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.
I’ve now answered just over a hundred support topics on the forums. This may not seem a lot to some of the more experienced mods, who seem to be able to answer a hundred in an hour, but we’ve all got to start somewhere and I’m happy with the problems that I’ve helped to solve and with the feedback I’ve received from users.
In addition to this, helping out with support has helped me to increase my knowledge of WordPress, hone my own skills, and of course, has made me really appreciate the WordPress community as a whole. There’s such diversity in people’s disciplines, backgrounds, and skills, I feel that there is something that I could learn from everyone.
A major thing that I will take with me from this internship is that contributing to Core isn’t the only important thing you can do to give back to the community. Support really does play a big part in making WordPress what it is.
One of the first people I met at WordCamp UK last week wasn’t a developer, but a complete beginner to WordPress. She attended Mike Little’s “WordPress for Beginners” talk and went to the Happiness Bar, at the end of the weekend she said she’d gained “the WordPress bug.”
WordPress has always been built with the user in mind, and it’s arguably this that has given it its edge over other open-source CMS solutions in the market. Support plays an important role in helping to maintain this user-focus and in attracting new people to the community. I’m glad to be a part of it. 
I’ll be watching the live stream at WCSF this weekend and will be attending the Contributor Day on Sunday via IRC. Hope all of you who are lucky enough to attend in person have fun, and I look forward to seeing what comes out of the Contributor Day.
Hey everyone. Another quick update:
I attended Word Camp UK in Lancaster this past weekend. Lancaster is a beautiful city, and the organisers did a brilliant job in choosing the venue. There was plenty of positive feedback in regards to the talks too and I definitely learned a lot.
It was great to meet people from such a wide variety of disciplines all using WordPress in different ways: I met marketing managers, bloggers, developers, designers, trainers, and support staff. It feels good to be part of such a diverse community, and I look forward to meeting more of you at future Word Camps.
Last week I hit a bit of a rocky patch work-wise. However, after a weekend of rare sunshine and GB sporting success, followed by some words of encouragement from my mentors in our catch-up today, I’m geared up for a productive week. Here are some things I have planned:
As always, any comments or thoughts on what you think I should be doing with this internship are very much welcome. Have a good week all.
Hi, one thing I think would be great is if there was a full demo of themes rather than the ‘preview’ which is just a lightbox popover and doesn’t really give you a feel for how a theme works. is this something you could include? I would have added a new post but as a new contributor I don’t know how!
i don’t think that’s ever going to a practical option as the range of features (and hence the set up) varies so much. Even a full demo may still not represent the way in which you would use the theme on your site. The best option is to install the theme and use the Live Preview option on your own site to get a good feel of how the them might look on your site.
Hey. I agree with @esmi in that installing the theme within your dashboard and using the “Live Preview” option may give you the feel you’re looking for.
If you’d still like to submit your idea, or for any future ideas, you can use the WordPress Requests and Feedback forum (http://wordpress.org/support/forum/requests-and-feedback). If you ever run into any problems using WordPress, you’ll find people that can help on the Support forums (http://wordpress.org/support/). Thanks for contributing.
It’s the 4th of July, so the Americans will be AWOL most likely.
To be honest, I was planning on being there for the chat today, but some RL stuff came up yesterday that’s taking my time and attention. So … If you were there, we are agenda less today in so far as support goes. if you have topics, bring ‘em up and feel free to post a summary as a comment here.
Sorry about the late notice, I got in later than expected :/
Hey everyone, just a quick update this week.
Things are going well with the internship: I’m learning so much from helping others on the forums and it’s great being able to give back to the community.
I was hampered slightly in my first couple of weeks due to migraines, but have been feeling much better the last couple of days. So hopefully you’ll be seeing me about much more this week.
Additionally, I’d like to say that I’m very grateful for the time that people have put into commenting on my posts and helping me out so far. I’ll be at WordCamp UK next weekend and it would be good to meet some of you in person, let me know if you’re going!
Thx for contributing
We’ve been discussing the possibility for re-merging the support and docs teams. Everyone seems to be happy with the possibility but I wanted to post here to see if anyone has any comments, thoughts, or objections.
I think it’s a good idea since we have our chats at the same time anyway, we’ve been discussing having a centralised support hub, and combined we could probably take over the world.
If we decide to go ahead, the best approach would be to merge docs back into support and have one large Support group.
As long as I don’t have to turn in my Docs Team t-shirt, I’m cool with this!
Although I’ve worked with computers for a long time now I’m not a technical but more an applications man… it’s what I can do rather than how to do it that first interest me (and I suspect an awful lot of others too). Now Word Press is a great platform (I can theoretically do a lot with it) but it lacks (or seems to) good non technical support/documentation on what you can actually do with it. So may I suggest that a future objective could be to produce some promotional rather than technical documents. What I’m driving at here is an over-view, one that introduces the platform and expands upon it’s versatility without becoming lost in the technical jargon. Show the possibilities to users as well as the methods needed by developers. My own personal interest here (amongst other things) is the potential to develop a ‘self hosted social network’
So many posts! Where to start!? The sheer amount of unanswered posts in the Support forums was a bit daunting at first. My first week as a WordPress Support intern was all about getting myself accustomed to the forums:
On my first day, I spent three and a half hours racking my brain and creating all manner of complex JavaScript to eventually solve an error in a user’s jQuery. It turned out that it was a very simple fix (the user was calling the wrong selector) – it shouldn’t have taken me nearly as long as it did to spot this.
I fell into this trap of spending too long on one problem several times throughout the week. I’ve soon realised not to leave it so long before reaching out for help or moving on from a post.
At the end of my first week, I feel as though I am a little quicker at spotting bugs in other people’s code and better at identifying the forum posts that I’m able to answer.
Week two: I’m going to continue with forum support and will also be contributing to the Codex. Any advice/tips would be much appreciated.
P.S: I missed the weekly IRC Support chat on Thursday (sorry!) but will make sure I’m at the next one. Look forward to speaking with some of you then.
“spending too long on one problem” – a familiar trap. Another to watch out for is creating an entire site for a user one css question at a time. And you were just in time for 3.5.2!
“Another to watch out for is creating an entire site for a user one css question at a time”
I’ve found you can avoid those by asking, “so, which CSS have you tried so far (that isn’t working) ?” – That way it encourages the OP to actually do some work before posting 
Feel free to message me in the #wordpress-sfd chat room if you want to talk about Codex/Docs.
Hey everyone.
I’m Siobhan. I’ll be interning at WordPress this summer as part of the Gnome OPW. My internship will be centred around support (forums, training, documentation) and my mentors are Mika Epstein and Hanni Ross, with Jen Mylo and Andrea Middleton acting as program administrators.
A little about me: I’m from Barry, South Wales and studied Computer Science at the University of Reading. Last year, I was lucky enough to spend a few months working as a developer at a digital agency in Florence, Italy – it was here that I started learning more about and getting involved in Free and Open-Source Software. I have since gone on to work on various WordPress projects on a freelance basis.
I feel very lucky to have this opportunity to get involved with and give back to the WordPress community.
I’ll be posting updates on my internship here every Monday for the next three months, and you’ll also be able to find me lingering on the #wordpress, #wordpress-sfd, and #wordpress-gsoc IRC channels.
As a final note: I’d like to wish the other seven WordPress GSoC/Gnome OPW interns a great summer. Good luck everyone!
Hiya Siobhan,
Welcome aboard and best of luck to ya with the internship. That’s quite a gifted group you have for mentors so I’m sure you’ll do just fine
Thank you!
I dub Thee Intern Siobhan (so as not to be confused with Docs Siobhan… though I may just start calling her Dr. Siobhan for grins and giggles). Glad to have our very first support mentee ever!
Welcome Siobhan! But “Intern Siobhan” is too obvious a title.
Let’s see… “Member of the Support Brute Squad Siobhan”? No? Too long?
Haha thank you. I do like the sound of being a “Member of the Support Brute Squad.” :p
I know! It’s a very catchy title and I think more people should join the ranks.
You know, to maintain a serious approach to forum support. Just saying.
Congrats, Siobhan! You couldn’t have better mentors!
Thank you Carrie!
Welcome, Siobhan. Really looking forward to seeing you do some great things!
Thank you Hanni, and thanks for the chat.
Howdy SiobhanDeux, welcome to support! Glad to have you aboard.
Thanks. Glad to be aboard.
Welcome and congratulations Siobhan! Glad to have you on board. And looking forward to the mayhem and confusion of having two Siobhans around
Aaha. Double trouble. Thanks. Looking forward to getting to know everyone on the Support team this summer.
ha.
Congrats Siobhan! Sounds like an awesome way to spend your summer – hope you learn a lot and have a great time.
Thanks Eric! Yes, hoping to learn as much as possible, and give back to the community too.
Welcome to the team Siobhan.
Thank you. Glad to be a part of it.
Hello supporters! We’ve opened up a discussion on creating a WordPress Support Hub: http://make.wordpress.org/updates/2013/06/13/creating-a-wordpress-support-hub/
We’d love to get your opinions.
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:
Elf Brings Coffee
Just a note .. Arizona is it’s own time zone
That’s why we give em in UTC. One hopes you know how to convert
Future is Bright are discussing. 
Just wondering, do you moderate too?