[wp-forums] Your WordPress

[Lorelle VanFossen]

The article referenced on the Your WordPress section as a sticky: 
http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Site_Reviews

It says right in there that there are no hard and fast rules. There are 
no rules that a site must be validated or anything else. It is a 
guideline for both the user and volunteer to help them understand how 
this all works and what to expect, if anything, from their request. 

    "When posting your site in theYour WordPress section of the
    WordPress Forum, you are inviting critique and review of your
    WordPress site. If you are not specific with the feedback you want
    and need, reviewers will be as kind or harsh as they see fit. You
    asked for it, and you are going to get it."

If someone asks "This is my new site, isn't it great?" then the answer 
would be "sure, yeah" or "well, I've seen better" or whatever and it IS 
the OPINION of the "reviewer" not WordPress, just to clarify that. If 
they say, "I really need someone to go over this and honestly, tell me 
what you think, and what can be improved or changed", then the quality 
of the response should be more than "cool site". The article points out 
the difference and helps everyone understand 1) how to ask in order to 
get the kind of response you want, and 2) the amount of work that goes 
into a good review.

It also helps those who really want a good review of their site. They 
can go through the points and think "okay, the review is going to 
validate my site, so maybe I should do that first" or "they are going to 
look at ALL my pages so I better clean up the categories pages" and 
things like that. We had a lot of people who were using the "Hello 
World" post as the only post on the site and they only tweaked a couple 
of CSS changes so there was no way to see how the site would really work 
under different views, so we asked that they include at least three 
posts to help with multi-post views. That helped things a lot since 
people were now THINKING about their site and not just jazzed about 
bragging about it.

We also had problems with the opinions expressed on both sides, so we 
put in there the statement:

    "Remember, none of the comments are personal. They do not reflect
    upon your ability, or lack thereof, to design or develop websites or
    web pages. They are meant to be constructive, informative, and
    helpful when possible."

There was a rash of "comments" that were, to say the least, not helpful 
so this was an attempt to get everyone on the same page. It was also a 
way of directing such reviews ONLY in the Your WordPress area and not 
spread out all over the forum, which caused a lot of problems when 
people whined about not getting reviewed, not knowing their posts were 
in the wrong section.

When the Codex is back up, we can add and subtract things from the 
article to help clarify things, so take a look and let us know what you 
think.  It's a really good resource for people to go through whether or 
not they want their site reviewed, since it covers some of the basics 
that should be done anyway. ;-)

Lorelle