Support Team Update – October 26th

WordPress 4.9

WordPress 4.9-beta4 is out, if you can please help with testing, the more bugs we can find before launch, the less work for us afterwards.

In similar news, Gutenberg (the new editing experience in WordPress) version 1.5.x is also out, with a first iteration of the 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. box support, so if you wish ot help shape the future, that’s what you’ll want to get involved with at the time!

Checking in with international support liaisons

The Italian, German, Russian, Swedish and Brazilian communities had representatives stop by and take part in this weeks discussions. If you’re doing support in a any other local communities we would love to have you join our weekly meetings so please stop by! It doesn’t have to be a WordPress.orgWordPress.org The 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/ forum, as we understand that various locales function differently!

We’ve enabled the user watch 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 on some more locales, if your WordPress.org forum doesn’t have access to the “Flag Author” link on posts (it should be next to the user notes link) and would like this, please let us know!

A flagged user will have their posts held in the Pending queue until a moderator manually approves them, this is intended for use with users who have misbehaved and we want to ensure they can play nice with others before we let them post without supervision again.

Flagging users

A bit of a followup on the previous lines, when a user is flagged it’s important to follow some fixed procedures to keep track of what is going on.

As such, when a user gets flagged, one should always add a user note, explaining why you’ve flagged the user, this is so that other moderators know why a user was flagged.

When a flag is issued, also always make a reply to the user explaining why they are flagged ,and what this means for them. If the user doesn’t know why they were selected, or that they are in that user classification at all, they won’t learn from their mistakes.

But before flagging a user, try educating them, we’re very trigger happy with flagging accounts at the moment (at least on the international forums), and educating them and adding a user note without flagging them may be more appropriate in many situations (basically don’t punish them for not knowing).

Moderator attendance

This is more a reminder that we expect a certain level of involvement from our moderators, at least on the international forums. We ask that they come by our weekly meetings at least somewhat-regularly or interact with the make/support articles that go up at the very least (we understand that meetings are not always timed well for every participant). This is to avoid having any unused privileged accounts hanging around.

 

Read the meeting transcript in the Slack archives. (A Slack account is required)

#support