Today in IRC we discussed what tools might may supporting in the forums better. For those
We started with this scenario: You’ve written a theme or plugin.
- How do you handle the forum posts today?
- What do you wish was there that isn’t?
- What annoys you about the forums the most?
The goal of this is to get an understanding of how you, as a person who supports your own work, uses the forums, and what pitfalls do you see.
From IRC:
Reply-by-email: You can already get emails of any new post in your plugin threads (Go to http://wordpress.org/support/plugin/PLUGINNAME and here’s a link for “Subscribe to Emails for this Plugin”), so what if plugin authors could email back?
More obvious subscription tools: Speaking of the “Subscribe to Emails for this Plugin”, it would be nice if that was on the http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/PLUGIN/developer page, as a list for the Subscribe links like this:
- Development Logs (commits) [RSS|Email]
- Support Posts [RSS|Email]
“Warnings” – so if someone’s being bad, moderators (and plugin/theme devs in their support forums) can click +1 or -1 on their name and set a ‘mood.’ or warning level.
Plugin Version: A way to list plugin version (can be auto-populated from the broken form?)
Throttle: A button to ask for the 30-second block to be lifted. Or automatically do it based on time served/products released/general coolness.
More ‘Support Type’ options: This is a feature request, this is a support request, this is a you-suck.
Flag POST as spam: We can do topics, but not posts (or Flag Topic vs Modlook). Imagine emails to wp-forums “JerrySarcastic has flagged the following post as probably spam… {link}” This would have to be limited in usage though. I would say plugin/theme authors in their threads only.
For moderators in general we came up with these:
Better Profiles: If you click on the IP, you go to the backend of bbPress and see all posts by IP. It would be nice if we could do that with usernames too.
TacNuke: One click to delete all posts and ban the account (for spammers)
Works for me!
Will be a happy Valentine’s weekend to WordPress users everywhere