jordesign 12:39 pm on May 13, 2024
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16th May Support Team meeting

The support meeting will be held on Thursday, May 16 2024, 20:00 UTC in #forums 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/.(a Slack account is required) or at https://make.wordpress.org/support/chat/.

Just a little reminder that this is a new time. We’d love to see you there – but if the timing means you are unable to attend – feel free to leave any thoughts or discussion in in the comments of this post.

Automated Support Badges

There’s been plenty of discussion about this both in TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. and in past meetings. But with a proposal to have this worked on at the WCEU Contributor DayContributor Day Contributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/ https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/. – it’s time to some to some final decisions and clarity around what we’d like. Please keep in mind that getting anything in place and automated would be good – so we can make recommendations for the purposes of the work being done, and then course-correct later on if needed.

Encouraging more Forum contributors/contributing

Let’s continue our brainstorm from last meeting about how we can be more open and inviting, and celebrate/encourage contributors who are regularly helping others in the Forums.

Proposal for a Support Trac bug scrub

This has been discussed a little already – but lets further discuss the potential of having a Bug Scrub on the week’s we don’t have a meeting. Would this be useful? When should we hold it? What would we expect the outcomes to be? Let’s talk about it.

Checking in with international liaisons

This is the section where we reach out to the non-English speaking parts of our community, to see how they are doing, if there’s anything we can help each other with, or just interesting things going on that it would be nice to share with others.

There’s no requirements for previous participation or “fame” to share here, anyone is welcome, and we encourage newcomers to participate!

Unable to make the meeting, or maybe meetings just aren’t your thing? We would still love to hear how things are going in other non-English speaking parts of our community. Please feel free to let us know via the comment section below, in your own time, if there is anything you’d like to share, any questions or concerns you have, or just to let us know you’re doing OK!

We will make a habit of putting this callout with every agenda post going forward, so that everyone has a chance to join in.

For any other items to discuss, please add them to the comments below, or bring them up in the meeting.

#forums

Nick Diego 4:02 am on April 30, 2024
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X-post: The Plugin Directory gets a refresh

X-post from +make.wordpress.org/meta: The Plugin Directory gets a refresh

Nick Diego 2:40 am on April 10, 2024
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X-post: The Forums get a refresh

X-post from +make.wordpress.org/meta: The Forums get a refresh

jordesign 12:30 am on April 9, 2024
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11th April Support Team meeting

The support meeting will be held on Thursday, April 11 2024, 20:00 UTC in #forums 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/.(a Slack account is required) or at https://make.wordpress.org/support/chat/.

Just a little reminder that this is a new time. We’d love to see you there – but if the timing means you are unable to attend – feel free to leave any thoughts or discussion in in the comments of this post.

Support Team Contributor Ladder

In an effort to grow the size of contributor to the Forums – we’re going to do a short excercise which pinpoints where contributors with different levels of experience can get involved. Please read this introductory post before the meeting to learn more about this.

Changes needed for adherence to Digital Services Act

There’s been some discussion on this in the comments (feel free to catch up and add any thoughts) but it would be good to decide some actions from that. Most notably:

  • Should we include a definition of what is considered ‘Spam’ for the Forum Guidelines?
  • What tooling do we need to open TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. tickets for?

Brainstorm and review of open Trac tickets

In addition to the above – we have a bunch of open Trac tickets (Automated Support Badges anyone?) with request for changes to improve the tooling and experience in the forums. I’m keen to hear all y’all thoughts on which of those are most urgent/valuable – so we can approach 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. with a prioritised list and try and get some of those moving.

Checking in with international liaisons

This is the section where we reach out to the non-English speaking parts of our community, to see how they are doing, if there’s anything we can help each other with, or just interesting things going on that it would be nice to share with others.

There’s no requirements for previous participation or “fame” to share here, anyone is welcome, and we encourage newcomers to participate!

Unable to make the meeting, or maybe meetings just aren’t your thing? We would still love to hear how things are going in other non-English speaking parts of our community. Please feel free to let us know via the comment section below, in your own time, if there is anything you’d like to share, any questions or concerns you have, or just to let us know you’re doing OK!

We will make a habit of putting this callout with every agenda post going forward, so that everyone has a chance to join in.

For any other items to discuss, please add them to the comments below, or bring them up in the meeting.

#forums

jordesign 11:19 am on April 8, 2024
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Brainstorming a Support Team Contributor Ladder

One of the things that will help with the long-term sustainability of the Support Team is to start getting more contributors involved at different levels.

Currently we have a situation where the Support Team is made up of a small number of Mods, and then we have a handful of contributors within the forums who answer a lot of threads, but are not really involved or aligned with the team in general.

I propose that we have a great opportunity to engage and connect with Contributors in the forums in such a way that we start building them towards greater involvement and impact within the Support ecosystem of 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/. This in turn would create a funnel or pathway towards future Support Team membership.

Contributor Ladder

A Contributor Ladder is a process and tool (based on the 5 stages of volunteering) that many other Make teams have used to identify ways to involve contributors at any stage of experience, and help them ‘level up’ their involvement. It is a great way to think about how to get more people involved, but also what skills and experience Contributors would need to take on different tasks within the team.

Here’s a few examples of how other teams use a Contributor Ladder

Step 1: Identify tasks

The first thing to do is write out all the things that the Team (in our case, including the broader contributor base) does. This is my shortlist – but I’d love to hear of others we should consider:

  • Checking Pending queue, Spam queue, and Modwatch queue
  • Identifying and removing Spam
  • Answering questions in #forums
  • Handling the password reset queue
  • Taking part in fortnightly team meetings
  • Answering questions in the general forums
  • Discussing and providing input on decisions
  • Supporting end engaging other contributors
  • Strategy and planning

Step 2: Match to the 5 stages of volunteering

The next thing is to assign those different activities to the stages of volunteering. At this step we can also identify why training/experience is needed in order for a Contributor to achieve a certain level, and how we acknowledge them.

Here’s my rough first attempt here:
Table displaying details of the Support Team Contributor Ladder

Let’s discuss and workshop?

I propose that we spend 10-15 minutes going over this brainstorm/process in our next team meeting on April 11th as a helpful step towards better understanding the work of the team and how to plan for the future.

jordesign 10:23 am on March 27, 2024
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Announcement of a new Support Team meeting time

This post is to announce a change in the timing of our regular Support Team meetings. 

The next meeting will be held at on Thursday, April 11, 2024, at 20:00 UTC in #forums 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/. (a Slack account is required) or at https://make.wordpress.org/support/chat/. Subsequent meetings will be held every 2 weeks at the same time.

If it’s been a while since you joined a support meeting, or you’re thinking of joining for the first time (welcome!) here’s a few things for you to know.

  • Ordinarily, the agenda for the meeting will be published on the Monday preceding the meeting itself. Y’all are welcome to suggest agenda items in the comments of that post.
  • Everyone is welcome to attend! Help out answering questions in the forums and want to get more involved? Want to see how things in the Support Team work? Whatever your reason, we’d love to have you join us.
  • Decisions on items (which are added to the agenda) are made by those who are in attendance at the meeting, with any comments on the agenda itself taken into account.

The agenda for our next meeting will be out on April 8th and I look forward to seeing you all on April 11th!

jordesign 2:50 am on March 14, 2024  

Discussion on changes needed for Forums to adhere to the Digital Services Act (DSA)

Following my previous findings/messages in Make 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/. – here are some changes we may need to make to the forums in order to adhere to the Digital Services Act (DSA) and make life easier for the Incident Report Team (IRT):

Notifying users when content is archived

One thing we will need to start doing is notifying forum users when we archive their content. It is a requirement (on legal advice) that this notification be clear about why the content is being archived (ie. the guideline that is being broken). There’s two ways I can see that we could address this:

Existing method:

Currently we will often reply to the user within the thread – explaining the reason why their comment/thread is being archived. When we mention the user they should be notified of that reply (challenges with email delivery notwithstanding).

If we were to have a system/process in place which made sure all mods include a clear explanation in their reply for why the thread/message was archived – then this would likely fulfil our responsibility.

Adding a ‘Reason’ dropdown/field to the ‘Archive’ button

If it were possible to add functionality to the ‘Archive’ button then we could:

  • Have the option to select the ‘reason’ from a dropdown list and/or
  • Have a text field prompt to write the reason
  • Send an email to the user with notification of the message being archived, and the reason.

Something like this leaves less margin for error, but does require development work by the 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. team.

Notifying users when they are blocked

There is also a requirement that when a user is blocked they are notified of this, including the reason for being blocked. We currently would add a user note with the reason, but this isn’t necessarily sent to the user as a notification.

It would be worth investigating if we can either:

  • Automatically send a notification to the user when they are blocked, and include the most recent user note as a reason, or:
  • Have a form for when we 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. a user which includes a dropdown (for common reasons) and/or a freeform field to add a reason – and when that is submitted the user is notified and the details are added to the user notes.

Either of these cases would require development work from Meta.

A note on Spam

It is important to note that these new regulations do not apply to spam. We will not need to notify in anyway for spam messages that are archived/deleted, or spammers that are blocked.

Improved User Notes

These requirements also make it a great time to discuss our use of User Notes more generally.

Looking towards the future it is important that any user notes we add are clear and understandable to other Mods (both now and into the future when we may not be around to clarify) and also to the Incident Response Team (IRT) if they are required to check user notes for any investigations.

My recommendation would be that we work to ensure our User Notes are clear, free from jargon and personal commentary, and verbose about the action being taken and why.

I don’t wish to place undue burden on the mods to have to reply in a specific format or anything like this – but there is value in remembering that any User Note you add will need to be useful to others in the future (sometimes in the long future) and writing with the appropriate level of clarity and objectivity.

Next Steps

I’m interested in discussion about these issues and how we can ensure we fulfil our legal responsibilities in a way that both minimizes work for Mods, but also provides a user-friendly experience to those in the forums who are effected by our actions.

I’ll leave this post open for 2 weeks for discussion and then summarise the results, along with next steps to implement any changes, following that period.

Felipe Santos 2:46 pm on March 12, 2024  

Should mods delete links on topics when requested?

Hi, everyone. I would like to discuss a proposal to change how we handle requests to remove links on the forums.

The issue

We often have the following issues on forums:

  1. Someone creates a topic and adds a link — they might add the link directly to the topic content (or alternatively use the “page I need help with” field).
  2. This same person realizes that the link is publicly available (and often indexed by Google when added directly to the content), so they don’t want the link on the topic and ask moderators to remove it.
  3. As this is something covered in our guidelines, our moderators deny these requests (unless there is a safety reason for removing them), and this can sometimes trigger long discussions between everyone involved.
  4. Sometimes, these folks even contact the DPO mailbox to discuss this further.

Proposal

While I’m not trying to justify OP’s (original poster) reasons and definitely not recommending us to change it because of GDPR (we’re technically allowed to keep these links), I believe we should change the workflow because of the following reasons:

  • We should stop spending all this time arguing with people — it would take us 10 seconds to remove the links instead of 20 minutes arguing about it.
  • It would improve OP’s experience on the forums — it is always good to make people happy when we can.

With that in mind, I would like to recommend we start manually deleting links on new requests as an experiment. If this doesn’t work out, we can document the reasons and revert this idea (or explore automated options for doing the same thing).

How do you feel about it?

Laura Adamonis 12:58 am on March 5, 2024
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X-post: Training Team Update – February 2024

X-comment from +make.wordpress.org/updates: Comment on Training Team Update – February 2024

jordesign 1:10 am on February 16, 2024
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22nd February Support Team meeting

The support meeting will be held on Thursday, February 22 2024, 19:00 UTC in #forums 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/.(a Slack account is required) or at https://make.wordpress.org/support/chat/.

Commercial support quality in reviews

Following on from the recent change to guidelines around reviews of Commercial/Pro plugins we need to discuss and make a decision about whether quality of support received for Commercial/Pro plugins is a valid part of a review.

Support Team plans for 2024

Let’s discuss my proposal of some things to work on in 2024 to make the Support Team more sustainable for the long term, and better connect with our contributors who work in the Forums.

Firmer language around links in reviews

Even though it shouldn’t be possible for link – some folks do manage to do so. At the moment our wording around that guideline (in the form itself) is a little soft. Should we have a clear mention in the Guidelines themselves, and also update the wording in the form to be clearer?

Checking in with international liaisons

This is the section where we reach out to the non-English speaking parts of our community, to see how they are doing, if there’s anything we can help each other with, or just interesting things going on that it would be nice to share with others.

There’s no requirements for previous participation or “fame” to share here, anyone is welcome, and we encourage newcomers to participate!

Unable to make the meeting, or maybe meetings just aren’t your thing? We would still love to hear how things are going in other non-English speaking parts of our community. Please feel free to let us know via the comment section below, in your own time, if there is anything you’d like to share, any questions or concerns you have, or just to let us know you’re doing OK!

We will make a habit of putting this callout with every agenda post going forward, so that everyone has a chance to join in.

For any other items to discuss, please add them to the comments below, or bring them up in the meeting.

#forums