to report issues that are caused by errors with the WordPress code and implementations. opportunities

Checking in with international liaisons

Welcome to the official blog for the WordPress Support team.

Want to get involved?

Weekly Meetings

Support Team challenges

Support ForumSupport Forum WordPress Support Forums is a place to go for help and conversations around using WordPress. Also the place to go to report issues that are caused by errors with the WordPress code and implementations. opportunities

Checking in with international liaisons

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