[wp-forums] R: Re: Closing down threads regarding old versions of WP

[Otto]

Hi!

You may be unaware of this, but a very large number of people, especially
new users posting support topics, use the "Notify me of follow-up posts via
email" option. Somebody replying to a topic with an unrelated problem of
their own is (totally unintentionally, mind you) sending emails about that
fact to almost everybody who has replied to that thread.

It does not make sense for us to be sending assorted random
unrelated emails to people who have posted in our forums, no matter
how accidentally or totally understandable the occurrence is.
The likelihood of some larger percentage of users marking the
forum's emails as "spam" and getting thus gmail on our case is simply
too great. We already have problems with people who say that our emails
go into their spam folders, and though we've fixed it to some degree, it's
not like it can't happen again.

As long as the response is nice and to the point (a "please start your own
thread" message), then I have to agree with the others here.

See, the driven4excellence person found a thread about the Jetpack widget
in a theme named "Customizr", and because they were trying to figure out
what the "Customizer" was in WordPress using Twenty Eleven, they posted
there. Somehow this person found this thread (google, I expect) and thought
it was the appropriate place, for whatever reason.
Now, while the mistake may be understandable, the fact that an email could
have been sent to at least 8 other people isn't.

Closing down the thread prevents anybody else from posting to that topic
and potentially emailing all those people again. If this thread is coming
up in a search for unrelated things, and it's potentially confusing, then
it needs to be closed in order to stop future problems with the same thread.

Could the message to post-your-own-thread be somewhat nicer? Probably. But
the need to close the thread when this sort of thing happens is real. It's
not a punishment. It's not abandoning the user. It is preventing us from
spamming the crap out of our users.

-Otto




On Mon, Jul 14, 2014 at 7:27 PM, electricfeet at libero.it
<electricfeet at libero.it> wrote:
>
> Education, yes. But it's education on forum usage, rather than education
on
> WordPress. (Surely we/you want the latter, not only the former.)
>
> And what about welcome? Or community-building? Making people feel they
can get
> help here?
>
> I think you guys are perhaps being too logical for your user base. I get
it, I
> really do. In my career I've been responsible for user support in quite a
big
> way (many years ago now). Enforcing rules places a nice order on things
(as
> well as sometimes being fun and empowering at times). But you also have to
> consider how people FEEL in order to build a community.
>
> If people aren't being disruptive--and no, this case WASN'T spam by any
> stretch of the term--then let it be. If someone wants to answer, to help,
leave
> them the opportunity to do so.
>
> And after all what's the downside? They'll write again when they don't
get an
> answer? So?
>
> N.B. I'm not attacking anyone here: I admire you all and your work (read
your
> archives over several evenings recently Mika;  thanks!). But I'm genuinely
> shocked every time I see people given a welcome like this.