Helpful Tools

Avoiding Overlapping Replies

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/ “Also Viewing” is a feature which lets you know if someone else who has enabled the same function – like another forum helper – is looking at or typing in the same thread you’re viewing. This helps avoid duplicate replies on the same thread.

The “Also Viewing” tool is automatically available to forum contributors who have made at least 20 replies.

If you wish to use this feature and do not see the option to enable it because you’ve made fewer than 20 forum replies, please reach out to the forums moderation team in the slack #forums channel, who can enable it for you.

Once you have the option available, you can enable the “Also Viewing” tool in your Forum Profile at https://wordpress.org/support/users/username/edit/ in the section “User Options”..

Screendump of User Otions settings in Forum Profile

Once you and some other person are viewing the same thread and both have this option enabled, you’ll see a bright banner at the top of the page that looks like this:
Also Viewing

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Clearer Plugin and Theme Support

WordPress.org Plugins and Themes Topic Highlighter is a script which provides some color-coding for the status of 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 and theme support topics. To use the highlighter:

  1. First, install the Tampermonkey or Greasemonkey browser extensions.
  2. Next, click here to install the highlighter script. (You can also click the “Raw” button on the /src/wordpress-plugins-topic-highlighter.user.js file there.)

Once installed, you’ll have some handy highlights that clearly identify unanswered, resolved, and stale (over a week old) topics:
Screen Shot 2018-10-16 at 10.27.42 AM

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Check for Spam Elsewhere

Stop Forum Spam Checker adds a button which will check the IP against Stop Forum Spam. This tool only works for Moderators. To use the Stop Forum Spam Checker script:

  1. First, install the Tampermonkey or Greasemonkey browser extensions.
  2. Next, click here to install the Stop Forum Spam Checker script. (You can also click the “Raw” button next to the /src/stop-forum-spam-checker.user.js file there.)

Once installed, click the “Check IP” button, and it will either report “Ok”, “TOR Proxy”, or list the number of sites spammed elsewhere along with the timestamp of the most recent report.

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Automatically see archived and pending posts

In order to see archived and pending posts, moderators may need to add the URLURL A specific web address of a website or web page on the Internet, such as a website’s URL www.wordpress.org parameter view=all to the URL they’re viewing. This is a script that automatically tags on this parameter when you’re visiting relevant forum URL’s.

  1. First, install the Tampermonkey or Greasemonkey browser extensions.
  2. Next, install the WordPress topic redirect script.

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Disable wrapping pasted text in code blocks

Every now and then users in the forums paste huge log excerpts or copy-paste code they’ve copied from their site, or somewhere else. This may disrupt the layout of some pages/views and make them hard to navigate. As a countermeasure, our forums automatically wrap any pasted text that is longer than 500 characters or 5 lines in “backticks”, which (if the backticks are in-sync) will mark the pasted text as a code 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.. (This “automatic wrapping” is not active if the user is pasting into a completely empty field.)

Some users (especially moderators) may want to disable this behavior if they often need to paste long text content, such as pre-defined replies, by using the no-backticks script.

  1. First, install any of the browser extensions Tampermonkey or Greasemonkey (unless you’ve already got one installed).
  2. Next, install the no-backticks script.

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Moderators often need to reach a user’s 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. profile, but when they arrive from 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/., they’ll usually first come to the “main” WordPress.org Profile page first instead.

Using support-links script, you’ll have convenient further access to a set of useful support forum links automatically added directly in the WordPress.org profile page.

By default, these links will point to a set of pages under the same user’s support profile in the global Forums, but you can easily select another support language and then switch between links to the global forum and links to the forum of your chosen language. This allows those that are moderators in more than one forum to check a user’s forums profile in those forums more easily.

To use the support-links script:

  1. First, install any of the browser extensions Tampermonkey or Greasemonkey (unless you’ve already got one installed).
  2. Next, install the support-links script.

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Autofill reason of change upon moving a topic between forums

Every now and then moderators clean a forum by moving topics to a better suited forum, where they’ll get more visibility. When doing such a change, the moderator should add a note in the “reason of change” field to inform the user about the correction.

If you want to forget about this extra step, the script forum-change-reason can handle it for you automatically. Whenever a topic’s forum is changed, this script will fill out the reason of change by appending “Moved from X Forum to Y Forum”. This text can be customized for use on any other locale forum, by altering this line: const reasonText = 'Moved from %1$s to %2$s.';

To use the support-links script:

  1. First, install any of the browser extensions Tampermonkey or Greasemonkey (unless you’ve already got one installed).
  2. Next, install the forum-change-reason script.

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Searching Documentation

If you use Alfred, along with its paid Powerpack, there are Workflows to search the Developer Reference and search the Codex Function Reference. Alfred has documentation on how to install Workflows.

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Saving Form Fields

We used to recommend Lazarus: Form Recovery here. It was a wonderful cross-browser extension that stored your form data in local storage, so you could recover your brilliantly crafted reply, even if the forums or your browser crashed. Lazarus is dead now (ironic, we know), so we can no longer recommend it. If you have any better recommendations than what follows, please let us know in #forums on Slack.

If you use Chrome, try Typio Form Recovery.

If you use Firefox, and you don’t want to risk losing what you’re writing, you’re probably better off drafting your replies in a plain text editor.

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Predefined replies for moderators

You can add them to your browser, via a Tapermonkey script, at https://github.com/wporg-support/predefined-replies or just copy/paste from https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/giving-good-support/pre-defined-replies/

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