2018 in review
2018 had a lot of great achievements, but also some recurring topics we need to work on going into 2019.
Achievements such as the release of Help Hub and the updated Support Guidelines.
We also introduced a few minor tools for volunteers to go along with the popular Also Viewing extension.
The Health Check & Troubleshooting plugin continues to be an essential tool in sorting users problems, and we’ll keep pushing it’s use and usability moving forward. As noted in the State of the WordState of the Word This is the annual report given by Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress at WordCamp US. It looks at what we’ve done, what we’re doing, and the future of WordPress. https://wordpress.tv/tag/state-of-the-word/., parts of it will find its way into WordPress coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress., while other parts are better suited as a 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.
We’re also seeing good activity for moderators across the board to help keep things running smoothly in the various support locales, where possible.
The amount participation level of new volunteers (and recurring) have also gone up over the year, which we are very happy to see!
Moving forward we do need to work on user communication though, especially in cases where they are being reprimanded or flagged, as there’s potential for improvements there.
We’ve also seen an increase in negativity from users towards volunteers, much due to the increased visibility added to individuals after the GutenbergGutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ release. We’re handling the worst behaviors, but will need to increase our efforts to avoid this behavior from spreading, and will be getting to that as soon as hosts are done rolling out the WordPress 5.0 update so we don’t need to repeat the actions a few weeks into 2019.
Unfortunately we do not have a fancy “year in review” stats blockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience., as that’s not something we’ve previously kept track of, but for fun since the end of August 2016 until January 2019 we’ve added ~1.8 million topics to the international forums.
Checking in with international liaisons
Members of the Swedish, Canadian, Urdu, Russian, Spanish, Greek, Dutch and Portuguese communities shared how things have been going over the holiday weeks, and things sound like they are going smoothly!
Read the meeting transcript in the Slack archives. (A Slack account is required)