Avoiding Overlapping Replies
WordPress.org “Also Viewing” is a feature which lets you know if someone else who has enabled the same function – like another forum helper – is looking at or typing in the same thread you’re viewing. This helps avoid duplicate replies on the same thread.
The “Also Viewing” tool is automatically available to forum contributors who have made at least 20 replies.
If you wish to use this feature and do not see the option to enable it because you’ve made fewer than 20 forum replies, please reach out to the forums moderation team in the slack #forums channel, who can enable it for you.
Once you have the option available, you can enable the “Also Viewing” tool in your Forum Profile at https://wordpress.org/support/users/username/edit/ in the section “User Options”..
Once you and some other person are viewing the same thread and both have this option enabled, you’ll see a bright banner at the top of the page that looks like this:
Clearer Plugin and Theme Support
WordPress.org Plugins and Themes Topic Highlighter is a script which provides some color-coding for the status of plugin and theme support topics. To use the highlighter:
- First, install the Tampermonkey or Greasemonkey browser extensions.
- Next, click here to install the highlighter script. (You can also click the “Raw” button on the /src/wordpress-plugins-topic-highlighter.user.js file there.)
Once installed, you’ll have some handy highlights that clearly identify unanswered, resolved, and stale (over a week old) topics:
Check for Spam Elsewhere
Stop Forum Spam Checker adds a button which will check the IP against Stop Forum Spam. This tool only works for Moderators. To use the Stop Forum Spam Checker script:
- First, install the Tampermonkey or Greasemonkey browser extensions.
- Next, click here to install the Stop Forum Spam Checker script. (You can also click the “Raw” button next to the /src/stop-forum-spam-checker.user.js file there.)
Once installed, click the “Check IP” button, and it will either report “Ok”, “TOR Proxy”, or list the number of sites spammed elsewhere along with the timestamp of the most recent report.
Automatically see archived and pending posts
In order to see archived and pending posts, moderators may need to add the URL parameter view=all to the URL they’re viewing. This is a script that automatically tags on this parameter when you’re visiting relevant forum URL’s.
- First, install the Tampermonkey or Greasemonkey browser extensions.
- Next, install the WordPress topic redirect script.
Disable wrapping pasted text in code blocks
Every now and then users in the forums paste huge log excerpts or copy-paste code they’ve copied from their site, or somewhere else. This may disrupt the layout of some pages/views and make them hard to navigate. As a countermeasure, our forums automatically wrap any pasted text that is longer than 500 characters or 5 lines in “backticks”, which (if the backticks are in-sync) will mark the pasted text as a code block. (This “automatic wrapping” is not active if the user is pasting into a completely empty field.)
Some users (especially moderators) may want to disable this behavior if they often need to paste long text content, such as pre-defined replies, by using the no-backticks script.
- First, install any of the browser extensions Tampermonkey or Greasemonkey (unless you’ve already got one installed).
- Next, install the no-backticks script.
Support Forum links on WordPress.org profile
Moderators often need to reach a user’s support forum profile, but when they arrive from Slack, they’ll usually first come to the “main” WordPress.org Profile page first instead.
Using support-links script, you’ll have convenient further access to a set of useful support forum links automatically added directly in the WordPress.org profile page.
By default, these links will point to a set of pages under the same user’s support profile in the global Forums, but you can easily select another support language and then switch between links to the global forum and links to the forum of your chosen language. This allows those that are moderators in more than one forum to check a user’s forums profile in those forums more easily.
To use the support-links script:
- First, install any of the browser extensions Tampermonkey or Greasemonkey (unless you’ve already got one installed).
- Next, install the support-links script.
Autofill reason of change upon moving a topic between forums
Every now and then moderators clean a forum by moving topics to a better suited forum, where they’ll get more visibility. When doing such a change, the moderator should add a note in the “reason of change” field to inform the user about the correction.
If you want to forget about this extra step, the script forum-change-reason can handle it for you automatically. Whenever a topic’s forum is changed, this script will fill out the reason of change by appending “Moved from X Forum to Y Forum”. This text can be customized for use on any other locale forum, by altering this line: const reasonText = 'Moved from %1$s to %2$s.';
To use the support-links script:
- First, install any of the browser extensions Tampermonkey or Greasemonkey (unless you’ve already got one installed).
- Next, install the forum-change-reason script.
Searching Documentation
If you use Alfred, along with its paid Powerpack, there are Workflows to search the Developer Reference and search the Codex Function Reference. Alfred has documentation on how to install Workflows.
Saving Form Fields
We used to recommend Lazarus: Form Recovery here. It was a wonderful cross-browser extension that stored your form data in local storage, so you could recover your brilliantly crafted reply, even if the forums or your browser crashed. Lazarus is dead now (ironic, we know), so we can no longer recommend it. If you have any better recommendations than what follows, please let us know in #forums on Slack.
If you use Chrome, try Typio Form Recovery.
If you use Firefox, and you don’t want to risk losing what you’re writing, you’re probably better off drafting your replies in a plain text editor.
Predefined replies for moderators
You can add them to your browser, via a Tampermonkey script, at https://github.com/wporg-support/predefined-replies or just copy/paste from https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/giving-good-support/pre-defined-replies/