Welcome to the official blog for the WordPress Support team.
Need help with a WordPress issue? You can find help with your WordPress problem by posting in the support forums or asking on the #wordpress IRC channel.
Want to get involved?
Answering a question in the support forums or on IRC is one of the easiest ways to get started. Everyone knows the answer to something!
We have a detailed handbook to help contributors learn how to work with the forums and IRC.
Weekly Meetings
As well as discussing support issues here on the blog, we use Slack for group communication.
Our weekly meeting is held every Thursday 17:00 UTC, with the first meeting of the month being office hours, and the next will be at Thursday, 17:00 UTC(your time zone) in #forums on SlackSlackSlack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/..
Note: Prior to Sept 1, 2016 the Moderator title was granted to many users as a mark of recognition and prestige. When the Support Forums were upgraded to bbPressbbPressFree, open source software built on top of WordPress for easily creating forums on sites. https://bbpress.org. 2.x, this was changed. Moderators now are required to meet certain criteria as the role comes with a great deal more power.
A Forum Moderator has the responsibility to regularly take care of the spam, pending, and modlook queues. They are expected to meetings (in Slack #forums) when possible, and be active helping others in the forums.
Not everyone needs to be a moderator in order to help in the forums. In fact, most people don’t. Being a moderator comes with an extra burden, as you will be expected to uphold the status quo of the forums and actively support both users and other volunteers. It also means you will need to actually help others with the spam/modlook queue, and clearly communicate issues or needs with the others.
In addition to activity we look for temperament. Being a moderator is a hard job, and people will mistreat you unfairly. Because of that, we require potential moderators to have the following qualities:
Recognition that you will be a “face” of WordPress
Being polite to everyone, even when others are not
Being consistent and firm when users are abusing rules; exceptions lead to further abuse
Being able to walk away and ask for help from other moderators if you’re upset/angry
Respecting other volunteers/moderators when the group makes decisions you do not fully agree with
Being a moderator a job that comes with no benefits, and no compensation. For most people, just being a volunteer is enough. If you are interested, however, please keep reading.
Rather than reaching out directly to ask if you can have more powers around here, we ask you let us come to you first. People who seek out mod-powers without first demonstrating care to the community have, historically, been those who turn out to abuse said powers. Since there are privacy concerns with some of the data a moderator has access to, including emails and IP addresses, we limit the power to people who have shown themselves to be trustworthy.
Basically we look for people who are:
active in the forums
use clear communication skills in Slack
demonstrate understanding the forum (and community) guidelines
behave respectfully to everyone
have no outstanding violations of any community or developer guidelines,
If that’s you, don’t worry, we’ll notice when you’re awesome, and you’ll get a DM via Slack from an existing Support Team member.
See if you can help them. Usually people having a bad day are not bad people, just people having a bad day. Review the post When Good Users Go Bad for some advice. If you’ve tried, you can report the post or come on by the Slack channel #forums and share a link so the other volunteers can help.
We’re here for you! Come to the Slack Channel #forums or ping another mod directly for help. You’re not alone, and you’re not required to help everyone.
