Support has been doing the day to day of support.
There’s been an uptick in spam in the forums, where we see hundreds of spam posts (mostly caught by Akismet) in a short period of time. In and of itself that’s not bad, but since many non-spammers get caught in the moderated-flag too, we’re taking longer to approve any posts, which annoys people, makes them post more, and increases the cycle. There’s no perfect fix yet, but we’ve started with throwing more warm bodies at it.
The alpha/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. forum has also gotten more traffic, and more volunteers are jumping in to help sort out legit 3.5-RCRelease Candidate A beta version of software with the potential to be a final product, which is ready to release unless significant bugs emerge. gripes from everything else.
Speaking of 3.5, we’re pretty much ready for it. The post is ready to go, and we have a couple plugins with known issues. This is the end run for this, and more will crop up after the fact, but we look pretty okay. The expected major freak out of the masses will be either link manager (I don’t think so really) and media manager (bound to mess up some workflows). The imagick changes will cause very little impact to plugins (all who will be impacted have been emailed, and none of the 4 plugins are that heavily used). Please comment here if you know of any plugin or theme conflicts with 3.5
There was no meetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. in IRC last week because of a surprise sickness. This week we plan for the usual time – 2100 UTC (4pm ET) – but we’re looking at having the time rotate so as to hit up more people in more time zones. I’m going to come up with a schedule for that for January to try it out. Suggestions welcome.
Next Week we’ll probably have a nice ZOMG 3.5 report.