If you need support, go to the forums. If you want to help make Support awesome, stay here.
If your comment is for support, it will be deleted. If it looks like spam, it will be deleted. Sorry, but there’s no other way to keep up with things.
We’re going to have a go at changing the chat time. From now on the Support/Docs chat will be on Thursdays at 16:00 UTC.
That’s:
Hi guys, Here in Brazil the moderators team are trying to improve the user experience while using our forums, for both moderators and common users. I guess we have the same problems every other forums have, but ours can be worst, because we also suffer from the lack of Portuguese Documentation. There’s an effort to translate the Codex, but the job is insane. So, I know you’re trying to improve the forums experience, I’ve read this post http://make.wordpress.org/support/2013/01/what-forum-tools-would-make-support-better/. But I’d like to know what came out of it, what we could do to help you implement some of those ideas and I’d like to know if there are any “official guidelines” for us to maintain an international forum. as far as I know, the only guide we have is this one: http://codex.wordpress.org/International_WordPress_Forums. It is about how to start one, I maybe wrong, but there’s nothing on the topic of how we should maintain it, about what policies we should adopt, etc. We use our good sense, we try to follow the English forums example, but it would be good to have some sort of guidance. 
The section Your WordPress on the forums might have made sense at the beginning when few of us were using WordPress, but now that it’s so popular, there are better avenues for someone to “Strut their stuff” and get feedback.
These days this section contains mostly spammers and moderators tend to give that section less attention. In my opinion, this section is not worth keeping, but I may have not considered something.
Care to voice your opinion filling out the survey and/or leaving a comment?
Very yes.
Voted yes however I would prefer something more advanced in its place…
It could be a plugin that sends information about the blog to this site i.e. theme, plugins, website name etc. Along with that the webmaster can describe their site, it’s purpose, the team and have questions that help us to determine why they use WordPress.
I think in short my idea is a community moderated portfolio. Effort would be required to get the WordPress on this forum. Screenshot of the WordPress should be included. The plugin rating system could be used especially now that it is tied into a review approach.
Is this not something worth considering so that people do have a free place to show off their WordPress on an official WordPress domain and it is done in a way that spammers wouldn’t have time for?
What you’re describing is the Showcase — and there’s no move to get rid of that!
Indeed.. I should have clarified, I’m suggesting that we remove this section – http://wordpress.org/support/forum/your-wordpress
not the showcase – http://wordpress.org/showcase/
If we don’t scrap them, we could introduce more strict guidelines on how to post.
Forrst.com is a website that dedicates itself to a community a review system. People can post their work and review other people’s work. Forrst deals with the same sorts of crap but they resolve it by allowing users to mark work as:
“Needs more work. Forrster hasn’t put enough time into their post for community feedback to be useful.”
“Overly Promotional. The post doesn’t contribute enough opportunity for the community to learn.”
“Lacks purpose. Forrster hasn’t asked for specific feedback, highlighted successful ideas, or shared insight into their work.”
We could take their guidelines as criteria that users must meet when posting their own work. Then if people don’t meet those guidelines, we could delete their threads.
I can see how introducing these guidelines would mean moderating the Your WordPress forum more, but the frequency of threads opening up there is really low, so it may not need too much moderation.
Voted “YES!” I think it’s time for the Your WordPress sub-forum to be shown the door.
Occasionally you’ll get some really good posts (I’m still impressed with Bea’s site) but the majority of the posts are people attempting to get Google Juice out of posting the a link.
Many of those are just plain awful and as Andrew used to point out not different from the theme’s demo site. It’s not really serving it’s original purpose anymore.
Yes, pretty much all of the sites I have reviewed on there since I can remember have been exactly the same as the themes they derive. Basically people want others to review their actual content, which of course does not contribute anything to the community. I often now reply, “I think the developers of theme X have done a really good job” when people try to take credit for them.
More rules/guidelines won’t help. If people don’t read the ones we have, and they don’t, it won’t change the pain that is both that forum and the Meetups one.
I vote to dump. It was a great idea when WP was a smaller community, we’re a bit mammoth
I think its time is long gone.
Granted… due to full time school+work, I haven’t been super active in the forums (I’ll be back!), but since I started hanging out on the forums, I’ve seen that section kind of devolve. It used to be a bit useful, a meet and greet, and beginners really looking for input – heck I was in there when I made my first couple of themes from scratch (man, they are ugly). It just doesn’t really serve that, or any, purpose any longer.
I think something outside the forum with a formal submission process would be a much better idea if the community wanted to keep something like this around at all. That way the moderators could create guidelines as to what can be submitted and a lot of the mess will not be published.
Any chance you could just block it to new submissions? It’s pretty useful to me at the minute while I’m researching WP history.
ah ah… I knew there would be something I hadn’t thought about. Good point.
That would be good. Put up a sticky on that sub-forum with “No more submissions etc.” and leave it for historical purposes.
Can we delete advertising/ spam/ lacking purpose/ lacking detail threads to make room for the good ones on the first page?
It’s tricky. If someone’s spaming any forum then *ZAP! Buh-buy!* that post.
But so much of Your WordPress is just “What do you think of this site?” and that’s kinda/sorta permitted provided it’s actually a WordPress site.
There’s one guy who every few months posts his client work link. The sites are WordPress and not bad per se but those posts don’t really serve a point IMHO. It’s just really an attempt to get a link.
The problem there is the manual work involved. Frankly, I have no interest in curating that. I’d rather actually help people 
Kill it and grill it. (Well, maybe not grill it.) But I think it is time for it to be turned into an historical archive, as suggested above.
Yes please, I’ve never wanted it gone so badly
I’m all for the idea of just archiving that section and disallowing any new threads to be created. Or hide the forum from the public view, make it private.
I voted no, and figured I might as well say why.
Basically, I think it serves as a good introduction point for new users to the forums. If you look around at various internet forum with relatively decent communities on them, most of them have some sort of “intro” place, where new users are encouraged to post, mess up, learn how the forum works, that sort of thing.
The “My WordPress” forum may not have any particularly valuable content there to others, but it serves enough of a purpose for getting people to register, learn to post, etc. I’m not too concerned about the spam in it, everything is nofollowed and such.
Just my 2 cents.
Additional: If spam is the real concern, I’ll happily noindex that section entirely as well.
It’s spam, but it’s also people posting for help in the wrong place, and moderators wasting time (IMO) wrangling things that are essentially worthless. If we’re not there to moderate and help teach them how the forum/community works, then they don’t learn and mess up (in understandable ways) elsewhere. If we DO sit and moderate, then I feel it’s wasted effort when we could be helping people with problems.
I don’t care about the spam. I personally totally ignore that forum because there are two types of posts I see as being valid and ‘correct’ in that forum:
1) “Check out my cool site!” This I ignore because there’s a limit to how much time I have in a day, and no offense, but I ignore random links from my wife, so yeah, I ignore random links from strangers too!
2) “Please suggest things for my site!” This I ignore because I strongly feel your site design is subjective . That is, ‘good’ ideas for a site purely depends on what you want.
The rest of what we get in there is similar to “This review is really a support request” which would be “This is my site! Why does the menu look bad?” And here you’re in the wrong place, and because of that we ignore you, which makes the community look like we don’t care about people and are ignoring them, which I know I am because they done posted wrong on accident, so they get unhappy.
That’s why I don’t like that forum.
I don’t have any strong opinions either way. Yes – you do get new topics that seem to have no other purpose other than getting a link published for a site but then there are topics that obviously serve a very real purpose. All in all, I’d class it as “Mostly Harmless” – though I’d endorse the suggestion to no-index that section.
Only twelve (thirteen if I count the one that I don’t even know what he’s asking…). If you can jump in and help out, remember to link to trac and mark the ticket resolved if there’s a trac ticket
ETA : Nine moar!
so close!
Hi support team. I would like to include Support in our Gnome participation this summer if there are any applicants interested in working in the forums etc over the summer. @ipstenu and/or other experienced team members: Head over to http://codex.wordpress.org/Gnome_Summer_Program_for_Women#Support and fill in project ideas (optional, I made a default idea that basically covers answering questions and beefing up support docs) and info on whoever from this team is willing/able to mentor an intern (ideally we put more than one mentor with each student so the time commitment isn’t too heavy). No idea yet how many student slots we’ll get.
Posts in Alpha/Beta that need help either solving or triaging. Once we have a trac ticket that’s accepted and picked up for a bug, we can mark the post as resolved (since we don’t expect to debug more in the forums).
Anything that isn’t ‘resolved’ is fair game
This post is the DRAFT of my regular forum sticky for new WP releases. What I’m hoping is people will chime in with important factoids I’m missing. The ‘—-’ breaks indicate separate posts. I do them that way so each section is easier to edit and add content down the line.
Remember that the sticky is a LIVING post. While it will be closed, mods and admins can edit it and add more data as it comes to light. In fact, I totally encourage that. Don’t bother asking if you can, if you have the access and you know that something’s missed, just add it in!
For disabling plugins, can we say don’t forget the MU folder if you have one? Some seem to panic when they don’t have a MU folder.
Thanks,
Keith
Already in there “Also remember to deactivate any plugins in the mu-plugins folder. The easiest way is to rename that folder to mu-plugins-old”
I meant add “if you have one” or “if you are using the MU version” as some get confused when they don’t have a mu-plugins folder.
Do you mean like this (if not, just write it out and show me what you do mean, it’s way easier than me poking you to elaborate when you’re totally encouraged to be a part of the writing process):
“Also remember to deactivate any plugins in the mu-plugins folder, if you have one. The easiest way is to rename that folder to mu-plugins-old”
And no, we don’t want to say ‘if you’re using the MU version…’ for two reasons:
1) It’s not MU it’s Multisite
2) You can use mu-plugins on a single site
Yes, that is what I mean.
Super nitpicky editor hat on:
“we delete bumps on site” should be sight
“make your own topic unless your problem is 100% exactly the same as someone elses” add apostrophe in else’s.
Also I like Esmi’s language from the forum guidelines: “Unless you are using the same version of WordPress on the same physical server hosted by the same hosts with the same plugins, theme & configurations as the original poster, do not post in someone else’s thread.”
Gaaah! Thank you, Jess!
WordPress 3.6-Beta has landed for @andrea_r‘s birthday.
http://wordpress.org/news/2013/04/wordpress-3-6-beta-1/
PLEASE test I will send you cookies.
We’ll probably go over, but we’re moving BACK an hour thanks to DST in the US and the others who asked if we could
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?hour=20&min=00&sec=0p1=0
See you tomorrow!
I’ve cleaned up the forum moderator/admin list.
Of the lof, 24 out of 25 were absent 12+ months, even a bunch of Automatticians, who are (yes) members now. Custom titles are applied where appropriate.
Everyone gets the 30-second thinf removed, since you were trusted once, we still trust ya a lot Ditto Akismet Always Trust.
Let me know…
IMO if you only post once a month, and you still help out, there’s no reason to dump you unless you go postal over people and need time out The next round of picking new admins and mods will start with the 3.6 release. How do you get picked? Be active, be helpful, don’t lose your blob. Showing some initiative is always good, knowing when someone’s trolling is great. Most of the time, we start with you as a mod, which is limited, but when you’re a super star, that lasts as long as how annoyed I get having to block users for you.
What? You thought this was an exact science?
If you think someone should be an awesome mod (or shouldn’t be one anymore), feel free to ping me publicly or privately, as you see fit. I trust your judgements!
What’s trolling?
Someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as a forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.
tl;dr: Someone who posts to piss people off, rile them up, and not provide anything constructive. Ever.
You’ll hear me say “Don’t feed the trolls” when people get into arguments with them. You can’t win, just walk away
So one would say I was trolling and you just fed me. Got it
Yeah, I was really tempted to say “… You.” But in the event that you weren’t, I took a chance
I would be interested in becoming a Mod. I do a lot of support on my plugin forums but would be keen to do extend that to the general forums and help out a bit more.
We actually look for people who, without being mods, go help in the general forums. As a plugin or theme dev, helping in your threads is expected, to a degree. It’s the above and beyond that ends up with people being moderators
Ok cool, no worries – thanks for the info
I would love to be a moderator
Jess, 
Elf Brings Coffee