[wp-meta] [Making WordPress.org] #6722: Support Forums: Timeframe to edit posts or to add further posts should be longer

[Making WordPress.org]

#6722: Support Forums: Timeframe to edit posts or to add further posts should be
longer
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 Reporter:  abitofmind      |       Owner:  (none)
     Type:  enhancement     |      Status:  reopened
 Priority:  normal          |   Milestone:
Component:  Support Forums  |  Resolution:
 Keywords:                  |
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Comment (by Ipstenu):

 Quick hits:

 1. If it's a year later and you need a feature missing in a plugin, the
 amount of things that will have changed for an in-support/active-
 maintained plugin are endless. Making a fresh ticket and linking back
 "Related to X, I have this problem...." is the best way to ensure you get
 FRESH help and 'today' eyes.

 2. "Please ensure this rule is applied consistently." -- I cannot stress
 this enough, when you have real humans processing hundreds of things,
 ''mistakes will happen.'' unless you can divine some way to ensure
 everyone is perfect 100% of the time, you're going to have to live with
 the reality of imperfect humans, and saying that doesn't actually help.

 No two situations are 100% the same, the volunteer moderators are doing
 their best. Please try to give them the same leniency for a mistake that
 you'd like for yourself :)

 3. Similar links and -2 and -3 are a fact of life with all forums. It is
 what it is, and allowing longer edits will never stop 100 people from
 making posts with the exact same subject "My site broke!"

 4. @zodiac1978 Actually we have a way to make private notes in the forums.
 That's how the current URL field works. Making a custom URL hidden from
 view available for ''all'' posts in a topic is a nice idea, that would be
 a good thing to bring up and see if it's feasible. It probably is. Would
 that be about right?

 5. I'm leery about allowing nod-moderators the ability to reply to long
 closed posts. Historically speaking, developers are just as likely to flip
 out and attack users as users are to devs :( I wish that wasn't a thing,
 but (again) we're all humans and we have feelings that cannot be
 predicted.

 Currently we allow any plugin dev or support rep to mark things as
 resolved, and that's already been abused by people and kicked off some
 gnarly fights :(

 6. "Allowing Edits until a Reply" has one flaw - the current system
 ''can'' notify any of a plugin/theme's followers 'So and so made a post!'
 Allowing infinite edits can turn into a plugin's support rep getting an
 email about a thing that has little information, and then going and seeing
 it's totally different so any work you did to solve a problem might be
 null and void. I don't know if there's a clever way around that, but I
 don't want to stress out support reps (be they moderators or plugins) more
 than they are. It's hard work!

 7. "The other point is that auto-closing after 6 months. Coming from the
 POV of a plugin support rep this can be a problem. Sometimes features are
 needing more time than 6 months and I couldn't inform user about the new
 feature."

 I mean... not to point a point to it, but if it takes 6 months to make a
 change, maybe you need a better way to track changes so you could tell
 people "We've put this on our to do list, but it may be a significant
 amount of time. Please follow our blog and it'll notify you when we get
 there."

 Otherwise, from a user perspective, y'all ghosted people for 6 months.
 They probably moved on or gave up.

-- 
Ticket URL: <https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/6722#comment:15>
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