Request to moderators: stop publicly shaming plugin authors

Hi! I’m Otto. As you probably know, I work on the plugins team as well as help manage these forums.

Since you posted this here instead of emailing plugins@wordpress.org, it seems that you want this to be public. So, I can roll with that.

We here at WordPress.org provide you with free hosting, free bandwidth to distribute your plugin to others, free promotion through the directory, and free support forums and review systems on top of that.

The moderators exist to only to make the community a better place. They don’t have any evil in their hearts. I do, but then I made most of them moderators because they don’t. See, I’d be much worse at that job.

In this case, they made a very simple ask: don’t ask for access to other people’s sites. This is a pretty basic rule. By even asking, you’re encouraging users to submit to bad practices. Don’t share credentials. Don’t give access to your site to other people that you don’t know. Don’t trust strangers on the internet. These are basic and really, self-obvious, principles that we expect everybody in our community to adhere to.

Even when I run across weird and unusual problems where I need to “see it for myself”, I always give my public email address, make certain that it’s one which is on this same domain, and tell people that I do not want them to give me access unless they are comfortable doing so, and that they should not trust me. I’m a stranger to them. Never trust strangers. Especially me. I could be totes evil and such.

In any case, the mods didn’t “public shame you” here, they pointed to the rules, and at the same time, they notified the original author of those same rules and the basic principles of not trusting random people on public forums. That is laudable, and honestly, required. I would fully expect them to call me out for the same thing if I didn’t properly preface my own remarks in asking for such.

If you feel “shamed” then maybe you should take that as a sign that you need better contact mechanisms. There is nothing wrong with putting an email address in your plugin and asking people to email you for help. Or, in rethinking how you ask for better visibility in the first place. If you really have to log into a site to see the problem to understand it, then maybe your testing mechanism or your development process needs some work. And that is not me shaming you. We’ve all been there. I didn’t understand the vagaries of weird hosting situations until I saw them for myself either. Took years before I figured out that hosts are freakin’ strange sometimes.

As for locking topics, that’s not for your benefit, but for the asker’s. They might do something silly like posting their credentials in public. It happens. A surprising lot of the time. Ultimately, we have to protect users, and allowing a thread to continue when it’s gone off the rails doesn’t make sense.

Support can be hard. I don’t judge you for your mistakes. But yes, they were right, you were wrong. Nothing to be done here.

The whole thing becomes very impersonal and cold.

So, you broke the rules, and you want somebody to give you a customized and warm response? Do you want cookies and milk too?

The mod had every right and reason to ban your account and kick you off the forums. He didn’t, he gave you a warning.

If all you have to complain about is the form that the warning took, then that’s not really a valid complaint, in my eyes. The simple fact that they need to have these sort of copy paste responses shows that you’re not the only one to not read the rules, so, my advice would be to read the rules, take the warning as given, and don’t do the bad thing again.

All we have left is to be courteous to each other and that is all I’m asking for here.

Fair enough. Here’s me being courteous: don’t break the rules, don’t ask users for their credentials in public forums, and don’t do obviously bad things.

Abide by these simple rules, and you will be welcomed. Break them, and you will not.