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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.
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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/..
Tag Archives: weekly chat
Marius L. J.
6:08 pm on October 12, 2023 Tags: weekly chat
This is where news that are relevant or good to know for the team from across the community are brought up and shared.
WordPress 6.4 BetaBetaA 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.-3
RCRelease CandidateA beta version of software with the potential to be a final product, which is ready to release unless significant bugs emerge.-1 is right around the corner, so please help test WordPress 6.4 if you can!
As there were no major concerns with the timing proposed in the agenda, and given the long feedback period given, the plan remains to publish them fully on the upcoming Monday, October 16th. The publication will be accompanied by a post here on make/support to help signal boost the update, and add some specific clarification that is relevant to theme and pluginPluginA 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 authors.
APAC friendly meeting times
There’s been some talk of a desire for more Asia-Pacific (APAC) friendly support meeting times. This is something the team has wanted to do, and although previous attempts lacked volunteers in the area with the time available to do so, we now have some volunteers, and are hoping to get that under way. More information will be posted about this once the involved volunteers have had a chance to plan it out!
Checking in with international liaisons
None of the teams international liaisons had any concerns or special events/news to share at this time.
This is where news that are relevant or good to know for the team from across the community are brought up and shared.
WordCampWordCampWordCamps 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
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 (betaBetaA 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.
This is where news that are relevant or good to know for the team from across the community are brought up and shared.
Extended capabilities for international moderators
Some may have picked up on this already, as the metaMetaMeta 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. commits are public, but in the spirit of transparency the team wishes to inform that the capabilities of moderators on the international forums (the ones directly under the main WordPress.orgWordPress.orgThe 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/ domain) have been extended. This is to allow them to more directly handle spam and similar scenarios where extended capabilities may be needed.
Alongside this, improved audit logging for actions taken towards user-accounts have also been added. These are not publicly logged, and will not be, as doing so may potentially expose either users or moderators to potential retiliatory actions.
The first onboarding call for the contributor mentorship program has been concluded
If you’re unfamiliar with the new contributor mentorship program, it is a pilot project to help onboard new (and potential existing) contributors to various make teams, and give them more direct mentors that can help them navigate the hurdles that may come up when getting started in contributing. It’s a cool concept, and the support team is part of the pilot project (big shoutouts to the wonderful mentors!)
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.
Karpe, Omar Sheriff – KENYA (Live from DY Patil Stadium, Mumbai)
This is where news that are relevant or good to know for the team from across the community are brought up and shared.
Suggested stance on the use of AI-tooling
This past week a post on suggested wording, and how to approach the use of AI-tooling in support scenarios on WordPress.orgWordPress.orgThe 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/ was posted, looking for acknowledgement and input.
See the full post at https://make.wordpress.org/support/2023/05/suggested-stance-on-the-use-of-ai-tooling/
WordCampWordCampWordCamps 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. Europe
Next week will be WordCamp Europe, not much to say ahead of time, other than the team hoping to see many of you there!
With travel involved, there’s not currently a planned weekly meeting for Thursday June 8th, but please reach out if you’d like for there to be one organized!
This is where news that are relevant or good to know for the team from across the community are brought up and shared.
Facilitating for sponsored volunteers
This weeks chat was primarily focused towards how the team can facilitate for sponsored volunteers, with the expectations this provides both from a team perspective, but also from the sponsoring side.
There’s definitely a place here for a followup post dedicated to gathering input from folks asynchronously, that were unable to attend the weekly meeting, and we will do just that. That gives time to also prepare suggestions for on-boarding and off-boarding routines, and document these.
Having a known schedule for volunteers would help with repeated tasks performed throughout the day on the international forums. It would also help leverage moderation on rosetta forums that may otherwise not have the same level of active volunteers already.
Another important element to keep in mind that we need to ensure that those who are sponsored have the access needed to carry out the tasks that are expected of them.
Some other elements that were brought up (and will be more thoroughly covered in the followup post) were the forum-password-resets email inbox, which is used to help users who are unable to reset their passwords, but is also where banned users are asked to reach out. This is an area where de-escalation experience is worth a lot, and the added benefit of support network sponsored volunteers often have that an individual might not have, would play in.
We recommend reading the discussion in its entirety during the meeting for those who wish to get a full picture of the current suggestions, as a prelude to the dedicated discussion on the topic.
This is where news that are relevant or good to know for the team from across the community are brought up and shared.
Private Forum Moderators Channel
Support moderators have been given a new channel for private discussions. These are for topics that should not be discussed in public for various reasons, such as privacy concerns for users involved, or just to ensure that the team provides a unified response to an ongoing highly opinionated discussion.
The team is slowly rolling this out to include our volunteers on rosetta forums as well, and hope to start sending out invited in the next 1-2 weeks, reaching out first to only invite those who have an interest in it.
Request for input: Support Status
Data and statistics can help guide a lot of decisions, and also give insights into how things are going as a whole.
There is a call for input on what kind of information people would find interesting at https://make.wordpress.org/support/2023/04/request-for-input-support-stats/
When collecting information though, it is important to see it as a whole, and as chance would have it, a great article was shared at https://www.commsor.com/post/how-to-be-a-good-community-data-analyst about this on the same day as our meeting, giving some good thoughts and insights into just that.
This is where news that are relevant or good to know for the team from across the community are brought up and shared.
WordPress 6.2 Release CandidateRelease CandidateA beta version of software with the potential to be a final product, which is ready to release unless significant bugs emerge. 2
There appears to be some interest in having statistics as part of the teams weekly update, so a new post to gather asynchronous input will be created to move this forward.
Some of the fields mentioned (but no guarantees are made as to what will be in the first implementation) were:
Post comparison between themes, plugins, and general global forums
Amount of users blocked in a given time frame
Amount of reported topics handled
Amount of resolved thread within the given time frame
Checking in with international liaisons
International liaisons are reporting on a lot of exciting new WordCamps planned, including the inaugural WordCamp Sylhet, and WordCamp Torino!
This is where news that are relevant or good to know for the team from across the community are brought up and shared.
Support ForumSupport ForumWordPress 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. Bug Scrub
CoreCoreCore is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. Media Modal Input
The team was asked if we had identified any recurring usability issues or confusion regarding the media modal, in relation to core ticket #24567, but no issues had been discovered.
Requiring a reason when flagging users
The call for feedback on, and resulting discussion, relating to requiring a reason when flagging users, which could then be exposed to the end user to ensure they had access to the reason for their account status being changed, took up the majority of our meeting this week.
Additional impressions and feedback is added to the ticket (meta #6834), which is still open for feedback and opinions, but it is also a good discussion from the meeting transcript that is worth reading over.
Checking in with international liaisons
Unfortunately, due to the passionate discussions taking place, our weekly meeting ran out of time, and we did not have time to directly reach out to our international liaisons during the chat this week, but the previously referenced plan of doing direct outreach on a quarterly basis is still planned to happen, and direct contact has been had during Q1.
This is where news that are relevant or good to know for the team from across the community are brought up and shared.
Two-Factor Authentication
Two-factor authentication is available for testing on WordPress.orgWordPress.orgThe 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/, the path to it is kind of hidden, as it is still being tested.
BetaBetaA 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. testing of the upcoming WordPress 6.2 continues at full speed. Do you run a unique kind of site, or fresh and modern PHPPHPPHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. http://php.net/manual/en/intro-whatis.php. versions? Help us test if you can!
Support ForumSupport ForumWordPress 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. Bug Scrub
A scrub of support forum component tickets is scheduled for March 1st.
WordCampWordCampWordCamps 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. Asia
The first WordCamp Asia was held over the last weekend, and we’ll get some updates on how contributor dayContributor DayContributor 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/. went form a support perspective when the attendees have had a chance to settle in, kudos to the volunteers who helped by giving back during the event (and before/after, of course)!
Volunteers interested in taking on more responsibilities
In an effort to facilitate for more volunteers taking on new roles and responsibilities, there’s a proposal to have others take part in running weekly meetings. To lower the barrier, agendas will be prepared and the groundwork handled if desired, to make it easier to jump in and participate in more ways.
If this sounds interesting, please feel free to reach out to @clorith!
Checking in with international liaisons
No major issues being reported form the international liaisons this week.
Our friends in the Russian community are currently experimenting with Telegram as a community platform, and are seeing new faces, which is an exciting development!
Open floor
Open floor is a segment of our chat that is used if there is time left of the allotted meeting time, where items not initially on the agenda can be brought up, such as feedback or ideas, anything really (so long as it relates to the support team).
This improves on the reporting flow, and ensures that more initial information is available to those who respond to reports, so that the reporters may retain their anonymity moving forward by not needing ot be called upon to explain their report.
Merry-Go-Round of Life from Howl’s Moving Castle, performed by Joe Hisaishi
This is where news that are relevant or good to know for the team from across the community are brought up and shared.
Topics reported by users
When a user reports a topic or review, they are now required to provide an explanation of why they are reporting the topic.
This should improve understanding among moderators when looking at a report, and remove the need to call out a user in public to get an explanation. This is doubly important, as the report feature maintains the reporters anonymity, by only revealing their identity, and the reason for the report, to a moderator, and that trust should not be broken.
Support component bug scrub
@vladytimy has graciously offered to host one (or more?) bug scrubs for the support component on metaMetaMeta 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., look forward to updates from them on times and dates!
WordCampWordCampWordCamps 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. Asia
More communities bring back feedback that they are looking for solutions to replace Slack as a community platform due to various limitations form the platform in terms of who may use it, and what data is available to the communities to help retain members and grow.
