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.
Want to get involved?
Answering a question in the support forums or on IRC is one of the easiest ways to get started. Everyone knows the answer to something!
We have a detailed handbook to help contributors learn how to work with the forums and IRC.
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, with the first meeting of the month being office hours, and the next will be at Thursday, 17:00 UTC(your time zone) in #forums on SlackSlackSlack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/..
When blocking a user, one should alwaysadd a user note. The note should explain why the user has been blocked.
The user should have been properly warned/informed that they run the risk of being blocked before this action is taken. Referencing them in a post reply explaining what has happened ensures they receive the notification if this is done before they are blocked.
In the case of spam accounts, the user does not need to be informed ahead of time, but a user note must still be supplied. Such a user note should describe what kind of spam was used (for future reference, as spam content is frequently completely deleted).
Users should only ever have one account. If multiple accounts are found, the extra accounts should be blocked, and the primary account (the one that has existed the longest or has the most activity) is left. The user is then notified, by referencing them in a reply, that their added accounts have been blocked.
The exception to this is if a company wishes to have a company account that owns their plugins and/or themes. We do not allowed anyone a company account purely for general forum interactions.
We encourage all interactions to be done using a persons own account, users prefer to talk to someone real, not a company. With that said, some may feel safer behind an anonymous company persona, and moderators should not be a hinderance for a users own safety.
If a user posts about a commercial product, moderators should, if possible, reference the users to the right source for such support. This will most likely be a theme or pluginPluginA plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party authors own website, after which the moderators interaction with the topic ends and it is left alone.
If it’s unclear if a topic is relating to a paid for service, moderators should leave it be, and let the author of the product respond and make the distinction, as they know their own product better, and are best suited to make that distinction.
Authors are still asked to bring commercial support off-site, but how they wish that interaction to be conducted is left to the author in this case.
The authors may use the “Report topic” feature if they feel a topic needs to be closed or otherwise enforced by moderators.
When a topic needs archiving, a user should always be informed that their topic was archived, and what the reason is for the archival.
This is to ensure the user learns what they did which was deemed inappropriate for the forums, and encourages a good dialogue between users and moderators.