 I do look at code sometimes and wonder what are people thinking, but I do plug-in reviews for WordPress.org. So if you think you've seen some pretty crazy stuff out there, I've probably seen worse. And it's doing those plug-in reviews that lets me see the actual reviews that people leave on other people's code. So when you get those things, like someone says, well, this plug-in sucks and this person eats rotten eggs and I hate them, I usually see those too and I get the complaints coming back, you know, you need to delete these reviews, which led me to talk about how to handle bad reviews at WordCamp Europe last year. Or this year, excuse me, my year, I wish 2016 was over, it's not yet. But because of that, the greatest takeaway that I had from that talk was reinforcing the reminder with people is that we are not the code that we create. So I decided I should pitch this for WordCamp US and talk about it here. After I pitched it and it got accepted, someone told me that I was one of the more highly anticipated talks from the people who were organizing it, which sent me into a bit of a panic attack because suddenly I realized the weight of what I'm about to talk about, the weight of my words and the responsibility of trying to explain to people something that should be so simple and should be so obvious to developers, to support technicians, to people who are using code to remember the human behind the screen. This is a really important thing that we forget a lot. So I've started these slides, I spent a weekend and I restarted them enough times that I could probably blog three times a week for two weeks, just on the things I threw away. So the pain though, the pain from all the rejection that I've seen and from being turned down for talks and jobs and everything and the worry of what I'm saying, it reminds me, I really like Greek myths. I love them growing up. And I keep making me think of Prometheus. After he introduces fire to man, Zeus curses him and ties him to the rocks and he gets ripped apart every single day by carrion birds. His liver grows back every night and it starts again every morning. And if you're a developer, if you're a programmer, if you do support, you feel like that every single day, that every day you are being ripped apart just for giving humanity the gift of WordPress fire. Well, this is a perception though, obviously. Too often we look back at these things and we think my contributions to WordPress are what make me important to the WordPress community. But we think of them in far too literal terms. I have written code. I have fixed CSS. I have beta tested. I have created a plugin, a theme, a blog, a store, a career. And we make a fatal mistake of boiling down what we are to that one thing. I am the product. I am the code. The reality is that we aren't. We know this. We know that we are creators. These are our creations. We have invented things out of nothing. With the power of our minds, we came up with an idea. With the power of our minds, we wrote the code that made something that had never happened before happen. Someone figured out how to animate a gift because they had a dream. And we love animated gifts. But we're artists. We're dreamers. We're builders. Anyone who's ever studied music or journalism or art understands this very weird association that we're going to have. We build in our hearts and our head. But our reputation becomes not the process of creation, but the end result. And we lose ourselves somewhere along the way. We forget us when we see these reviews that are terrible or the reviews where people hate us. And the problem stems a little bit from the fact that artists are seen as temperamental. I mean, how many times have we heard about things like Sid Vicious threw a television out a window? Or a musician had a party that was so big. Justin Bieber threw water balloons off of a building and tormented New York City. We hear about all these horrible things of artists who do create. And yes, I do think that Justin Bieber is an artist. I don't like his music, but I think that he has merit somewhere in there. But people see artists as capricious characters, creatures who are at the whims of our own desires and our passions, people who obsess over one thing to the exclusion of others. And now this sounds like us, doesn't it? We obsess over that one thing. I can get these pixels right and the site's going to be perfect and everyone's going to love it. But we're not the people who trash hotels when we're frustrated. We are the people who lash out in the comments, in the reviews, at our users, at our coworkers, because here's our passion and here's someone telling us that it sucks. And it's so hard to separate ourselves from the art of what we've created because we have put so much of our self into it. We can no longer see the forest for the trees, as it were. If you saw my talk at Word Camp Europe this year, all of that just sounded really familiar. Like, didn't you spend 45 minutes talking about just that? It's true. We contributors to open source are exactly the same as artists. This is why we work so hard because we have this great passion to make things. And we have to also work hard to separate our heart from our head to remember that when we've created something and sent it out into the world, it's no longer just ours. It becomes something that belongs to everyone. We brought fire to the earth. We shared our joy. We have changed 26%, probably 27%, of the internet together. Give or take. But instead of being told how awesome we are, we're told that our code sucks. We're told things that if we don't offer our help for free, we're greedy and vain. Being driven to fix one part of WordPress? That's a waste of our time. Why aren't we fixing this other part? Why are you working on menus when you could be working on the Settings API? Why are you working on the JSON API when you could be working on Customizer? Why are you wasting your time with Customizer when you could be making a better default theme? Those are all actual things that people have said in track on the make blogs and comments on WordPress forums. To me and Twitter, we hear that all the time, that we should spend our time fixing what's broken. Don't innovate how. Doesn't matter if you don't know how. You should do what I say. And we're pulled by these millions of masters that we created ourselves, 28%, whatever, of the internet. Yeah, that's all of those people coming back to all of us saying, you're not doing what I want. Therefore, it's not good enough. And we feel like we can never do enough. But then we have to think also about the developers and the contributors who are less visible. Think of all the people here today wearing purple shirts, wearing rainbow bands. Think of how much time and effort they've put into making this one event. Three days for $40, where you get to come here and learn all these things and talk to all these people and network. And think of the person who insured the funding so that you only had to pay $40. Or what about the person who fixed the inline documentation for core that let somebody else write a theme that did exactly what you wanted? What about the person who answered a question in the support forums? What about the person who reviewed the theme that's on WordPress.org that you love so much? Or the plugins? Sure, I do that. And we try to keep things fair for everybody. And we don't get seen for it quite as often as we feel we should, because here we are putting ourselves out. I love the movie The Princess Bride, like a lot of people. And when Wesley says, life is pain highness, anyone who says different is selling something, it's true. Because we sit and we hear those horrible things first. That's the one that's going to stick with you at the end of the day. The one person. I've talked to maybe 100 people today easily. And one person said they didn't like something. And that's the thought that's going to be staying in my head for the next 24, 48 hours. That's just how your brain works. But everybody you see here, everybody who is a speaker, a sponsor, a volunteer, even just someone who maybe helps on the side sits over by the Happiness Lounge and says, oh, hey, you have a problem with your site. Let me help you. We're all here for good reasons. You are all here for good reasons. Look around at everybody else with you. You may not be here for fully altruistic reasons. Not everybody is going to be a socialist like me. And that's OK. But you're here because you do believe that things are going to be better when we work together and make things together. And that's really important. Every single one of us here started from the same spot. We started from a place of not knowing. We learned. We advanced. And we're giving back in our own way. Even by just sitting here and listening to me, you're giving back to me in a way that I can't calculate or measure. And I appreciate it greatly. Every single person who steps up here is doing it for the greater good of WordPress with the best intentions. No one here is doing it because they think they're smarter than you or better than you or greater than you. They're doing it because they care about something and want to share. One of the points that I really needed to address in this talk is that there are all these days when you know you've done the right thing. And you know that you've done everything that you possibly can to make things better. And people will tell you that they like you, that they like your work, that they respect you, and then there's that one person who said he really didn't like the fact that I closed his plug-in. And I'm sorry. But I know my worth. And even so, it's hard for me to remember the difference between my reputation and my honor. And I have a quote up on the screen from a civil campaign. It's a book written by Lois McMaster Bujold. She's one of my favorite science fiction writers. She writes science fiction in a way that makes you not go, oh god, what are you inventing now? She actually is a scientist. So everything she writes about is believable. And she remembers to keep the humanity in science. And one of her characters says that reputation is what other people know about you. And honor is what you know about yourself. And the point she's trying to make is that as long as you know that you are doing things for the right reason, you can have the internal strength to withstand these horrible things that people will be saying about you. Because they will say it. We're going to be accountable for all of these things. We're going to be accountable for every single action that we do, whether or not it's what we intended to do. We're going to be one day, the 20% minority who gets told, yeah, that feature in WordPress is great, but we're not going to make it. You don't really need it. And most of the people who use WordPress aren't going to use it. If you've ever been to the Ideas Forum on WordPress.org, you'll see me running around there sometimes telling people, yeah, that is a really great idea. But it's probably best as a plug-in for now, because not enough people will use it. And once in a while, somebody pushes back and says, but it's really important. Being really important doesn't mean it's used enough to be pulled in sometimes. So, okay, you want to have a plug, you want to have a way in WordPress Core that lets you duplicate a multi-site site. Anybody who knows me knows that my love affair with multi-site is interesting. I love to hate it. If you have a multi-site, you've got multiple WordPress sites installed and one install of WordPress. And if you want to duplicate it, exactly one to the next, to the next, to the next, it's not actually very easy to do that. But most people don't actually want to do that. A few people do. And for those people, we have plugins. Because WordPress was built to be extendable, plugins are the great way to go. If enough people start using the plugins, then we'll shift over and maybe it'll show up in Core and maybe it won't. But when I have to tell people that it's a really great idea, it's a powerful idea, it's a wonderful idea, but it's probably not going to end up in Core anytime soon, a lot of the time they get very upset to be told they're the minority. They don't like hearing that. This is a part of human nature. You don't want to find out you're the minority and when you do, sometimes you lash back and you yell at people and you say, well, that's just not fair. It actually is fair. It's part of the definition of fair, but it sucks to find out you're on the other side of it. And when they come back at you, no matter what your intention was, you're going to feel bad. And this is the dark part of human nature is that you're going to do things with the best intentions and not be appreciated for it. And when that happens, you get mad. And you have a few options now. And like I said when I was pitching this, I'm going to talk about how you deal with it and how you take these feelings. That you're not your code, but here you are having your code attacked and it feels like it's you. Well, you've got your choices. You can correct them. You can let go or you can fight back. Somewhere around here, there's a fellow by the name of Otto and he spends a lot of time talking me down from fighting back at people. Because I have this urge where I want to go, well, actually that's not what this means when I've done this thing. And Otto, Mika, just no. Shush, don't say it. Because you can't win. Because there are people that insist that I'm power hungry, that I have malicious intent when I've closed plugins or when I've said things at a specific time. None of these things are true. I have friends though who listen to me vent. And sometimes I sub tweet. I shouldn't and I know better. And I'm on a Twitter break right now to try to get myself out of that habit because it really, it doesn't help anything. It doesn't actually make me feel any better and it certainly doesn't make the other person feel better if they figure out it's them. And that's just not a really good experience. It inspires the circle of hate which we try to avoid. And the truth of all this is that it's like a game of tic-tac-to. The only winning move is not to play the game. If you've seen war games, that's literally the point of the whole movie is teaching us that sometimes you just, no, don't fight. And it hurts so much because you wanna just tell someone, no, that's not what I meant. Let me explain and you know in your heart that they're not going to listen to you. That they're not going to accept your explanations. They're just gonna see these as excuses. Silence, oh, that's just proof that they were right in the first place. Fighting back, you must be covering something up. There is literally no way to win when someone has decided they're not going to listen to you. So what do you do? Will you survive? On that bombshell, no. Actually, do you have a little bit more? This isn't that kind of talk. I'm not just gonna leave you and say there's nothing you can do. You can survive and I can show you how to survive because outsmarting them sounds like this great idea but it actually doesn't feel good at the end and outplaying them, I mean, this is not actually a game of survival. You can't outplay them because you're not any smarter than they are. There's someone in this room who's going to be smarter than you. That's just the law of averages. So if you ever think you're the smartest person in the room unless your name is Richard Feynman, you're probably not. If you don't know who Richard Feynman is, you can go Google him later. If the win, though, is outlasting, that becomes sort of an eventuality. You just keep going. You just keep fighting. Okay, well, what can we do? My Southern relatives like to tell me that you can't teach a pig to sing. It frustrates you and it annoys the pig. And from that, I always try to remember that there are going to be things that I can't explain things that I can't do, people I can't reach. And this is where I start saying the remark of, well, I'm really sorry that you feel that way. I don't make excuses for anything. I don't tell someone they're wrong. I simply say, I'm sorry that that's how you feel. There is no but at the end of that sentence. It is literally, I'm sorry you feel that way, period. I don't reply anymore after that. And that's really hard to do because if you've read the comment section of anything, you know that you have this urge to go in and say, but you're wrong and you can't do it because you're not going to win. I have to accept the futility that my fight is a game of tic-tac-toe and once you're over the age of six, you can't win a game of tic-tac-toe. You can't lose a game either. You just play to stalemate over and over and over again unless the other person sneezes. So I keep with me though my inner strength because while I'm saying accept the futility that you can't change everything, I don't accept the things I can't change. You know that one about serenity and accepting what we can't change? Yeah, that's no, that's not me at all. I don't believe it. I don't believe that there isn't a single thing we can't change. It's just that we can't change it as quickly as we want to. Accepting futility means I have to accept that today, here, now, I can't change their mind, yet. And then the person that you're going to be outsmarting is not them but yourself because if you can convince yourself not to be stupid, this is the hardest thing in the world, by the way. If you can convince yourself not to be stupid, you will protect yourself from pretty much everything. If you can get yourself to believe I'm not right all the time and sincerely believe that maybe I'm wrong when someone's telling me I suck but not in a way that is detrimental to your mental health and boy is that a trick, you will be surprised with how much you can outsmart your own tendencies. This is why we leave ourselves notes and documentation, I swear, this is actually related. If you've ever gone back and looked at code that you wrote like a week ago and wonder was I drunk when I wrote this, it's reminding yourself that you learn more every single day. The me six months ago was a much better program, much worse programmer, excuse me, than the me today. The me in six more months, hopefully she's learned JavaScript deeply, she's trying. But not being stupid means I continue to learn from myself. I learn from my mistakes. I don't pick fights. I let things go. When I know I can't change them now and I try to change them by continuing my honor and being the person that I know is good and right. The secret to outplaying people is that you're going to be outplaying your own tendencies and habits. You're going to be outplaying that wait but you're wrong, moment. You know yourself better than anybody else. You know when you're about to snap off that reply that you shouldn't when your neck gets hot. I don't know about you but my face will start to flush and I'll be typing and I'll be hitting the keys and I realize in that moment I cannot hit enter or publish on this comment. I need to delete it and walk away. You know when your humor is going to be a little bit more biting than it should be. You have to learn how to play yourself in those moments to catch yourself before you get too far and step away. Because the only person who can fool yourself is you and believe me, you can do a really good job fooling yourself, making yourself look stupid. Only person who does that perfectly in the world besides your parents is yourself. I love my parents, don't get me wrong but boy they can make me look stupid. And then I mentioned outlasting. This is not about outliving everyone although whoever lives the longest gets to write the history books and we know this but that takes so much patience and the web is moving so fast that outlasting really only means giving it a month or two of constantly showing that isn't what you meant with your actions and with your emotions. Telling someone that you're sorry you can't help them and sticking by it and walking away and trying to fix things and keep going forward and making things better is going to prove to everyone that your intention was right and in the end they will look back in two or three weeks, not months, not years, weeks and they'll say gee. She said she was sorry, went on making a really awesome product, gave really nice support for all these people. Maybe this guy was just having a bad day and this plugin doesn't really deserve a one star review for someone who didn't like the color of a background. People do do that a lot but you have to do this to survive. I can tell you how I survive. I can tell you to subtweet or to blog or to scream or to ride your bicycle up and up and down through Orange County until your legs are on fire until your blood is pounding so much that your iPhone watch thinks you're having a heart attack and asks you funny questions. I can tell you to talk to a friend or a loved one or a professional, you could try meditation. I really like the breathe app. It actually, I was sitting over here a minute ago meditating right before I came up and talked to just kind of chill myself out and relax. Survival is about self care but it's also about this. You're not code, we are code. Everybody in this room wants to make WordPress better for themselves maybe but also for the community because every time you make it better for yourself you're actually making it better for everyone else as well. So I can't give you the right answer for you but I can remind you of this, you are not alone. We're all here too. And that means that one person maybe, yeah, that thought is gonna stick by my head for a few hours but I'm pretty sure that a couple of my friends who are sitting in the back somewhere, they're gonna catch me on my way out, they're gonna hug me and they're gonna tell me, hey, you know what, you're not your code. And I'm gonna smile and remember, yeah, I'm not, together we are though and that's okay. Because there is joy to be had in Mudville when you make your connections. We rely on each other, we lean on each other, we ask each other for help. When there's a customer you can't deal with you have coworkers and you say, hey, I'm gonna kill this customer if I have to keep explaining to him that when he deletes his files it means they're deleted, can you please try talking to him? And handing it off to somebody else. It's remembering that you're not alone. Every company is going to be okay with you saying, look, I don't know that I can explain it to this guy in a way that won't lose us the customer, can someone help me? Because you're a company together. Even the big companies are companies together. And I'm gonna tell you this, there's somebody in this room who rooted for the team who lost the World Series. And there's somebody in this room, probably back there who rooted for the team that won. There you go, that's one. And you know what? I have a connection with this person because I used to live right next to Wrigley Field, literally two blocks away. I lived there for four years, I loved it, I loved the Cubs and that was the greatest World Series I could have possibly dreamed. It sucks that the team that I root for, my home team lost. But now we have one more connection between us. Not just WordPress, not just IKeto, because I do that too, yeah. We have more connections and there are people here that you have thousands of connections with if you just step up and say, hey, what do you do in WordPress? What do you do outside of WordPress? And you make the connections and you make a community. I wish my friend Andrea Renwick was here. She is one of my greatest friends on the planet and I met her because she made a theme called Pride and Prejudice and I put zombies in the background. And then she did sense and sensibilities and I put a sea monster in the background. And we met on Twitter and we started chatting and within the course of a year, Andrea set me on a path that changed my life. She got me to meet other people. She got me to have the courage that when I was asked, do you wanna speak at WordCamp San Francisco? I said, okay. And when this guy named Shredder who led the WordPress 4.5 release said, hey, you ever think about applying for a job at my company? I tried it and suddenly there I am. My life changed and I remembered I wasn't alone. I wasn't just this lonely bank employee sitting in a corner answering support tickets in my free time because I was bored out of my mind. They don't encourage innovation at banks. They really don't. Especially not from their little errant programmers who sit over in a corner and handle automation. They just sort of look at you funny and go, yeah, you wanna take time off to go to San Francisco and do what? But it reminds me every day, I'm not alone. This is my community, these are my people. Even if I just share a joke with someone, I've made a connection. And sometimes we're loud about these things and sometimes we're quiet. And sometimes we ask each other for help when we desperately need it because we want an opportunity to change our life because our cats are sick, because we can't afford something that we desperately need or that we maybe just need someone to give us a hand. And we've learned that these things are okay to ask because we're not our code. But we together are the code that keeps WordPress together. My name is Mika Epstein. You probably know me as Ipstonew. I'm a writer, an artist, a dreamer, a contributor to open source. And DreamHouse has very graciously allowed me to come to WordCamps to give some of my time back to review plugins and to give back to this community that has given me and us so much. Thank you. And my buzzer didn't go off so they didn't get to see me spook myself. I had a timer set in case I went over. Now if anybody has any questions, there is a mic in the middle of the room and just come on up and ask. You can ask about anything. It doesn't even have to be about this. You can ask me about plugin reviews if you want to. I promise that I give nice answers. Being constantly under attack is hard. And I believe that that's one of the things that prevents a lot of people from contributing back to the community because they are afraid that the code that they are gonna write is not good enough. What I want to ask you is how is it that you, what are three ways that you handle the way when somebody is attacking you personally? The fear about your code not being good enough, every single person has that. Every single person has that. So do remember that we all started from a place where our code was terrible and even if you're the greatest coder in the world, even Andrew Nason who's one of the best programmers for WordPress, he looks back on his stuff and goes, I can't believe I wrote that. But the three techniques that I use personally for handling people who attack me. The very first one is the minute I recognize someone is attacking me, I walk away. I don't reply right then and there. I step back, if it's on Twitter, I close Twitter. If it's on Facebook, I close Facebook. I step back and walk away and distance myself from it. The next thing I do is I take a moment to think, okay, is there any reason that is justifiable that this person has for being this mad? Because you can tell the difference between someone who's annoyed with you and somebody who is actually attacking you. There's a huge difference between the two. Some of the names that I've been called are not things that I would repeat and when I'm at home, I'm a pretty foul mouthed person. People can get pretty mean and I do try to take a minute and look, is there anything valid in there? And the last thing I do is I have a gut check and I have my friends who are in the community and I turned to them and I said, hey, am I reading too much into this or this person lose their mind on me? It's remembering that I don't have to reply. It's looking for the truth and it's remembering I'm not alone and those three steps, no matter which way you go about them, they'll help you handle these things because yeah, being attacked constantly is really tiring and if people get bad enough, I just block them on Twitter and Facebook and I don't communicate with them anymore because if it's that bad, there's nothing I can do. Thank you. Hey, so I guess for me, they kind of see the plug-in repository the same way I kind of see Yelp and when I go to Yelp, I automatically- I'm laughing because he's right. I automatically look for the one-stars and as I work for a company that heavily depends on good reviews as a part of our livelihood and those one-stars hurt so much because it directly impacts how we make money. How do you handle that? One-star reviews are really tricky because they come in a few flavors. I talked about this in greater detail at WordCamp Europe. You can watch it at WordPress TV. If you go to my site, slides.halfelf.org, my slides will be up there and you can look at them. One-star reviews are complicated. If it is a legitimate one-star review and not just somebody who's going to go off into a rant about how everything is terrible and you suck, those one-star reviews, talking to them as if they were the calmest, sanest person in the world, tends to actually be to your benefit because what happens is that either they keep screaming and someone who reads that one-star review later will go, well, this person clearly is not stable with their review. I should just discount it or they're going to calm down and start talking to you and those are your two options. If the person actually is a real legitimate troll, we do ask that you come and let us know. If you go to Slack, there's a forums room, just let them know, hey, this person is attacking and they've got four other posts where they're doing the same thing, can you help? And they totally will. That's what we're here for, is to try to clean those up. But sometimes a one-star review is just a way of life. No one is going to universally like your product. That is just a statistical impossibility. But what you can do is concentrate on the pain points that those one-stars bring up, make them better and start getting the five-star reviews, not by bribing people and not by telling them, oh, if you leave me a five-star review, I will make this other product for you that you really want, but just by slowly and steadily showing them that you do mean well. Yoast SEO did this fairly recently where they started telling people, hey, we've made a lot of changes, have you reviewed us? And they suddenly got an influx of five-star reviews because people stopped, took a moment, and said, you know what, they have done a lot. I'm still using this plug and I think it meets everything I need, I'm gonna give it a good review. And it's just consistently applying yourself to making things better will win out over those one-star reviews. But yeah, you're gonna get somebody who loses their mind and I wish I could stop that. If I could ask one more question? Well, just make sure. Is there anyone else who has a question? Because if so, I'd like to make sure they all get through. But if not, yeah, okay, go ahead. Sometimes you get knocked down a few stars, not necessarily because what you offer isn't good. It's because of what you don't offer with your plug-in. Yeah. So how do you handle that part? Especially when you're in the early stages of developing a plug-in and that's like version two, version three of it. And especially in those early stages because those reviews have higher weight. They have deceptively higher weight. And you think about it, you think, well, okay, if I only have five reviews and one is a one-star review because I don't do a thing and one is a three-star review because it mostly worked for what they needed but not quite and one is a five-star review of somebody who really liked it. It averages out to three stars, right? And you think, well, okay, great, now this one-star review has much more weight. When I talked about outlasting, this is kind of what it is because what you need to do is to continually apply yourself to making things better and to get the four-star reviews. I always tell people that you don't want a five-star review, you want a four-star review. Five-star review, there's nothing you can learn from that. This plug-in is awesome, it does everything I want and dancing monkeys and unicorns, great. What you really want is that four-star review who says, this plug-in is wonderful, it does almost everything I want, I just wish the monkeys could wear jackets. People are laughing, but these are some of the crazy things that I've seen in plug-in reviews where people are like, I just wish I could change this one color. And in the moment, the plug-in developer's like, well, hey, that's easy, I can totally give you that ability to change that. Here's how you can do it in CSS right now and I don't really want to build an interface because if you saw Pippin, he talked right before lunch, he says sometimes he tells people, no, he's not adding things to plug-ins because he doesn't want to support them, which is something I strongly agree with. I think if you don't want to support an aspect of your plug-in, it's okay to tell people no. You're gonna have to accept the fact that they may just give you a three-star review because of that, though, because it's not what they want. Reviews are really messy. Auto likes to tell you that reviews are someone's opinion, it's someone's experience. And just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's not real, it just means that they didn't like it. However, we can happily tell you that the majority of people who read reviews on WordPress.org actually read the reviews. They don't just look at the numbers. If they see, hmm, he's got a three-star rating and only three reviews, I should go look at those reviews and see what they are, and people do look, which is really to your benefit. So don't get too hung up, especially in the beginning, if you've got one-star reviews. Get hung up when you're like a year and a half down the line and all of a sudden you have like 31-star reviews from different people with different complaints coming in then you know you've done something completely wrong and you need to go back and fix it. But in the beginning, that's when people are getting a feel for you too. And they're trying to figure out exactly if this is what they needed or if it's not. And sometimes you're gonna have to accept it and say, you know what, this plugin is not going to be for you. I'm not gonna be writing this aspect of code that you want, but did you know this other person does it? And lose the business, but gain the reputation. And the reputation will last a lot longer than that one-star review that you got a year ago. Thank you. You're welcome. Okay, well, if there's no one else, I will be around all weekend. Oh wait, someone's coming up. Yay. Is that someone I know? First of all, I wanted to thank you for your talk. And you know, I mean, I realized that a lot of the questions are about plugins and it might ask as well. But yeah, you know, the talk was great. The talk was great. But since we're on the subject of plugins, I guess one of my questions is kind of, is there a recommended process for basically saying, you know, I wrote this plugin like three or four years ago, I think it's time to just get it out of the repository, that sort of thing. Cause I mean, a while back, I probably ended up with like nine or 10 plugins in the repository. There's really only one or two that I'm continuing to be able to support and that sort of thing. I know that there's the adopt me tag in case people are interested in that sort of thing. I'm just wondering if there's like a process that we should go through to have our plugins eventually either adopted or just taken out, or should we just leave them stale to the point where they don't show up in search results anymore? It's entirely up to you which way you go. If you've decided that I would like someone to take over this plugin, I recommend posting on your blog or tweeting or saying, hey, look, this is a plugin I wrote. It's good. If you're interested in it, please let me know. Otherwise in, you know, six months, I'm going to ask the plugin review team to please close it. And if you want that, just email plugins at wordpress.org with a link to the plugin and say, hey, I've written this. It's awesome. I don't really want to support it anymore. Can you close it? And we'll say, sure. And if you come back in six months and say you want to reopen it, we may ask you why. But if you come back in six months and say, hey, I just found this guy who wants to take it over, is that okay? Yeah, we'll totally take care of that. We don't have an automated process yet. That's phase three. The directory if you haven't been paying attention has been getting a revamp. And if you would go to wordpress.org slash plugins, there's a little link that asks you to check out the new one. Please do. We're trying to make it better. We know that the search sucks, by the way. Thank you. You're welcome. Kind of related to that, two questions. One is, let's say you have a plugin that is very similar in function to another plugin. Is there a way to merge two plugins? I would like to kill my plugin and I would be happy to write migration stuff to move it over to somebody else's. Is that ever come up before? It has come up before. The problem is the way we set up the plugin API doesn't really lend itself well to being able to say, well, now that this plugin is gone, everybody should get this one. That's the whole thing, you can't rename a plugin. You can rename it and rebrand it, but Yoast SEO will forever have the URL of wordpress dash SEO because we literally don't have the way to change that without breaking everybody's site. The best thing that I can recommend is push an update that tells them, hey, this plugin is no longer supported. However, I recommend you install this other plugin and when you do, my stuff will magically be migrated over and turn it off. Because what you can do in your own plugin is you can detect if the other plugin is active, copy my data over. Cool. Although I would recommend making sure that that's an opt-in feature. Like they can say, yes, I do want to import my data because otherwise what will happen is someone will overwrite data and not be paying attention. Always assume that users didn't read before they did something. And in case you're wondering, usually that user who didn't read was me. Cool. Second question, if it's okay. Go for it. The other thing that I would love to see WordPress plugin repository supporting is downloading other plugins. So basically dependencies and stuff like that. And I know that this has come up before and I just want to bring it up now at WordCamp US. Yeah, no, don't go small. Go large. So the reason that we don't let you install other plugins is that if a plugin isn't hosted on WordPress.org and you've installed it through WordPress, it becomes questionable who was responsible for installing the plugin. While I'm sure everyone in this room is not going to suggest you install hacked or nulled plugins with backdoors and things like that, that can't be said true of everyone in the universe. And quite frankly, people have put vinegar in the cornflakes too many times for us to allow it. It's just too dangerous. And you can recommend plugins and you can have your plugin pop up and say, hey, if you don't have this other one installed, you've got to. If you look at how WordPress itself does it when you click on the importer and it actually uses the regular WordPress features to go through and install something from WordPress.org, but it walks you through it and you have to say, yes, this is what I want. This is, I'm okay with it. That's okay. But installing it from third parties, we just, we can't allow it right now. We don't have a way to do it safely and sanely for everyone. Again, 26 to 28% of the internet, that's a lot of responsibility. And if we open them up to too much danger, then that devalues WordPress and puts all of us in a pretty bad position. So with the plugin repository and the support of the plugin repository. I did know that this was coming, folks, by the way, that everyone was going to ask about that. Don't worry. Go ahead. With the support of the plugin repository and searching it specifically, let's say I'm looking for the words fatal error and plugin name, whatever plugin name it is. Is there an easy way to find the specific answer that we're looking for within the support forums and the plugin repository? Within, well, the support forums just recently were migrated to the grown-up version of BBPress. They used to be on BBPress One. And if you have any experience with the BBs, you would understand how kind of daunting the prospect of moving that. The woman who moved everything over is a goddess and I don't know how she did it, but she's amazing. The search within specific sections of the support forums, because everything's actually in the support forums, all of those support tickets, those aren't a separate forum. They're in the regular forum. And sadly, they're all in one big giant subcategory for plugins, which means that searching that can be really tedious and messy. And WordPress search is not the greatest or most robust thing in the world. What I recommend people do, and I'm going to apologize for saying this, is to go to Google and type in site, colonwordpress.org, the plugin name and quotes, and then the problem that you're having, and that usually shows things up. And this is gonna be my last question, it looks like. Great, so this is actually about the talk, not about the plugin repo. So. Yay. One of the things from kind of a psychological perspective that's often really helpful in dealing with a community is to assume everyone is coming with the right intent. Yes. And sort of give the benefit of the doubt. Assume good faith. Yet, we have time and time again seeing there are actors in the community who honestly are not acting in good faith. How do you find, in trying to deal with an open source community, where to draw that line, where to decide somebody really has violated a code of conduct or a guideline, versus where you're in that moment of like, I'm annoyed at this person, but maybe it hasn't. I can still believe they have the right intent. A lot of that is the gut check. Like I said, I talk to my friends and I say, hey, am I reading too much into this or did this person lose their mind? Fairly recently, someone on track said some things about a core developer. And I read it, and I looked at it, and I thought, that's just not cool. That's not nice. That's not how you treat someone in a social setting. That's certainly not how you treat them in a professional setting. And I said in no uncertain terms that that kind of behavior really wasn't welcome. And I may have overstepped my bounds. I don't know. I didn't say anything after that. I just told this one person that this isn't cool. This is not how you should be treating people in public. And then I went to the person to whom he had been directing his rant and apologized to them and said, if I've overstepped my bounds, please let me know. But that one moment, I didn't gut check. I didn't ask anybody else's opinion because I now have the experience to know the difference. And I'm the person people come to a lot of the time and say, hey Mika, am I losing my mind or is this person nuts? And it's knowing that you have somebody else to talk to and to just spot check. When I don't have anybody in the WordPress community for that, I have my wife. She's really good at telling me to turn off the keyboard. Having, psychologically, that's why I kept stressing that you're not doing this alone. You have to remember to rely on the community because most of us are good people. And when you make these connections with people over sports or over liking Wapoo, I think most of us do, we have a bond and I can turn to you and say, listen, I don't know how to handle this situation. Can you help me or do you know someone who can? And it's remembering we're not alone and reaching out to the other people to get that extra help. Thanks. All right. So go out there, say hi to someone you haven't met, introduce yourself, find your friends and give them hugs or handshakes wherever they prefer. Remember, not everyone likes hugs and have a good day, everybody.