Announcements
WordPress 5.2.3 was released.
A new forum moderator tool, Stop Forum Spam, has been made available.
This allows moderators, at the click of a button, to check a users online reputation, as in, have they been caught posting spam recently, and if so, how often and how recent.
It’s a helper, but not a definitive tool, in our battle against strange user behavior
The WordPress 5.3 development cycle is now available at https://make.wordpress.org/core/5-3/
Checking in with international liaisons
Members of our wider community from Italy, Netherlands, Brazil, India, Russia and Sweden.
Our Russian friends reported a larger than usual amount of issues on older sites with backported fixes in 5.2.3. @macmanx iterated that although security fixes are backported, it’s even harder to test for all scenarios for them, and this is likely why there may be more of them. It’s also worth noting that 5.2.2 was not a security release, and as such had no backports so it’s not a clean comparison.
Open floor
A reminder that it’s ok for 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/theme developers to ask their users to email them directly, but if you see an employee of a company (let’s say TransactionBuddy) ask people to email them personally (at let’s say a Gmail address), please let someone know.