Marius L. J. 9:17 am on February 1, 2020
Tags: guidelines ( 2 )

Changes to the support guidelines for linking to off-site resources

After thorough discussions, and observations over an extended period of time, the support team has decided to amend the guidelines, and add a section relating to links for external resources.

It should be noted that this only applies to topics in plugin and theme support forums, and not to the general support forums of WordPress.org, although the spirit behind the guideline should still be adhered to there as well.

The guideline text can be read, and linked to directly, in the Forum Guidelines.

When creating links to other resources

Public links in plugin or theme support topics may only be posted if they meet one or more of the following criteria:

The link is to the plugin or theme authors own website.
The link is to the plugin or theme authors own support website.
The link is posted by the plugin or theme author them selves to an external resource related to the topic.
The link is to documentation on the WordPress.org website

Why is this being enforced?

Links may come and go, websites change, URLs change, this all could mean that someone looking for an answer in the future ends up on a topic that only has links to a website no longer running, or to a site now owned by someone else with different content from what is expected.

Most support related websites have guidelines asking users to post their answers in full, instead of linking to different places, and this is why.

By sharing the information on WordPress.org, you ensure that it is kept available for all WordPress users.

As we like to assume good faith, the reasons for us not wanting content linked externally are outlined in such a fashion, but it should be noted that as part of the decision making process, other uses were also mentioned.

Links to personal sites which promote paid resolutions, and attempting to solicit work after the fact, by not providing complete solutions on the forums, were also a driving force behind this change.

By providing this guideline, we also encourage plugin and theme authors to provide their users with good documentation them selves, either by sourcing it through the community and offering it on their own official channels, or by creating it them selves ahead of time.

Both directions help new and existing users alike, by ensuring they get the best possible experience, which in turn leads to higher user satisfaction.

So what does this mean for you, the user?

Well, first of all, we don’t retroactively punish anyone, so even if you had made links in the past, this won’t come back to haunt you.

It does put higher expectations on posting answers, if the plugin or theme author does not have their own proper documentation. We do hope that this is overcome by an initial set of good replies that the authors can adapt into their own FAQs and user documentation though.

And as a final note; We, the support team, and broader WordPress community, thank you for volunteering your time and helping others!

#guidelines

Yui 10:43 am on February 1, 2020

WordPress.org Documentation links must be extended to any WordPress.org link, including (as many translation related topics are created):
make.wordpress.org/polyglots
translate.wordpress.org
any *.wordpress.org/support and *.wordpress.org/team sites
External Slack links listed in https://make.wordpress.org/polyglots/handbook/about/teams/local-slacks/
Jeff Matson 8:12 pm on February 6, 2020

I understand the motivations behind this and the workload that it takes to moderate external links, but I feel that it’s a “burn it all down” approach that hurts the community a lot more than it helps. Here’s why:

A successful and ethically sound strategy for utilizing the forums would be the find solutions to problems, write about them on an external site, then link to that solution. It benefits everyone. The person who finds the solution gets rewarded, and the problem gets solved.

By limiting external links to only the plugin author, the motivation behind publishing solutions like this is dramatically reduced. People will still publish their own solutions externally, but they won’t be able to provide that answer to the forum question.

And what about all of these plugins that have poor documentation? Often times, unless it’s a “freemium” plugin, documentation is lacking. It’s especially true for smaller, niche plugins.

What if someone asks a question and someone else was able to find a solution posted elsewhere? If someone is able to help someone find an answer via a 3rd-party link, why not allow them to do so? An answer to that could be to re-write the answer into a forum reply, but it then creates the problem of using a solution that someone else found, without citing the original source.

How about premium 3rd-party extensions? If someone is trying to figure out how to add a feature that’s not officially supported by a plugin, this entirely removes the ability to recommend a solution that already exists and may be well supported.

Once again, I understand the potential problems with external links and moderating them, but this is going to cause far more questions to go unanswered or dramatically increase the time that it takes to get a response. It’s going to hurt the community as a whole far more than it helps.

If it’s a workload issue of moderation, feel free to let me know. I’ll be happy to donate my own time to make sure links are reputable or work together to come up with a more sensible solution.
- James Huff 1:16 am on February 7, 2020
  
  A successful and ethically sound strategy for utilizing the forums would be the find solutions to problems, write about them on an external site, then link to that solution.
  
  But that’s not utilizing the forums for anything more than a link farm.
  
  The successful and ethically sound strategy for utilizing the forums is to write solutions on the forums.
  
  And what about all of these plugins that have poor documentation?
  
  This particular guidelines addition exempts plugin and theme authors.
  
  How about premium 3rd-party extensions?
  
  https://wordpress.org/support/guidelines/#do-not-post-about-commercial-products
Jon Brown 8:52 pm on February 6, 2020

+1 On Jeff Matson’s thoughts above.

I do appreciate the stack exchange guideline to post the answer, not a link to the answer. think that’s a good guideline to reduce external links that could later break.

However, limiting links (and responses in general) so extremely to “authors” is major problem. Specifically “The link is posted by the plugin or theme author them selves to an external resource related to the topic.”

These are _community support forums_, the expectation is and should continue to be that the _community_ helps provide that support.

Repeatedly as of late my attempts to help fellow users in the forums has been moderated at which point I just gave up trying to help fellow users with their problems. Having spoken with others I’m not alone in this feeling of frustration at being moderated out of helping others. This is extremely “un-WordPress”.

If the only person expected to reply to forum topics is the author we might as well scrap the forums and setup a email ticket based help desk.

Personally I feel the author should be the last one expected to respond, they’ve already contributed their code, the least other users can do is pitch in to help support other users.
- James Huff 1:17 am on February 7, 2020
  
  If the only person expected to reply to forum topics is the author
  
  Absolutely no one is saying that here.
uamv 9:02 pm on February 6, 2020

I’m with Jeff and Jon on this. Also, isn’t it ironic…

Links may come and go, websites change, URLs change, this all could mean that someone looking for an answer in the future ends up on a topic that only has links to a website no longer running, or to a site now owned by someone else with different content from what is expected.

I recently tweeted a link to a WordPress support thread in which a user (of an apparently abandoned plugin) provided a compatibility fix that many, including myself, were sorely in need of. That link is now broken. 🙁 I’m pretty sure he had linked to his solution, so I expect that is why the thread has gone missing.

I think an alternate (and better) solution would be to encourage users to post solutions on the site, but not necessarily restrict them from sharing links to already existing solutions. This restriction in itself seems like it will increase the workload issue for moderation as I expect people are going to continue to link out unawares. Maybe a allow a mechanism in which users can flag broken links, so that they can be identified by users prior to clicking out to a 404.
- Marius L. J. 1:33 am on February 7, 2020
  
  You’re absolutely right, that is a bit counter productive, I’ve reached out on Slack for the details on which topic it is (I suspect that if it were removed, it was for completely unrelated reasons, as we don’t take lightly on removing any content on the forums for that exact reason, and a link alone is not reason for removal).
  
  The guideline (not restriction, I find this to be an important distinction) is enforced by people who perform the tasks manually, and they don’t go looking for links, it’s more of a “I chanced upon it” kind of scenario. Linking off to your own sites has been used (and abused) for quite a while, and often when a link was removed, it would lead to a dispute, because it wasn’t written anywhere. This way moderators can reference a document in cases where links are used more for promotional reasons than legitimate ones, and have their bases covered in that regard.
  
  To take a quick example off twitter, if someone sees that a function is misused, and links to the documentation on php.net, we wouldn’t punish that user for this action, the context matters here. On the other hand, if they chose to write the php.net solution on their own blog and link to that, we would remove the link it self (but the post would still remain, unless the post was literally just a link).
  
  They are guidelines though, because that gives leeway for our moderators to use their own judgement, and we don’t explicitly state “this and that site is OK”, because once you start making lists, it becomes a slippery slope to maintain and enforce when needed.
  
  All of that said, we do encourage input, and if there’s parts of the wording that would help make things clearer for example, we would love to hear them. I’m not a native English speaker, so the text above (being written by me, after our discussions on the topic over many instances, and eventually formally during our weekly meeting), may have a voice which does not work for everyone who is a native speaker, but it is there with the best of intentions.
Torsten Landsiedel 10:27 am on February 7, 2020

Hi there!

Although I know the problems very well on my own, I think we have a problem here.

The link is to the plugin or theme authors own website.

How do you know the website of *the* author in times of free contributing on different platforms? Example: There is a bunch of people maintaining the plugins from Sergej Müller (Antisam Bee for example) and we named us “pluginkollektiv”. We have a public Github and not everyone is shown as support rep in the forums. We are blogging on our own websites, because there is no official blog for the pluginkollektiv itself. How do we know the author of the plugin? It just shows “pluginkollektiv”. What if the Github repo is not public? You can’t know who is contributing to teh plugin is therefore one of the authors. So how would this guideline work if you can’t determine that information?

If you disallow links (like Stackexchange) then bbpress has the big disadvantage that I can re-edit my own post later to fix wrong information. And the you create a bigger problem. The link is not dead, the information is dead and the user doesn’t know it. He/she tries and fails. How is this better?

I am not sure about the solution to this but I am sure that the guideline is producing some big headaches to some people.

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Changes to the support guidelines for linking to off-site resources

When creating links to other resources