 But let's get started. So welcome everybody. And as always, as you join, please let us know where you're joining us from in the chat while I do my usual introductions. My name is Jonathan. I'm from Cape Town in South Africa. I'm a developer educator at Automatic and I'm sponsored to work with the training team. And fortunately, I'm not sponsored to be perfectly technically proficient today. I seem to be having some gremlins in my day. Awesome. So I see James is with us today. Hello, Adrian. Good morning. Got some other folks coming in now. So I'm just going to admit them as we go. It is, as always, lovely to see you all. James is from Boston. Boston is the home of one of my favorite television shows and that's Boston Legal. I do love a good legal dramedy and Boston Legal is one of my favorites. So welcome, James. Good to have you here. Rahul, welcome from India. Akta, welcome from Bangladesh. From Afroja, from Bangladesh. Oh, your name is Afroja, you all today. Laura, welcome from Greensboro. NC, is that North Carolina? I'm going to guess. I'm trying to learn all the states and their abbreviations. So I'm guessing that's North Carolina. That's the only one I can think of that has an NNSE at the front of it. All right. So today, I would like to chat to you all about the WordPress support forums. You'll notice that I titled this workshop, How to Contribute to WordPress by Just Being Helpful because hanging out in the support forums and helping folks with their WordPress problems is honestly one of my favorite things to do. It's one of the reasons I became a developer educator. I like helping folks. I might not always get it right, but it's something that I like doing. And the support forums, the WordPress support forums kind of started that journey for me. So I'm hoping that today I would inspire some of you to spend a little bit of time in the support forums. One of the things that when I first started working with WordPress, I discovered this concept called five for the future. So I'm going to go and pop over to that page quickly. Let's go to the make site and let's go and hit the five for the future link. I'll share this with you in the chat. And this is an initiative that Matt Malinwick sort of started right about, I think it was 2014, 2015. And the idea is that if you are using WordPress for your business or for your personal needs or to charge clients money or whatever the case may be, 2014 it was launched. So it was just before I got into WordPress. I got into WordPress in 2015. Matt proposed this benchmark to maintain a ratio of contributors to users. And I discovered five for the future because I was at a word camp where somebody was speaking and they were talking about contributing to call. And I said to them, how do you find the five? Because I've heard about five for the future. And I said to them, I assume you are, this is your five for the future time. How do you find the time to contribute to call? And this person said to me, well, actually I work for a company that pays me to do it. And I thought, what a wonderful idea. And so that became a dream of mine which eventually became true a number of years ago. But in the beginning, what I used to do was I used to think, well, if I have and this is when I became a freelancer working with WordPress. I thought to myself, if I, let's say work for 40 hours a week, 5% to 40 is two hours. So if I spend two hours every Friday afternoon which is usually when I've had enough of work, I've had enough of everything by about 3 p.m. my time I'm ready to put down tools and go and do something else. If I can take those two hours and do something that I contribute back to the project then I'm contributing that 5%. And that's when I discovered the support forums and I used to spend every Friday logging on to the support forums and just looking for trouble, looking for threads where I could help folks looking for trouble. So that's what I'd like to chat with you about today. So when you go to WordPress.org the support forums can currently be found actually, before we do those let me just quickly do my announcements before I forget because I forgot about my announcements. So welcome of course to everybody. Thank you all for being here today. If you can't see my screen, if you've joined and you can't see my screen, please let me know so that I can re-enable the screen share if I need to you can let me know in the chat. We are presenting in focus mode today but if you would like to enable your video you're more than welcome to and you're welcome to ask questions, post questions in the chat unmute to ask questions. Today I would say even more so today's going to be a little bit more free flowing probably going to take more breaks than normal just going to be chatting about supports and my experiences in support. As always, if I'm going too fast, please do let me know and I will be posting this to WordPress TV afterwards sometime during the course of the day tomorrow. If you're looking for any other WordPress tutorials and courses, you can find those at learn.wordpress.org and if you're looking for developer news and updates you can find that at developer.wordpress.org slash news. Okay, that's the announcements out of the way. I see James has posted some comments in the chat so let's read through those quickly. James says, I didn't hear about Five for the Future until last year, heard it from a WP Taven podcast late to the game and that's perfectly fine James. It's not something that we talk about a lot. As Laura points out, it's something that was discussed about at the community summit. Most folks who join the WordPress project for the first time don't know about A, Five for the Future or B, the fact that you can contribute. There are ways that you can give back to the project. A lot of folks who go to the support forums don't know that they're managed by volunteers and all those kinds of things. So it is a bit of an ecosystem that does take a while to get into and understand. I am the kind of person that when I get into something I really dive deep, deep, deep into it. So for example, if I buy a new car, I kid you not I'm sitting with the manual of that new car that day, that evening in my bed before I go to sleep at night I'm reading through that manual and I'm reading that whole manual, that's just me. Because I want to know everything there is to know that I can find out about this car as an example. So when I joined the WordPress project I wanted to find out everything I could about the project. And so I dived into, and this is a recommendation I have as well for everybody and anybody who's involved with WordPress. There's a book called Milestones. It is the story of WordPress. There are two versions of the book. There is the first version that was released in, I think it was 20, I wanna lie to you now I'm gonna pop this link in the chat as well. James is those are the best novels, absolutely. So the WP20 book was released recently and this is version two of the book. And then the original version, trying to find where the original version is. Actually, let me just go, let me just find a chair. Now I'm not gonna find it, am I? This is the current one, where's the previous one? Unless it's got everything in it. Oh no, it does, does it? Chapter one, no, it doesn't have the first book. And I now need to find that so that I can share it with you. There we go, version one. So it's book and it's WP20 book. So book is the first one. Basically, it has everything from the first version of WordPress up until around about 2010, I think it is, or there are thereabouts. And then the WP20 book is the next 10 years. And it's all on GitHub and you can download PDF versions of it. But I do recommend reading all of it. So that was the first thing I dived into when I got into WordPress. And then the second thing was diving into the make sites and the make teams. All right, so let's get back to support. The reason we're here today. So currently support, if you wanna get to the support forums, they're underneath the learn tab at the top of the WordPress site. And you scroll down and there's the forums link there. And that takes you through to the support forums. So first of all, this is a great place to get support. If you are struggling with a WordPress problem and you're not sure of how to solve it, this is a great place to start. And a lot of folks will join the WordPress Slack and they will start asking questions there. And that's not usually the right place to start asking questions when you're trying to build your own WordPress sites and develop your own things. That's where the support forums are there for to come through and work there. So you can click on the get started and it'll take you through to the forums and explain how it all works. The one thing that you will need to post on the forums is a WordPress profile. So what I'm going to do is I'm just gonna log out of my profile quickly and show you what the login process looks like. And then I'll take you through those steps. So once you get here, you're gonna click on the get started. That'll take you to the support forums. It'll talk to you about asking for support. It'll say posting your question in the appropriate forum, et cetera, et cetera. So if we click on the forums, for example, you'll see there are different forums with different topics. So there is installing with WordPress, fixing WordPress. Let me share this forums link if you want to open this on your side. Developing with WordPress, the WordPress mobile app, WordPress networks or multi sites, questions around accessibility, questions around localhost installs and then there's an everything else WordPress if it doesn't fit under one of those. There's even a forum for requests and feedback and then there's specifically a forum for when you're doing alpha or beta testing. So if you're part of the testing teams, you can click on those forums. I generally hang out in the developing with WordPress forum because that's kind of my experience and where my sort of knowledge lies. But if you've got a question around one of these topics then it's a good thing to click on the specific forum you want to work with and then go through from there. So I'm gonna click on the developing with WordPress forum now. This is what the forum looks like. If you've ever used a plugin or a theme and you've submitted a forum thread to one of the plugins or themes you'll see it's a very similar layout. This uses a plugin called BBPress which basically enables, yeah, BBPress. It enables forum functionality on WordPress sites and that's what the WordPress.org folks use. So you can search the forum. So you can search to see if there are other topics similar to yours or you can then log in to create a topic. So I'm gonna go through that process now quickly. So when you click on login it takes you to the login form. If you don't have an account there is a register account link at the bottom of this page. You can click on that and you can register your username and password. I already have an account so I'm going to log in quickly and I don't mind using my password manager because you can't see my password that way. So that's my login. And then once I'm logged in, then I can create a topic and I just click on create. You'll see it gives you some guidelines, some suggestions of how to do certain things and then you have a topic title which is the title of your topic. You can add a link to the page that you're looking for help with and then you can pop your message in that area. So this is just very quickly how you can log support issues. I do recommend doing a search before you log a support issue just to make sure that it hasn't been asked or answered already but generally the forum moderators, that's a team of folks who maintain and moderate the forums. They're pretty good at picking up duplicates if it exists and then rewriting it and redirecting it to the relevant place. Okay, so that's how you can use the support forums if you're looking for help. I see James says it's a bit intimidating contributing to open source. I've been in the web development space for 13 years but I've used WordPress I don't know for the past six to seven. Yes, I agree. It can be very intimidating. And so that's why one of the things that I recommend doing if you want to is to start by helping in support because you might have solved something that somebody else is struggling with and by helping them, you're allowing another support volunteer to help someone else. And so hence the reason for today's chat. Okay. So once you decide you want to start helping in support, it's actually not that difficult to get going. Essentially you go to the support forums and you pick the topic that you are comfortable with. So again, in my case, I'm going to go with developing with WordPress. And then you look for an issue that looks like something you think you could help someone with and you click on it and you respond. Now that seems a bit, hang on, can I just go ahead and do that? And the answer is yes, you can just go ahead and get involved. There are some guidelines, which we will dive into in a second. And there are some rules around what you can and can't do. But because it's an open source project and because it's a volunteer space, anybody is welcome to help out in support. So as an example, I'm going to show you a couple of the support tickets that I worked with recently. I'm just going to hop on to it to my profile here and you will see that I have got a replies created option. So once you've logged in, you will have a forum profile and you can see my name is at the top here. So if I click on that, that takes me to my forum profile. This is slightly different from your WordPress.org profile, but they are linked. So they use similar information and you will see here that under replies created, this is the activity that I've been working on for the last couple of days or whatever. And so here was one which was quite interesting. This user was unable to center their logo. They had been doing some custom CSS and they'd been struggling with it. And so I saw this, I read through it and I just literally started answering this question. So I was trying to help troubleshoot it with them, figure out what was wrong. It's not something that you need any special permissions for. You can just go ahead and start answering questions. I see James has a question. How long do these support forum tickets stay active? So essentially because it is volunteer driven, the support forum ticket will stay active until you as the forum create, sorry, the thread creator market as resolved. So if we have a look at this list of fixing WordPress issues here, you will see that, sorry, threads, not issues and we'll chat about that in a second. You will see that this one has a little checkbox next to it. So here is an example of where the user has asked the question, they've received some information, they've been able to figure out it was Jetpack that was the problem and then they have come along and they have marked it as resolved. So only the thread starter, I believe has the power to do that, maybe the moderators as well, but you as the person helping in support, you can't market as resolved. The person who creates it, it needs to market as resolved. And we'll dive into in a second how you can get the person to do that and how that works. Okay, that's actually a good time now to pause and check if anybody else has any questions. While I find the super water to have quickly and then I actually wanna take you through the process of what that might look like to get a ticket resolved. Before I do that, I wanna share a few other things before we get into that. So let's hop on over to fixing WordPress again. You will see that there are some views that you can access down the side here. And my favorite one, you'll see it's a different color because I click on it quite a bit, is the topics with no replies one. If you click on that, that will list all topics in all forums that don't have a reply. And this is a great place to find one that nobody else knows that maybe you know and you can help with. So I'm going to go and just have a look at this list. And we're gonna do this in real time now. So we're gonna see if we can help someone in the forums in real time. So here we go. Somebody says CPT delete from WordPress or MySQL. So let's click on that. The person says, we have a custom website that has over 20,000 custom post type entries. We need to remove about 4,000. I need to know if it is better to trash inside WordPress or remove via MySQL. Thoughts, opinions, thank you. Now here's one where somebody's asking more for an opinion than a fix for something. I'm going to answer with my opinion and said this is my opinion, but it's better to do it in this way. And my opinion would be it's better to do it inside of WordPress. And that is because there might be other data linked to the custom post type that also needs to be deleted. But the other side of it is there might be not. So you might need to go through and check. So I'm going to post this answer now as a response. And what I usually like to do is just kind of say hi to the person's name and then type my response. Before we do that though, I just want to show you some of the other things that you can do around this ticket. Sorry, around this thread, before we actually do the response. So you'll see you have things like how many replies there are, what the last reply was, when they last set it, what the current status is. You can subscribe to this topic. So you can hit subscribe and it'll send you emails when this topic is updated. You can favorite it. You can also report it. And there are certain guideline violations. We'll get into the guidelines in a second that you can report this for. So you can say this is possibly spam or it's a guideline violation or it's a not safe for work link or some other reason that you think it's not meant for public consumption. These are the five most common ones. I generally don't see anything that I need to report. The moderators are very good at picking those up. And then if you do report it, you need to specify exactly why you're reporting it. Okay, so I'm going to respond to this support ticket. Now I'm going to say hi to that person over there. I don't know how to pronounce that. It's a nickname. And I'm going to say in my opinion option, in my option, in my opinion, it's usually, can't spell today, usually best to delete to trash. Let's say trash from inside WordPress as it should also delete any associated data. And then I'm going to say something like, for example, and I don't know that for sure. Then I will say, however, it is faster if you delete via MySQL. And I've actually had a thought here. So this is where, this is how I usually do this. As I'm typing my response, I realize there might be a bit of information that I don't have knowledge of. And the example I'm going to give you is, if you delete a custom post type, does it delete any metadata associated with that custom post type? And so usually what I will do is, I will actually test this theory. So I'm going to go into my local WordPress test site and I'm going to go into pages and I'm going to go into, I'm going to create a new page and I'm going to create some custom fields, which is post meta. So let's just say new page and let's just say test content. And I do this whenever I'm working with a support ticket. I make sure that I verify my information because I hate to give someone information that isn't correct. So let me enable the custom fields. So let's create the new page again with some content. I spelt that wrong. And then let's say meta field. Yeah, and let's just give it some text. And let's add that custom, let's publish that. So it publishes and then let's add the custom field. So that's there. And then I'm just going to check in the PHP My Admin for the site does, has it created that data and it should have done. I'm going to just move the camera off screen very quickly. So here's WordPress. There's WordPress. Let's go and have a look at the posts. So we should have the, there we go. There's a new page. It's post ID 28. And if we look at the post meta table, there should be something against post ID 28. There it is. There should be more than that one. So let's just make sure of this. Actually, no, sorry. I'm looking at the wrong place. It'll be post ID. So let's just do a quick search. Post ID 28, no. Have I done something wrong there? Let me just check. Oh, maybe I've got the wrong custom post type. Let's just do a quick check here. Oh, that's, here it is. It's 27 probably, because this is probably inherited from it. Let me just check that. 26, sorry. I've got the wrong ID. It's 26. So let's go back. And this is why it's not a good idea to look for the ID in the database. Okay. So there's all the meta fields. So there's the one I created and there's the other keys, the hidden ones. It's actually created two, which is fine. So now what I want to do is I want to delete or trash this field. And then I want to see if it trashes the meta keys. So if I move this to trash, and then I want to also delete it from trash. So let's delete permanently. And then let's do a search here. Let's refresh this search. Okay. So it does delete the meta keys. So that confirms the knowledge that I assumed. It's been a while since I've had a look at that data. So when I delete it, when I trash it, it does delete the meta keys. And that's why it's generally suggested to do it that way. See, Kaiser says, trash should be good as there might be some dependency without the plugins exactly. Those plugins can also take proper initiatives. That's another good reason to add. So let's add all of this for this person. Thank you Kaiser for that information. So let us go back to the ticket and let's say, as it should also delete any associated data. And let's say example, metadata. And then we can say additionally, if any custom plugins need to delete associated data, their delete routines would also kick in if you trash from within WordPress. Would you be happy with that sentence Kaiser? Would you describe what you were saying there? And then I'll say, however, it is faster. It is possibly faster if you delete my MySQL. You will just need to ensure that you have the right to delete your MySQL. You will just need to ensure that you also delete any associated data. So you'll see what I'm doing here is I'm not telling him or her or them one way is specific to the other. To me, in my opinion, there are pros and cons to both options here. If you do it the trash way, you're gonna make sure that any other delete routines or any other data associated to your custom post types will also be deleted. However, it's gonna take a while. You're gonna have to select or you're gonna have to run like a hook or whatever the case may be. If you're just going to the database, you can delete those records very quickly and you can delete the meta records very quickly. But then you do need to make sure that that associated data is deleted. So that's the type of answer that I would give for this kind of question. You could possibly also run some kind of automated process that does it. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to say, you should best trash from inside WordPress. And then I'm going to say, you could consider automating this process by calling and it's probably gonna be by... Let's see if there's a, let's find it. This is how I do these things. I think about these different options. So let's go WordPress trash posts. Programmatically. I like to try and give folks as much as I can. So you've got WP trash post. So you could say, yeah, so we can give this as an example and we could say, wait, wait, wait, there we go. By calling by gathering the post, the custom post IDs. Looping through the IDs and calling WP trash post. I think this is what she was saying as well, Kaiser, when you add WP underscore trash by calling WP trash post on each one. And then we could say, this would be faster than doing it in the admin UI. However, it's possibly faster if you delete by MySQL. You will just need to ensure that any data associated data is deleted. So that's kind of the answer that I'll give for something like this. I'll try and give as much information as I can to give the developer options and I will leave it at that. Then in terms of tags, you can specify specific tags. So this could be, maybe trash would be a tag. If it's common things like a theme problem or a 2022 theme or a 2023 theme problem, you could tag it as that as well. I'm going to just tag this as trash for now. And then you'll see right at the bottom, there's a little checkbox that says notify me or follow up replies via email. You'll see it's on by default. And this is handy if there's some more feedback you need from the person to try and help them. Or if you just want to know if they found an answer from your solution. I usually leave this on by default so that if anything comes back or anything comes up, then I can respond. And that is the responsibility I sort of take. When I'm going to tackle this ticket, I'm going to take the responsibility to follow up if need be and make sure this person is happy with the answer. Okay. And that's as simple as it is. A little bit of time, testing a few things out and you can then respond to somebody in the forums. All right. Are there any questions, comments, anything anybody wants to ask or say before we move on to a few other things that I want to share with you? It's really as simple as that to help out and support. My only suggestion is to make sure of your facts like I did, make sure that, you know, I made sure that that deletes the metadata because sometimes I forget these things. And yeah, just double check, you know, check your functions, gives links to documentation is always handy to show folks how to do things and then take it from there. All right. If you are doing something like this, all right. A few additional things I would like to show you before we call it a day here. You will see that there are forum guidelines. The guidelines are linked at the top of the forums and basically the guidelines are what sort of drives, you know, what kind of conversations happen in the forums. There is a, so you can read through here, talks about user expectations. It talks about how you can contact the moderators. So if you want to speak to any of the moderators, there is a forums channel in Slack and you can pop in there and you're welcome to ask them questions. I've actually done this recently. So I'm going to open my Slack instance. This is the forum and you'll see here on, when was it? Yesterday, there were some responses that I was like, are these responses okay? And somebody came back and said, yes, they have been dealt with, they were spamming your responses. So you are welcome to use the forums channel and it's all about any of those kinds of responses. Then there are the guidelines. So it talks about warning folks about adult content. So the WordPress project doesn't prevent folks from posting support threads about any kind of adult related content. I mean, this is just something that people build websites for. The other day there was a support thread that was marked not safe for work about a product that you can purchase in certain states in the US, but not others. And I'm sure you can guess what that is. So any of that type of contact is marked not safe for work. They ask that folks don't spam the forum. So don't post one question and then post multiple questions at the same time and same places. Post it once and somebody will get to it when they do get to it. Don't bump posts. So it is a volunteer space. So post your question and somebody will get to it when they can. Don't expect any kind of turn around time when you post a question and go from there. Then it says, do not offer to pay for help and do not offer to work for hire. I'm lumping those two together. So when you're posting a forum support thread, don't ask, don't say you're looking for work. It's not a job board. Don't post a question looking for a developer to hire. It's not that kind of space. There is the WPJobs website, which is at jobs.wordpress.net, which is the officials projects. Kaisa, I did see your second question there. I will get to it in a second. It is the project's official space to post jobs and projects and that kind of thing. That is not what the forum threads are for. And what I do like about it is they do say we are not against paid services, but the forums are not the right place for that. So if you're wanting to support somebody, you can't say hire me to fix a problem. You need to say, please post it on WordPress jobs and then you can apply for the job there. Which leads into Kaisa's next question. I heard that we cannot ask for credentials. We can share our mail if sensitive data is needed. My understanding, and I just want to see if they have it here in the guidelines. They don't have it in the guidelines. My understanding is you're not allowed to ask for credentials. I don't know about a rule about email. So let's go and have a look quickly at the forum's team and see if there's anything in the documentation there. We will get into this in a second. So I'm going to just say a predefined applies. I just want to see if there's something specific about, don't see anything about it. But my understanding is that you're not allowed to post emails in the support threads either. That's my understanding. I could be wrong about that, but ideally you should try and solve the problem some other way. So the way that I've done that in the past is if I really need access to something to be able to see what's going on, I will try and ask the folks, can you send me the theme you're working with or can you send me the plugin you're working with so that I can set it up on my side and try and replicate the environment? If it's a paid plugin, that's kind of difficult. So usually in those instances, I will say to them, I think this is a problem that needs somebody to be able to troubleshoot with you. I would recommend posting this as a project on the WordPress jobs board. This is kind of outside of the scope of what we can do here, especially if they're using, and as you'll see, one of the guidelines is, do not post about commercial products. So folks can't post questions around, I'm using this commercial theme or this commercial plugin and then get support for it there. They also are very specific about if you are the owner or working for that plugin or theme company, you are allowed to say, look, this is a problem with our plugin or theme. Can I send you the link to our plugin or themes support forum and you post your details there? And then there you can ask folks for contact details and that kind of thing. When I used to do support for the Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin, we used to as developers, we used to do support once a week for a couple of hours a week or whatever it was. I used to try and help where I could in the forums until it got to that point where I now need some level of access. And then I would redirect them to our support, our CASTOS support forum where they basically can email in and it's a private conversation, it's in our support program, whatever it is, I can ask them for credentials privately and do things that way. So I'm not sure if you can share your mail, I would need to verify that. I've never done it before and I don't think it's allowed, but maybe double check with the forum moderators and you can find out from there. And then you will also see that they speak about links to other resources. So public links in plugin or theme support topics may only be posted if they meet one of the following criteria. This is what we spoke about earlier. The link is to the plugin or theme authors website, own support website. It's posted by the plugin or theme author to an external resource related to the topic. It's a resource to the WordPress.org website or the link is to a reputable image sharing service for screenshots. And those are the criteria that you're allowed to post links in. So if you're posting links to your hire me page or anything like that, that is frowned upon and not allowed. Okay, and here it says under the bad stuff, do not post email addresses or ask others to post the email. Do not post to ask for login information, test IDs, test passwords. So there is a list of things that you are not supposed to do. And you'll see their email is part of it. So there is the answer. We found it. And they do ask that folks follow this. There have been a number of folks that have been banned from the forums for not following these rules over and over and over again. And so it's a good idea if you want us to help in the support forums to make sure you've read through these guidelines, you understand them, you agree to them. And you're there to support folks, not there to try and make business. I will be honest though, as a freelancer, it did help me doing these kind of questions because then when it got to the point of folks saying, okay, I might need to hire a developer, then I could say to them, well, here's a place where you can hire developers and post your job. And I used to then bid for that job and those kinds of things. So there are ways to do it that follow the guidelines that aren't breaking the rules, but it starts by being helpful. It doesn't start by coming into it with a, I'm gonna earn money off this mindset. Okay, any other questions around the guidelines around how that all works before we dive into my last topic for the day, which is the support team themselves. All right, there don't seem to be any further questions, so we'll dive straight in. So right at the top of the support forums, there is also the Get Involved link. That takes you to the support team, the Make Support Team. I'm just going to hide this welcome box here. And this is where you can really dive into how you can get started with support. So if you wanna start doing this, I recommend reading through this. They talk about how to get started with support. Basically, all these things I'm discussing with you today is all listed here. They talk about when good users go bad. So if somebody starts becoming aggressive or if someone starts losing their mind on the forums or whatever, there are ways that you can reply. There are some good guidelines around giving good support. They talk about what's appropriate, what's not appropriate, examples of good and bad support. They talk about getting help. It's okay not to know the answer and ask others around you. There are also a great list of predefined replies. And one of the ones that I use the most and James, this comes back to your question earlier about when a topic is closed. There is actually a, when you want to use it to resolve their own topics, there is a pre-deplined, pre-deplined, good grief, pre-defined reply that you can just copy paste. And it just has, if your question has been answered, you would love it. If you could mark the topic as resolved, this helps our volunteers find the topics that still need attention and more people will get helped. So I use this predefined reply a lot, especially when someone's come back and said, okay, they found the answer. Then I will just copy paste that reply, pop it in. And most of the times they will then mark it as resolved. So there's a lot of resources for somebody who wants to work on the forums. I do recommend reading through all of these resources before you get started. It does help a lot. There are also some additional things around finding posts for your topic, forum moderators, filtering. We spoke about the predefined replies, privacy issues. There's a whole bunch of information here. And there's even a topic specifically on volunteering on the forums, which is everything we've discussed today. So I do recommend reading through that. And then in the appendix, there are a list of helpful tools that you can use. There is a setting, and I discovered this recently. I didn't know this was there, but there's a setting called the also viewing feature. So if I'm viewing a support thread and then somebody else clicks on it, then it shows a little message at the top of their screen to say somebody else is already looking at this. So that's a nice way to know, okay, I'll leave that one for now. I'll move on to another one. So if you do start wanting to help in support, I do recommend enabling that setting. There are also some, you see, that's what it looks like at the top there. There are also some things that you can install with either the Tampa monkey or the Greece monkey browser extensions that do certain highlighting on the forums. So you can see if a question has been unanswered, if it's been resolved, you'll see it highlights it in yellow or it highlights it in green if it's resolved. I don't have those enabled at the moment, but those do help. And there's a whole bunch of useful tools. So the support teams have really looked at like what are the things that they use regularly? How can we make it easier for folks to give support? You can do things like disabled, wrapping pasted texts, all kinds of interesting tools. I'm not gonna go through them all now, but I do recommend reading through all of this and seeing what you can use and what makes your life easier. Okay, and so that is the support handbook. I'm gonna share that in the chat as well. These three things are linked in the slides, which I will upload to the session after we're done here, but that is my bit for today. So that is how, in my opinion, easy it is to get involved in support. Make sure you've got your WordPress profile set up. Go to the support forums and once you've read through all the documentation, just find one or two support forums that you can help with. I find it, so I wanna share a couple of interesting ones that I had recently, if you don't mind. I find it very interesting to work in the forums because then I get a feel for what folks are struggling with. See, there's the one other person viewing this page message. What folks are struggling with, what difficulties they're having, what I can learn from their environment. So there's two interesting ones that I wanna share with you. The first one was, actually, let me go into my, my reply is created. There was one that I had, stop this one, this one, I'm just gonna try and find your content, format display, Google font, no. Sorry, folks, it was quite a long, cut a couple of days ago. No, it wasn't the add to cart button. Wasn't the random URLs, wasn't that one, wasn't that one. Wasn't that one, wasn't that one. I can find it now. Here we go, here we go, this was a fun one. So I'm gonna open up that one first of all and then I'm going to open up the other one, which is the CSS one. And the reason I'm doing this is just to give you an idea of kind of how it can work and how you can get that information from the person without getting access details to their environment. So the first one was this one. This person was saying that they are taking a live copy of a site, running it on a local WAMP server and they're getting a difference in their images. So in the images on the live site, you will see that it's including the source set attributes, which those of you might remember from my responsive images workshop is how that is generated from the responsive images. And on the local WAMP site, they're not getting that attribute and they weren't sure why. And so we kind of started with, I said to them, okay, this looks like responsive images. To start, can you check if the, for the different sizes being created? So the, and then I said, it might be the PHP GD extension. The person said, okay, cool. The images are being created. The extension is enabled. So then I said, okay, what about your meta keys? Are you copying over the meta keys from the live to the local or whatever the case may be because it might need those. And the person confirmed, yes, that data is there. And then I said to them, run this specific function to see if the underlying functionality works. And they did that. I gave them a link to a file for them. And so basically I try to give them as much as I could. So I gave them a gist that we've used and I'll learn, press workshops to be able to run this code from just a test.php page. And they ran the code on their side and they got the information back and it looks like it is working. And you'll see, I said, interesting. And then I said to them, okay, why not try it on a different environment? So I said, why don't you install local WP or DevKinster and try it on there? And they did that. And then it turns out that when they did that, it actually worked on the local WP environment. So this helped us isolate the fact that there was something with their WAMP server setup that was causing the problem. So now fortunately, they've decided, okay, they were doing a local demo that doesn't have internet. So they're just gonna use local WP because that's working. And then when they have time, they're gonna go back and try and figure out the problem. But we were able to do this troubleshooting steps without me getting any access to the information. You will see a couple of times this person posted some configuration settings. So you kind of have to think out of the box a little bit and go, okay, if this was me, what would I be doing? And then try and guide them through that process. The other one that I thought was fun and interesting. So this person was trying to center a logo and they were using the 2023 theme. And I don't know if they fixed it on their site yet. So we're gonna open it up very quickly and just see. Okay, they have fixed it. But originally the logo was to the right of the menu item and they were trying to get it set up. And I could see from the source code that they were using the 2021 theme. And I got back to them and I said, okay, I see that you're using 2021. But in the default 2021 theme, when I add a logo to my site, and I'll make this a bit bigger in a second, it puts the logo at the center of the menu. And I was looking at the source code and I noticed that the HTML structure was slightly different, my version to their version. And I couldn't figure out why and it bugged me. And so we went through a couple of things and we tried a couple of things. And then eventually I discovered that in 2021, if you disable the display site title and tagline setting in the theme, it doesn't just disable those elements. It actually moves the logo HTML into the site branding container. And that's where you end up with this, they had it's the logo on the left of the menu. So when I disabled this WordPress, but it moves the logo down there and puts it in line with the menu. Once I'd done that, then I could give them the CSS to say, right, once I've done that, this is the CSS that I used, they applied it and there you go, they've got it sorted out and they've got their logo centered and off they go. So again, I didn't have any access to their site. I was just able to determine from the HTML what theme they were using. Based on that, I could set it up on my own environment, try and replicate their setup and then work through it with them. So you should in most instances be able to do it without gaining access to their site. If you can't and they're wanting to keep going, then it's best just to move on and then try and find another simple thread. James says, can you send the link to this topic to chat? You're talking about the WAMP server one or the impossible to send to logo one, James? Both, cool. So this is the HTML differences one. This is all public, so I don't mind sharing it. And this is another reason not to share anything private like email addresses because all of these support threads are public and you shouldn't be sharing anything in them that is not public. So there are those. You're welcome to go through those and check those out. And this is how I try and figure out what's going on and how to help folks come up with the solution. It does make your, it does sharpen your troubleshooting skills because if you're the kind of person like me who likes to log into the site and troubleshoot that way, now you have that taken away from this problem. How can I figure out? How can I help this person get things going? All right, that is my bit for today, folks. I hope this has been an interesting session at least. I hope this has inspired some of you to try and help out in the support forums if you have some time. My suggestion or recommendation would be to start with one a week. Just pick one support thread a week. And this is the other one to mention. I keep referring to them as tickets. They're not tickets, they're threads. And the reason the support teams don't like to refer to them as tickets because tickets have a sort of an expectation that they will be a response within a certain time and a resolution will happen. These are just forum threads. So someone's posting a question, anybody can view it, anybody can answer it, anybody can try and help. It doesn't necessarily mean that everybody has the right answer but we will try and help each other to get there. So that's why the forum folks refer to them as forum threads and not forum tickets. So my suggestion, if you wanna help out in the forums, once a week, Friday, after lunch or whenever it's your quiet time, pick a thread, read through it, see if you can help the person figure out the problem. I have found it to be very beneficial to both increase my WordPress knowledge because I'm not doing the kinds of things that these folks are doing, but I'm learning from it in the process. And it helps me feel like I'm giving back to the project, I'm putting my time in. And it's one of the easiest, if not the easiest way to contribute back to the WordPress project. Okay, awesome, folks, thank you so much. I've been doing a lot of talking now and no coding, it's been weird. But I thank you all for joining me today. If in the future you have any questions about doing support, you're welcome to reach out to me in Slack. I thank you all for joining. Laura says, great presentation. I enjoy contributing to the training team. Find a team that you are comfortable with and start small. Yes, absolutely. At WordCamp, it was great to meet the people I contribute with in person. Laura, it was lovely to see you there at the table and to see you interact with everybody. So yes, it was lovely to know that you were there and contributing and part of the table that was awesome. Great, folks, have a wonderful rest of your Thursday. Enjoy the rest of your week and I will see you next week with topic to be decided. I haven't figured out yet what I'm presenting on next week, but I promise I'll make sure that the Zoom URL is set up properly and everything else is set up properly. I don't know what happened to me this week, but thank you all for joining me and I will see you next week. Bye-bye.