This came up in this week’s slack chat. Using tags can be a fine art, and we may end up doing a tag-scrub some day soon, to get more people into helping triage posts in the forums.
Tags usually aren’t used properly, and it’s OKAY that the masses don’t. This is actually a great job for someone who wants to get involved in support. By reading a post and determining it needs specific attention, you can improve the chances of someone getting help promptly.
When you see a post, look at what the poster is asking and try to use a tag that makes logical sense for the issue. To help you get started, we have some standard tags that we use and encourage their appropriate use.
Team Tags
The following tags are used by the various make/teams on WordPress.org to track posts that need their attention.
- Accessibility –
a11y - Questions about the theme review process –
thememod - Questions about the plugin review process –
pluginmod - Moderator please come fix this –
modlook - Not Safe For Work –
nsfw - WordPress.com theme not in the .org repo –
wpcom-theme
Proper Use of Modlook
Don’t use it if you are a moderator. This should go without saying.
Be very careful with ‘modlook’ – Abuse of that tag will get your posting rights revoked. It should be used to flag moderator attention for things like duplicate posts, spam, abuse, harassment, etc. It is not to be used for getting help faster. That just gets you negative attention.
When you use ‘modlook’ try to use it in conjunction with another tag. For example, if the issue is a spammer, use ‘modlook’ and ‘spam’ tags. If the issue is the post has personal information (like passwords) use ‘modlook’ and ‘private info’ – Basically try to make sure if a moderator is reading the post, they’ll see why the post needs attention. This is especially important when we’re talking about duplicate posts 🙂 If you’re tagging spam and think it may not be obvious who is the spammer (things like ‘buy viagra!’ are pretty obvious), put the username of the spammer as another tag. Just in case. The mods will delete the tags once it’s handled.
It’s also a great idea to actually reply to the legit posts. Telling someone “I’m alerting the moderators to this post. Never post your passwords in public!” is totally awesome!
Keep in mind, we do not remove URLs from posts unless there’s a good reason. And by good reason we mean abuse, harassment, or legal reasons. Asking a URL be removed, or a post deleted, because someone is upset that Google picked up their URL in it’s search is not a good reason. If you don’t want something to be searched by google, don’t post it in a public forum.
Plugin/Theme Tags
This one is simple. Tag a post to match the slug of the plugin or theme that’s having the problem.
For example. If someone is having a problem with Akismet, tag the post akismet. If it’s Hello Dolly, tag it hello-dolly.
Pay careful attention to that plugin slug! Complicated plugins like https://wordpress.org/plugins/joes-awesome-twitter-widget may have the name “Joe’s Totally Wicked Cool Twitter Widget Plugin!” on the plugin page, but that slug of joes-awesome-twitter-widget is what you want to use for the tag.
If the theme is one downloaded from WordPress.com, use the tag wpcom-theme
Company Tags
If someone specifically mentions a hosting company, make sure that company is tagged. Many hosts keep people on payroll in order to monitor posts tagged for them. The same goes for things like theme and plugin shops. It’s helpful to them to have, for example, GoDaddy or StudioPress tagged.
When in doubt …
Don’t tag 🙂 Come on over to the #forums room in Slack and ask us for help. Someone’s almost always around.