General announcements
The WordPress 4.8.1 release is tentatively scheduled for August 1st.
User notes
This weeks main event, user notes are finally live!
User notes allows a moderator to attach a note to any user, allowing us to keep tabs on why actions were taken, and historical data if we have repeat offenders and similar.
This information is also shared with the rosetta sites, so they can add notes for behavior we may not observe on the international forums (or vice versa), giving us more control than our previous approach with emails and P2P2 P2 or O2 is the term people use to refer to the Make WordPress blog. It can be found at https://make.wordpress.org/. posts.
The handbook now has a new section about how and when to use user notes, moderators should familiarize them selves with the document, and keep in mind that the handbook is a living document, so remember to check back now and then for any changes.
Forum Welcome and Forum Guidelines
The new forum welcome is now live on the forums, and can freely be adopted by the rosetta sites as well. When translating it keep in mind that you don’t need to make it an exact copy of the international welcome, all languages and countries are different and what works for us might not be a perfect fit for your own locale.
In light of the much better experience a short welcome provides as part of the forums, we’ve migrated the forum guidelines into the forums as well, this ensures a consistent experience for regular forum users who may be put off by the sheer amount of information in the handbook (where the guidelines currently live).
Checkin With International Support Liaisons
The Portugese, Spanish, Italian and Swedish communities are doing well.
They’re looking into an odd issue with a specific Portugese forum being locked, metaMeta Meta 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. is on the case.
Other stuff
It was also brought up that the #forums channel might appear a bit off-putting when you join and you have to go through 13 pages of backscroll with nothing but emoji (my own over-statement for emphasis), which we can understand is less than ideal, so an effort will be made to keep the random outbursts of emoji down. This is not to say we’re going to kill any conversations between volunteers, as we recognize the value in blowing out in a friendly manner now and then, given the nature of support in general. So if you enjoy #forums emoji, don’t be too put off by this, we’ll say if it’s becoming too much.
Read the meeting transcript in the Slack archives. (A Slack account is required)