August 22nd Support Team Meeting Summary

Welcome to the official blog for the WordPress Support team.

Need help with a WordPress issue? You can find help with your WordPress problem by posting in the support forums or asking on the #wordpress IRC channel.

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Weekly Meetings

As well as discussing support issues here on the blog, we use Slack for group communication.

Our weekly meeting is held every Thursday 17:00 UTC and the next will be at Thursday, 17:00 UTC (your time zone) in #forums on Slack.

#weekly-chat

General announcements

The Site Health Team did the suggested upgrade version bump for PHP in core this week, and over the next week users will start seeing a dashboard widget if they are using PHP 5.6 or lower, guiding them towards upgrading.

A reminder that when flagging users, a moderation action limiting public display of posts until approved by a moderator, always educate the users on why this was done and what this means, there will also be more direct guidelines on when to flag users coming in the future, as the use of flags is becoming a bit too liberal, at least on the international forums.

And when writing notes on users, make sure to be descriptive enough, as they are available across all rosetta sites, and not everyone can read an archived post for example.

In other news, there’s a lively conversation going on at https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/4696 relating to WordPress profiles here on dotorg.

Increased use of the topic report feature by authors for invalid reasons

There has lately been an uptick in incorrect use of the report topic feature by plugin and theme authors, primarily because they don’t like getting negative feedback from users.

This has started to become a nuisance to the volunteers, and we would like to reiterate that the report feature is for forum guideline violations only. Continued misuse of the feature will lead to us reporting things to the theme or plugin teams respectively.

WordPress Core Timeline Update

WordPress 5.2.3 is scheduled for release on September 4th.

WordPress 5.3 is tentatively scheduled for release on November 12th.

Checking in with international liaisons

Members from our Russian, Swedish, Brazilian and Dutch communities took place in this weeks discussions.

If you are a part of a non-English speaking part of our community, we invite you to join our weekly meetings (if you can), as we would love to get ot know you!

Open floor

Some questions are going unanswered, notably relating to the new block editor. Although it’s a shame when someone doesn’t get helped, we’re all volunteers on a community forum, and it’s perfectly fine for some questions to not be answered, we’re all human, and we do what we can when we can, but nobody should feel obligated here.

The Health Check plugin was updated last week, and some of the more notable changes include:

Changes to the grading indicator in the header (no longer uses a numeric value, instead it’s an indicator with a string for clarity)
A new dashboard widget when you login to give you the site health at a glance
A new PHP compatibility checker for plugins in the Tools section

For more changes, the full list is available at https://wordpress.org/plugins/health-check/#developers, and yes, some of the changes in the plugin relating to the grading indicator and Site Health Checks are being tested out and intended for a core release.

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