WordPress 4.4.2
No new common issues to add to the 4.4.x Master List, but we did remove a slightly confusing “also” from the description of the lingering pagination issue.
Moderators for Plugins
Recently, the Plugins Team has made a security-focused push to ensure that plugins do not have any non-committing committers.
Possibly in response, we’ve noticed some Administrators promoting plugin support personnel to Moderator, mostly so they can retain the ability to mark threads as resolved and set sticky threads. This really isn’t a great solution, as it gives such a person nearly full control over all of the WordPress.org Support Forums without adhering to the established expectations. It’s a bit like trading one security concern for another.
The good news is, @otto42 was on the case and swiftly resolved Meta Ticket 1413 before the end of today’s meeting. This resolution allows plugin contributors to mark threads as resolved within their plugin’s support forum. The ability to set threads as sticky was skipped for now, as it’s really not a common necessity, and the Support Team will not mind being pinged in #forums on Slack to request that a thread be stickied.
Considering this, we kindly request that all Administrators please stop promoting plugin personnel to Moderator (and demote any who were back to Member), and instead list them as contributors in the plugin’s readme.txt file.
In addition, if anyone supporting their plugin notices something in need of our intervention, please tag the thread with “modlook” and add a second tag to clarify the reason, like “spam”, “abuse”, “sockpuppet”, etc.
Gamification
By unanimous vote, the team will not be pursuing gamification of the WordPress Support Forums at this time, but we will strongly consider the ability for the OP to mark the most helpful answer (StackExchange style) after we’ve upgraded to bbPress 2 (largely depending on available developer resources).
If gamification is ever considered, the team also unanimously agrees that the priority focus should be on the quality of support received by the user.
IRC Stats Update
@clorith has completed the reporting tool, and the report sent to Slack looks something like this:
There was a change since the screenshot though. The final verbiage is now “IRC assistance requested in #WordPress – See logs,” and if a note is attached, “IRC assistance requested in #WordPress [User provided note] – See logs.”
We are awaiting a ping from the Meta team when they are free to deploy this and process to promotions as well.
HelpHub Article Categories
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Read the meeting transcript in the Slack archives. (A Slack account is required)