Here are the items discussed at today’s #wordpress-sfd support 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..
Code authors jumping straight to requesting admin access
This is kind of a repeat item but except for asking authors to try intermediate steps I don’t see much to offer about this. It’s not quite like asking for FTPFTP FTP is an acronym for File Transfer Protocol which is a way of moving computer files from one computer to another via the Internet. You can use software, known as a FTP client, to upload files to a server for a WordPress website. https://codex.wordpress.org/FTP_Clients. access but it’s close.
Asking for access like that is not recommended and should be discouraged. The forums are a self-help resource and when the author just fixes the problem it doesn’t really help the community.
It’s too much of a shortcut and just like FTP access if something breaks due to an author’s changes then the author is to blame.
Status of doc-bot
There was some discussion about where the doc-bot is being run from and features.
For IRC support requests comments should be made to https://make.wordpress.org/support/irc-doc-bot/ in which @sivel will pinged.
Semi-formal process for requesting forum custom member titles
Occasionally there are official support representatives for a company, 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 or theme and those reps are not listed as a contributor. When that happens the authors can ask that those other accounts gets a custom title such as “ACME Support Rep”.
But there’s not really a process to request that title. There was a make/support blog posting but that got really spammy quickly and had to be shut down.
There was some discussion in the meetup about how that could be accomplished.
- A sticky forum post with posted requirements – That would get even more spammy and that idea was discarded.
- A PollDaddy form – That may work but would need some more fleshing out.
- Make it part of the plugins and themes bbPressbbPress Free, open source software built on top of WordPress for easily creating forums on sites. https://bbpress.org. admin portion – Difficult to do. Really difficult; they’re seperate bbPress installations and the integration work is a lot. If it were something simple like that it would have been done already.
At the moment when a moderator identifies support staff, they confirm that they’re legitimate and offer to customize their forum member titles. But it’s more of a shoulder tap thing and not something that has a process for.
If there’s an interest in making a process for those requests I’ll create a new post at make/support to get more ideas.
You can read the transcript of today’s meet up via this link.