Support Team Meeting Updates for September 29

Items covered at today’s Support Team Meeting:

  • Feature Requests
  • Discussion of 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 Vulnerabilities in the Forums
  • Premium Product Support
  • Pre-Defined Replies
  • 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/ oEmbed on Forums

Read the Make/Support blog post for more details.

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Summary for November 18th Support Meeting

Community headlines and updates

WordPress 5.9-beta1 has been delayed, a new date for the betaBeta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process., and consequently a new release schedule, is not yet announced, but will be posted once it is finalized by the coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. team.

Team representative nominations are over, and with only one nominee, we have no need to hold a vote. The nominee is @sterndata, and instead of the vote which would have ensured if there were multiple nominees, we will instead have a ~2 week period in which any concerns can be raised, this can also be done privately to @clorith. If no concerns are raised, or they’re all worked out, the final announcement of the new representative will be done after December 1st, and we will prepare a handover period with some onboarding and similar at that time.

Next weeks meeting (November 25th), will be a very informal office hours, due to major holidays being celebrated in parts of the world, and other social events elsewhere, there are not a lot of regular contributors available at the time, so this feels like a good approach.

Open floor

A note was made that often folks join the channel after an incident, quite often relating to something unfortunate happening on for example the forums, and that the users may not feel very well received.

This is in part by nature of guidelines helping us enforce directives, but we can probably also be better at providing a more welcoming surrounding in such cases.

We, as volunteers in the #forums channel, should avoid “piling on” when someone has concerns. Letting one individual handle the case, of course another person may be asked to chime in, but it should then ideally happen at the original attendees request, to avoid giving users a feeling of being outnumbered and of a lesser voice, or may lead to confusion and frustration.

That’s not to say things do not some times escalate, and we know that not everyone wants to accept the answers that are given. If things escalate, and users do not wish to listen, it becomes an unwelcome environment for other participants on SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/., so please escalate such cases to a Slack admin, and they can deal with it from there.

Read, or comment on, the complete original post on make/support.

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Summary for April 15th Support Team Meeting

Headlines / Community Updates

WordPress 5.8 preparations

With Full Site Editing making it’s initial appearance in WordPress 5.8, the support team have started to prepare actionable items to get ready for it’s arrival.

Under are some thoughts and concerns that came up in that discussion, and which we’ll try to address moving forward up to the release date.

If there are other concerns or talking points, please feel free to provide them in a comment on the original summary post (where you can also enjoy this weeks artist), or raise them in an upcoming support meeting!

  • Coordinate with docs to make sure relevant documentation is ready before release so that support can familiarize them selves with it.
  • Coordinate with 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/ team, how do they want to get feedback, and issues, reported in a sensible way. Support shouldn’t have to create tickets, but pushing users away and telling them to go to GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ is also a terrible experience.
  • Make sure Gutenberg team has people on hand and we know who is available to help on complex issues the team may not know the answers to.
  • This may be another scenario like the 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. editor release where we see The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. How do we support those who land in the thick of it with negatively inclined users. All while also trying to show understanding and compassion where it should be, not everyone is inherently bad, and may be concerned or scared users as well.
  • Likely a focus on existing users and how this affects them, more so than new users without existing themes and content.

#support

Support team – November 5th – Summary

In keeping with a previous post, to reduce noise the support updates are more sporadic, and posted when there’s actionable items outside of regular check-ins.

Headlines / Community updates

After some hearty discussions surrounding handling of support requests for commercial products on the 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/ forums, a set of guidelines for how moderators should respond to such topics was worked out.

This work spurred the now published Moderator Enforcement Guidelines, the goal of which is to ensure a unified response to scenarios that happen regularly, and make it easier to reference others to as well so they can see what the process is.

Open floor

We had a good discussion on how to get the forums more forum-like, there’s already a meta ticket for this (https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/4007), but it doesn’t quite hit all the right notes.
A post will follow with a proposal for how this could be approached, that would solidify their place as a forum, and also make discovery a bit easier.

#support

March 12th Support Team Meeting Summary

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

General announcements

Many countries are starting to experience the Daylight Savings Time (DST) changes these days, and although a lot of teams change their meeting time when this happens, the support team hasn’t done so for many years, and will keep it’s 17:00 UTC time slot.

Adjusting the meeting format a little

Although a pre-existing weekly time slot, we had no published agenda this week, and just winged it. This turned out to be a popular format, as it allowed for more users to get a word in that would normally feel compelled to sit idle by when an agenda existed.

In light of this, we’ll be looking to do an informal agenda-less meeting regularly, likely once a month, to help spur further such good conversations.

Upcoming changes to WordPress 5.4

The newly introduced full screen editing by default that’s slated for WordPress 5.4 was discussed at length, and although it’s inclusion in the release is still up for debate, we will plan for a scenario where it is included.

The primary concern is users feeling lost, how do we help them find their way back to their usual flow, and the desire for a simple solution to users.

It was mentioned, but has since been discovered to be incorrect, that a keyboard shortcut would let you toggle the mode, this is not the case as of this writing.

Pre-defined replies

The support team has a list of pre-defined replies for regularly occurring scenarios (available at https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/contributing-to-the-wordpress-forums/stock-answers/) which got updated this past week to allow for easy copy-pasting, and also got expanded with a new entry.

Old topic notifications

Discussions about how to handle older topics which may or may not be relevant followed suit, and one of the better ideas that came forth from this discussion was to add a notice, much like plugins does for older plugins, that information in this topic is more than X times old, and may not be accurate any more.

Checking in with international liaisons

Members of our broader community from Sweden, Russia, Bangladesh, and India took part in the lively discussions this week, and a thank you for that, as broader views are unimaginably valuable!

One who smiles
rather than rages
is always the stronger.

#support

February 6 2020 Support Meeting Notes

2020-02-06 forum support team meeting

https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C02RQC6RW/p1581008447159700

  • quick summary of the forum ticket scrub
  • all OK with the international fora
  • discusson of javascriptJavaScript JavaScript or JS is an object-oriented computer programming language commonly used to create interactive effects within web browsers. WordPress makes extensive use of JS for a better user experience. While PHP is executed on the server, JS executes within a user’s browser. https://www.javascript.com/. issues when httpHTTP HTTP is an acronym for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. HTTP is the underlying protocol used by the World Wide Web and this protocol defines how messages are formatted and transmitted, and what actions Web servers and browsers should take in response to various commands./httpsHTTPS HTTPS is an acronym for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure. HTTPS is the secure version of HTTP, the protocol over which data is sent between your browser and the website that you are connected to. The 'S' at the end of HTTPS stands for 'Secure'. It means all communications between your browser and the website are encrypted. This is especially helpful for protecting sensitive data like banking information. mismatch occurs on sites. Will Chrome 80 fix this?
  • open floor:
    • macmanx proposes that Otto write guidelines for moderators and publish them on make.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//support. There’s been a lot of pushback on moderation lately.
    • jnash proposes a capability to allow some users to “moderate” the spam queue (or at least, tag items as spam and pending). This led to discussions about whether we just
    • need more moderators. jnash is creating a tracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. ticket to further the discussion

#support

January 23rd Support Team Meeting Summary

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

Additions to the guidelines

Most of this weeks meeting time was taken up by discussions about amendments to the support guidelines, and a very good discussion ensured relating to changes in guidelines relating to the use of links in 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 and theme related support topics.

As the subject can be hard to cover, a separate post will be made outlining the changes, and how they may (or may not) affect the average user.

Checking in with international liaisons

Representatives from our non-English parts of the community in Italy, Netherlands, Russia, Greece, Sweden, Brazil, Bangladesh, and India were present this week, and helped broaden our horizones.

Reminder that if you are from a non-English speaking part of our community, we would love to hear from you, as shared experiences are worth more than we can describe!

#support

January 16th Support Team Meeting Summary

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

General announcements

We’ve changed up the agenda post (and summary!) to give it a little bit of color and fun.

That was a side-effect, the primary focus of the new approach is to make the agenda post more accessible to potential new users, by being more detailed about agenda items we remove the veil of mystery.

Goals for 2020

Better recruitment is a recurring theme, even across rosetta sites, how this will happen isn’t fully fleshed out yet, but there are exciting ideas being shared and if anything comes to fruition it will be shared in depth.

Look to onboard more people familiar with the new 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. editor, this is an area which is lacking as very few individuals have experience with it that go deep enough for support related tasks.

The idea of a support day, much like the already established translators and accessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) days was brought up as a potential goal to achieve for the year.

Many of the rosetta sites have also set translations of the support handbooks or HelpHub as their goals for the year, which should be exciting!

Checking in with international liaisons

Members of the support community from the Netherlands, Italy, Russia, Bangladesh and Spain took part and helped us flesh out some goals moving forward.

#support

January 9th Support Team Meeting Summary

General announcements

No particular announcements this week, as we’re coming off the holiday downtime, but a reminder of ongoing discussions relating to the validity of reviews and spam prevention. Watch for relevant 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. tickets relating to this.

Checking in with international liaisons

Members from our international community took part this week, and we saw them joining from Russia, Sweden, Spain, Bengali and Greece. And yes, there is a new face in there, I love seeing new attendees, everyone is welcome, and we’re always interested in hearing how things are going outside of the international forums, it helps provide a broader understanding of our users, and encourages us to look at things from other perspectives.

Open floor

The pre-defined replies that are recorded in the support team handbook have gotten an update.

A remark on recurring issues relating to errors when saving posts was brought up, some discussion shows that this primarily happens to sites with WP_DEBUG enabled, as this makes the JSONJSON JSON, or JavaScript Object Notation, is a minimal, readable format for structuring data. It is used primarily to transmit data between a server and web application, as an alternative to XML. response from the save-function become invalid when it contains error notices and similar, often caused by plugins or themes.

#support

December 12th Support Team Meeting Summary

General announcements

The bbPressbbPress Free, open source software built on top of WordPress for easily creating forums on sites. https://bbpress.org. slowdowns have, for the most part, been resolved right now (some moderation tasks may still be slow at times, this is being looked into, but for the average user, it should be fine), and notifications have been re-enabled on the international forums (they were disabled for a period due to incorrect recipients).

Health Check

Our favorite support tool is the Health Check 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, but it has some drawbacks (or amazing features, depending on how you look at it); It currently supports WordPress 4.0 or higher, that’s a lot of versions to account for when working on the plugin.

There’s a request for input on thoughts relating to splitting things out, keeping a “Legacy Health Check” for those users on older versions of WordPress (for example, many folks actually use it before updates to help check that they can upgrade without major issues).

The details on the proposal can be seen at https://github.com/WordPress/health-check/issues/365, and input can be left there, or in the comments below the make/support summary post.

There many be many pros and cons to this, the two major ones brought up so far is that yes, it provides better parity with coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. in an up to date release, with less restricted by older core versions, but it may be confusing to have two similarly themed plugins/names.

Checking in with international liaisons

We had lovely community members from Sweden, Russia, Netherlands, Urdu, Brazil, India, and Italy (and possibly other spaces who did not get a chance to say hi this time), and some of them stepped up and helped out a new member get situated with the Bengali forums, so thank you @fierevere and @tobifjellner 🐱‍🏍

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

Feeling overwhelmed? Walk away, you are a volunteer, and don’t need permission to take breaks or to walk out on any situation you are no longer happy or comfortable with.

#support