Category: How To

How (Not) To Ask For Help

I wrote about this once in I’m not a coder and I need help! It’s come up again.

I was a bit torn about posting this, given that it’s a guy acting like a real jerk in public, and I’m still pretty sure his problem is that he doesn’t understand what we’re saying. But. I think it’s good to have a concrete example of how you don’t ask for help on a forum.

The story so far: WordPress 3.2 was released on July 4th, and we knew there would be some minor issues. Most of them are related to the fact that WordPress no longer supports IE 6, PHP4 and MySQL 4. Before it was released, I decided to be proactive and take the lessons learned from 3.1 and make a Troubleshooting Master List. I posted to the forum mailing list and got advice from everyone there. As soon as 3.2 was let loose, I posted and started checking the forums.

Then I found this guy.

Yes, I did get really annoyed/upset with this guy. Full on anger. My face went hot and I felt myself typing furiously. And I deleted what I’d written at least a dozen times in order to keep as cool as I could. I knew I was mad, I knew I was writing in anger, and I backed away. That’s why my replies got shorter and shorter until, finally, I walked away and let the rest of the community hit him with a brick. I did come back the next morning and close the post, but only because it had become impossible to help the guy. And yes, I would have left it open to help him. It’s what I do.

So taking the cue from his post, let’s run down the ‘what NOT to dos.’

Cursing

The actual title of his post is Upgrade to V3.2 and my site is f**ked. Except he said ‘fucked’ but we modified that. The URL still says it. Just don’t do that. It’s rude. If I have to explain why it’s rude, you need more help than I can give. And I say this from the point of view of a foul mouthed tart. There is a time and place to swear, and the free support forums ain’t them.

Mouthing off

Even if you’re not swearing, there’s a huge difference between being polite and being a cretin. People are taking time out of their day to help you. Treating them like they’re worthless and insulting them is not a good thing to do. Being polite, even when you’re very angry and upset, is hard. I’m aware of this. But that doesn’t excuse your behavior. You’re the one who decided to show your fanny. It’s like what they say on Reality TV. The people being filmed will blame the editing, and the editors will point out ‘We didn’t MAKE you pee on Joe Bob there, you did that on your own.’ Yes, selective quoting and editing can make you look worse, but frankly, you’re the one who put it out there.

Not taking the time to read

I think this falls under ‘Not taking the time to think.’ We told the guy multiple times ‘You need to reset your plugins.’ We linked him, multiple times, to directions on how to do that when you can’t log into your back end. Three times he complained that he couldn’t get to the back end of his site before he finally up and said he wasn’t going to.

Most of the issue was that while we told him what to do, he was blinded by his own interpretation of what we meant. He would have been better served by simply saying ‘I don’t understand what you mean by FTP’ … except he did.

Not following directions

This is really simple. If you’re asking for help, you’re assuming the people who answer know more than you. If you refuse to follow their advice, you’re done. Seriously.

Getting derailed

You may have noticed how he started picking on my language (I used ‘seriously’ twice, and apparently that was too many times), my nationalism (I’m a dual-citizen as it happens), politics (Afghanistan), and so on and so forth. A lot of energy was wasted by his anger and the resulting attitude from it.

The entire reason I did not snap back and point out where his gross assumptions were wrong is because it was not productive. It would just make him madder (yeah, think about that for a second) and make the situation more volatile. Don’t feed the fire.

It’s NOT all about you

I cannot stress this enough, every single volunteer on the WP forums knows and understands exactly how important your site is to you. I have this problem in my day job too. I work with hundreds of very important people (they actually are – the office would come to a standstill if any one of them broke). They are all incapable of understanding that everyone is just as important as they are. I have been known to snap at people and point out that more than one VIP is having a problem, and I am working on the issue, but if you’d like to tell them that YOU are more important, go for it.

No one ever does. They usually shut up, which tells me that really they’re like a kid who fell down on his tush. He’s fine, just crying for effect. You may think that the squeaky wheel gets the oil, but you forget about the boy who cried wolf. At a certain point, we stop listening to you until you come in with a broken wheel.

What else?

Obviously this list can’t be exhaustive (I’d run out of internet before I ran out of examples). The real basic rule is ‘Don’t be a dick.’ Everything else is an extension of that.

If you’re helping someone who treats you like crap, you’re allowed to walk away. At work or at play, you don’t have to deal with it. Just walk away. Of course, at work, you need to tell your boss, and on the WP forums, I tend to email or ask people directly to step up for me please and thank you. In fact, watching the community get my back in that post was both pleasing and very sad. I was sad it had to happen, and I remain sad that he couldn’t be helped.

5 July, 2011
WordPress: Change HTML Editor Font
Starting with 3.2, the WordPress HTML editor has become MonoSpaced. Yay! Problem is that it looks best on a non-Windows PC, so someone of my friends who happen to be Windows users have the grumpy.

I made an htmleditor.php file and tossed it into my mu-plugins folder. You can use the folder in single and multisite WordPress, and it makes any php files in there act similar to your functions.php. I find it preferable since you don’t have to port to a new theme, should you change it. Read What is the MU-PLUGINS folder? if you need more help.
```
<?php
/*
Plugin Name: HTML Editor
Plugin URI:  https://halfelf.org/hacks/wordpress-html-editor-font/
Description: I don't like the HTML editor Font on Windows
Version: 1.0
Author: MA Epstein
Author URI: https://ipstenu.org/
*/

function html_editor_admin() {
        ?>
        <style type="text/css">#content #editor, #editorcontainer #content, #editorcontainer textarea#content, #editorcontainer textarea, div#postdivrich.postarea #editorcontainer textarea#content { font: normal 13px/1.5 verdana !important; }</style>
<?php }

add_action('admin_head', 'html_editor_admin');
?>
```
You can obviously change font: normal 12px/1.5 Monaco, monospace !important; to whatever you like.

Enjoy!
28 June, 2011
Manually Customizing the WordPress Admin Bar
FYI – In WordPress 3.3 the Admin Bar was renamed the Toolbar, replacing the header entirely, and now has more hooks to edit it. Please read http://wpdevel.wordpress.com/2011/12/07/admin-bar-api-changes-in-3-3/ for more information.

Since WordPress 3.1, the Admin Bar has been around and been somewhat controversial. Some people love it, some hate it, and some couldn’t care. A lot of the time in the WP Support Forums I had to remind people that you can turn this off for yourself in your profile.

My standard replies to people was pretty much this:
If it’s throwing your theme out of whack, make sure you have a call to wp_footer() in your theme’s footer. The next cause for that is your theme’s css having a conflict. If it’s your avatar size, again, that’s CSS. Wanna turn the admin menu ON for EVERYONE? Use the Always Show Admin Bar Function. Like the bar but not the search? Hide Admin Bar Search Plugin is there. Want to minimise it? Admin Bar Minimiser Plugin. Want to disable it selectively? Admin Bar Disabler Plugin can do that.

Finally if you MUST turn it off… you can add one of these to your functions.php
```
add_filter( 'show_admin_bar', '__return_false' );
show_admin_bar(false);
show_admin_bar(0);
```
OR use the Disable Admin Bar plugin.

FYI, if you put the plugin in a folder called mu-plugins (yes, you can do this on Single Site as well as MultiSite) then your users won’t be able to un-install it unless they go in via FTP. Just put the mu-plugins folder in the same level as themes and plugins (wp-content/mu-plugins) and copy the FILE (not the folder) for the plugin into there. Done.
Now me? I like having it on. I used to have it turned one for all users, all visitors, everyone all the time. Recently, when I re-designed some sites, I removed that functionality because it was showing too much info to people who were suffering from information overload. Once I pulled the admin bar off for non-logged in users, I realized I wanted to change the way it worked.

The normal admin bar is actually pretty straight forward. The pretty icon of your user ID with a drop down menu rocks. The problem I had was my site was built to keep people off the backend. I already use the rocking WP Hide Dashboard plugin, and BuddyPress is installed, so I wanted to redirect people from places like ‘My Profile’ on the unbranded WP backend to the pretty BuddyPress front end. And yes, I think all ‘user interface’ plugins should have a front-end version.

I could have used something like WP Custom Admin Bar, but I knew I was going to want some pretty weird, granular level, control over the layout and the submenus. In order to make this look how I wanted, I had to remove menus I didn’t want (or need) and add in new ones. I did it all in a file called adminbar.php, which I tossed in the mu-plugins folder (so on a multisite it can never be turned off):
```
function ipstenu_admin_bar_remove() {
        global $wp_admin_bar;

        /* Remove their stuff */
        $wp_admin_bar->remove_menu('my-blogs');
        $wp_admin_bar->remove_menu('my-account-with-avatar');
        $wp_admin_bar->remove_menu('appearance');
}

add_action('wp_before_admin_bar_render', 'ipstenu_admin_bar_remove', 0);
```
The values like my-blogs and so on are the IDs of the menus you want to yank:
- my-account-with-avatar / my-account: Links to your account. The ID depends upon if you have avatars enabled or not.
- my-blogs: My Sites menu. For networks (aka MultiSite) only
- edit: Post/Page edit link
- new-content: Add New Content menu
- comments: Comments link
- appearance: Appearance menu
- updates: Updates link
- get-shortlink: Shortlink to a page
While some of these menus only show up for the admins, I figured I may as well remove the ones I don’t need right there anyway. I’m also of the (unproven) opinion that the fewer calls I make in that admin menu, the faster my site will be. The only reason I yanked my-account-with-avatar was because I wanted to remove some of the submenus and add in my own. I found it was easier to recreate it on my own, so I did this:
```
function ipstenu_admin_bar_add() {
        global $wp_admin_bar, $user_identity;
        $user_id = get_current_user_id();

        /* Add my stuff */
        if ( 0 != $user_id ) {
                $avatar = get_avatar( get_current_user_id(), 16 );
                $id = ( ! empty( $avatar ) ) ? 'ipstenu-account-with-avatar' : 'ipstenu-account';
                $wp_admin_bar->add_menu( array( 'id' => $id, 'title' => $avatar . $user_identity,  'href' => 'https://ipstenu.org/members/'. $user_identity .'/profile/' ) );
                $wp_admin_bar->add_menu( array( 'parent' => $id, 'title' => __( 'Edit My Profile' ), 'href' => 'https://ipstenu.org/members/'. $user_identity .'/profile/edit/' ) );
                if ( current_user_can('manage_options') ) {
                        $wp_admin_bar->add_menu( array( 'parent' => $id, 'title' => __( 'Dashboard' ), 'href' => 'https://ipstenu.org/wp-admin/' ) );
                        $wp_admin_bar->add_menu( array( 'parent' => $id, 'title' => __( 'Network Admin' ), 'href' => 'https://ipstenu.org/wp-admin/network' ) );
                }
                $wp_admin_bar->add_menu( array( 'parent' => $id, 'title' => __( '<strong>Log Out</strong>' ), 'href' => wp_logout_url() ) );
        }
}

add_action( 'admin_bar_menu', 'ipstenu_admin_bar_add', 10 );
```
But wait! If you just tried that, you found out the CSS looks like a monkey puked on your site. The avatar icon’s goobered, that pretty sprite that shows the arrow is missing. Well, that’s easily fixed with some CSS.

In the same adminbar.php file, I put this:

function link_to_stylesheet() {
if ( is_user_logged_in() ) {
?>

wp_head you still get the fugly on the admin side. That’s easilly fixed with a second action call: add_action('admin_head', 'link_to_stylesheet');

Now you can make your admin bar have the menus (or submenus) you want to your heart’s content too!

While you can take my work for your starting point, here are the links I found helpful when I was kicking all this around:

• SumTips: Customize WordPress Admin Bar by Adding/Removing Links
• WP Engineer: Add Menus to the Admin Bar of WordPress
• Digging Into WordPress: Admin Bar Tricks
23 June, 2011
Responsibility, Responsibility, Responsibility!

So you’ve put your blood, sweat and tears into a site. You finally made it popular. You have regular visitors who comment, retweet, like and share your stuff. You’re getting traffic and the ads are actually paying for things! Everything should be smooth sailing, right? Wrong.

Last year, I touched on the Dangers of an Unchecked MultiSite. While that was specific to the trials and tribulations of WordPress’s (then new) feature of MultiSite, it hammered home the lesson that you, who runs the site, are responsible for what goes on there. There’s a reason I have a comment policy on this site and a terms of use. I am aware of my responsibilities, but I don’t take responsibility for everything.

You have to look at your website like a business. If you ran a business, you would be responsible for whatever crap your employees looked at on-line, how they used their phones, etc etc. If someone uses your services to do something illegal, you’re responsible. That’s why you have to sign your life away in blood. Not that anyone reads that stuff for most things, but you do agree to not break the law when you install your operating system, for example.

At the end of the day, when you’ve made a site, you become responsible for the content (with some exceptions). You’ll note that the Terms of Use for this site have a pretty hefty bit of disclaiming going on, and outright says I’m not responsible for the contents of any message (i.e. comment). That’s a mostly legally safe claim to make, and I’m being up front saying ‘Hey, if someone’s a dick in the comments, that’s on them.’ Later on I say I reserve the right to delete anything I damn well feel like, and I do, but the point is I’m still responsible for your antics! That’s why a big part of running a site is moderating the community.

If someone makes a comment you (or your visitors) deem to be offensive, it’s in your best interest to quickly take decisive action. Make a choice, pick your stance, and stick by it. Don’t waver or feel guilt. This is your site, your responsibility (there’s that word again). If it makes you understand it better, this is your job. The easy part of the site is building it, the hard part is maintaining it. For those of you who just spent months getting your site to look just right, the idea that something is harder than that may be daunting.

First you put in the sweat equity to make the site. Then you spend hours researching and writing posts. You’ve already found out about how much time you have to put in fighting spammers. Now here I am telling you that you get to spend even more time and energy keeping the community of your site going. It’s okay to hate me. I actually spent more time these days keeping people in line and tending to them than I did anything else a couple years ago. That’s the real reason a lot of sites go in for moderating teams. It’s a lot of work to keep track of everything. Since then I’ve turned to what I call ‘community moderation.’ Plugins like BP Moderation (for BuddyPress users) and Safe Report Comments let your visitors flag posts for you to come back and review.

Regardless of this, there remains one person responsible for this site: Me. I’m responsible for what people who have accounts do here. I’m responsible for what I say and what they say. I’m responsible for your comments and the ads on this site. Everything here is my responsibility and I take it seriously. To carry it up a level, if your site sells a product, you are responsible for all of that product.

Recently there was a kerfluffle when Joost de Valk announced that his SEO plugin was being infringed on by WPMU Dev. Of course there was a public rebuttal by WPMUDev and a response to the rebuttal. Even WPCandy stepped in.

Before everyone gets het up about this one, I honestly don’t care who’s right or wrong for the purpose of this post. My opinion, and yes, I have one, doesn’t matter.

See, no matter what else, at the end of the day, a company is 100%, totally, unequivocally, responsible for their own products. Full stop. Everyone can agree to this (and as far as I can tell, everyone does agree on this point). No matter what, WPMU Dev is responsible for their products. No one is arguing this. The fact that they pushed a flawed product that slipped through their checks and balances is the point. They can’t blame the developer without blaming themselves for not checking his work. Regardless of if they failed to check the plugin, or forgot to tell the developer to always attribute his work, or whatever it may be, the company who hired the developer assumed all responsibility for the work which was then pushed forth in their name.

They weren’t the first people to make this sort of error, and they won’t be the last. Making the error, in and of itself, is monumentally stupid, but you know what? We’ve all been there. We all take responsibility for these screw ups. It’s horrifying, the first time you realize you’re responsible for something that you’re not in control of, but there you are. You run a company. Sometimes things go wrong in ways you never predicted and should have, but didn’t. In 2009 Microsoft yanked code they’d stolen. I know, stealing is a dirty, hot-button word, but that’s what it is. PC World says it right:

Third parties or not, though, Microsoft is responsible for making sure its software isn’t stolen, and it’s simply not doing the job. (Microsoft yanked code they’d stolen – PC World)

Think it’s just software? Think again. Last winter, a small magazine called Cooks Source lifted someone else’s work, wholesale, and put it in their magazine. The author was attributed, certainly, but not compensated. When the author found out, she contacted them and asked for a $130 donation to the Columbia School of Journalism. She got a pretty awesomely horrible reply, and posted it on her livejournal. From there, the Internet exploded. (If you go to http://illadore.livejournal.com/ you can see the crazy first hand.) How far did it all go? Well the magazine is no more, after the Internet got their hooks in it. People called up the advertisers to tell them that Cooks Source was a plagiarist, and more than one advertiser bailed. Then it turned out they’d stolen multiple articles from multiple sources, non paid, and photographs as well. Let’s not get into the website, which had stolen content all over the place.

It’s your site. It’s your name. You are responsible. Make all the excuses you want, but it doesn’t exculpate you from that role.

13 June, 2011
How to Support Plugins

This is not meant to be a perfect, will work for everyone, solution. But if you’ve made your first plugin and you’ve no idea how to support it, this is for you!

I’m going to present this under the assumption that you already understand how to code, even if your coding is about as good as my French. I’m also going to assume that you are a thinking being with the ability to be rational and accept defeat.

History first. I picked up WordPress back when MovableType decided to change their licenses, and I’ve never looked back. First it was just my blog, then I learned all the cool things I could do to it. The turning point for me was when I decided to rebuild my fansite using WordPress. While I do write code for my day job at a very large bank, I spend an awful lot of time troubleshooting for developers.

In a nutshell, I take phone calls (and emails) from very smart, very technical savvy people, asking me questions about things I know nothing about and make them work. I support software I don’t use, I support software I don’t understand, and I support software that’s almost as old as I am. It’s a very weird job, but I like it, and I do well at it, which is why I keep my day job and just play with WordPress! And what do I do with WordPress?

I help in the support forums!

My job made me accustomed to taking weird questions from smart people about a brand new topic, learning what I need to in order to solve the problem, and hand them the information quickly and in an understandable way. My mom loves this, and knows she can call me about anything computer related, and I’ll find the answer for her. When I started helping on the WordPress forums, this was suddenly a skill whose worth could not be measured. I wasn’t afraid to jump in and help out on topics I was unfamiliar with because I knew I could figure it out.

The magic to it, the secret to my power, is that I know how to learn, when to ask for help, and to admit when I don’t know.

That’s pretty much it. And I’m going to teach you how to do it too, provided you’re willing to think, and to admit that you’re wrong sometimes. Don’t worry, I’ll be wrong right along with you!

You are not the only user of your plugin, so be available

Most people who write a plugin do it for a few reasons:

They need to do something special
Someone else needs something special
They want to feel important and praised
They’re a bored genius maniac (see pic on the right)

It all boils down to the idea that we do it for ourselves. There’s nothing wrong with that. Remember, as long as that plugin is just yours, sitting on your server, you could do whatever you wanted. The moment you start handing out your cool ‘just for me’ code to other people, there is a level of responsibility that you have to own up to. You’re now a developer and that means you need to help people. If your plugin is up on the WordPress repository, you are no longer making this for you, but for anyone who needs it. They’re going to ask for help, they’re going to tell you that you did it all wrong, and they’re going to be unreasonable.

If you’re making a plugin that you don’t want to support, this better be painfully clear on the plugin readme.txt, or you will be in running for my asshat of the year award. There’s nothing wrong with making a plugin and abandoning it, but there is something wrong with not telling people that. For the rest of us who are supporting our plugins, make sure it’s clear how they should contact you.

The default expectation is that if I post in the forums and tag my topic with your plugin flag, you will see it and reply. There is no law that says this must be the case, but since it is the common way plugins are handled, you must be explicitly clear to people that you want to use a different method. As a forum helper, when I see someone ask for help on a plugin, I always go look at the plugin readme first. If it says ‘for support, go to…’ I always tell people to do that.

Now that said, you still need to remember to add the RSS feed to your reader, because some people don’t read, and sometimes they’ll let you know of something huge in the forums, and not contact you correctly. I’m not saying you need to reply to them, but think of it as a CYA manuver. There’s a great URL that anyone can use for all your plugins: http://wordpress.org/support/view/plugin-committer/YOURHANDLE

That will update every time anyone posts about any of your plugins. If you need it to email you instead of RSS, I suggest using RSS2Email, FeedBurner or any other web-app that turns feeds into email to alert yourself.

It’s your plugin

At the same time, this is your plugin. You designed it to fill a certain void and damn it, if you don’t want it to have dancing monkeys, then you don’t need to! This has been where I see most developers get into ‘fights’ online. People often have unrealistic expectations for free products, and most of why I charge people for phone/email support is because it gets rid of the stupid requests and keeps me sane. If I answered every email, IM or forum post someone addressed to me with the same attentiveness and response-time I give at my day job, I’d be working 60 hours a week on a free product, with no monetary kick back. I don’t have the time for that. Neither do most people.

The hardest lesson to learn is how to walk away when you feel responsible for your product. Even though these are your users, and these people rely on you, there is a point at which you cannot explain ‘why’ sufficiently for them to understand it. Either they’re stuck in their world, or you in yours, but regardless, you are at an impasse. And this is when you have to walk away. Tell them ‘I’m sorry, but I’m not going to do that. You’re welcome to fork the plugin if you want.’ And walk. Away. Sometimes things are just outside your scope, and if you don’t want to support the addition, you don’t have to. Don’t let people bully you into things.

The expectations of ‘free’ plugins are crazy, and we all know that. It’s like not feeding the trolls, though. When people are unrealistic to you, you’re under no obligation to support them. But also, when things are outside the scope of your plugin, you can tell them that and be done. I’ve said no to people who wanted things added in, even after I spent a day down the rabbit hole applying code to implement their feature, because I neither wanted to support it nor did I find it useful. At the end of the day, it’s my plugin. I decide what it should do.

Don’t forget you have a life!

Most problems people have with plugins are literacy problems. That is they did not RTFM, or they didn’t pass reading comprehension and are over-thinking a problem. I spent 4 hours once at work talking to a woman who didn’t understand what I meant when I said ‘If the folder’s not there, just make it.’ She was certain I was omitting a crucial step, or secret hand shake. This goes back to what I said about why I have a per-hour price for personal support. I don’t have time to walk someone through the basics of how to FTP or edit a file. That’s not the support you need to offer for plugins, and if someone can’t do it, it’s okay to tell them that they need to hire someone. You have a life! Don’t let them take all your free time.

I have other hobbies besides WordPress. I write, I play guitar, I ride my bicycle, I’m in the SCA, I do some volunteer work for bicycling, I’m part of a couple fandoms, and so on and so forth. I have a family and friends and interests outside slaving away at a computer all day and night for no compensation. So I try to balance my time and yes, that means sometimes I walk away from a coding frenzy, but sometimes you just have to. There are commitments in life, and you will have to sacrifice them sometimes. Don’t sacrifice your self, though. Embrace your life and don’t let one obsession rule it. That will help you keep it all in perspective.

Users are people too

Maintaining a plugin will involve sacrifice. The first thing you’re going to lose is free time, but the second is you will lose face. You’re going to get into a fight with someone on the forums, no matter how well you mean. Part of this is because text is an imperfect medium. My father complains about it, because he says it’s not a discussion, but a debate, and most people in the US never took a debate class.

It’s really hard to remember to be polite, especially when these people aren’t reading the damned manuals/readme/directions. I fail at it often enough that I used to joke it’s why I’d never be promoted at work or made a forum moderator for WordPress. Ironically enough, both those things happened roughly within weeks of each other. I suspect the reason is that while I do lose my cool sometimes and write angry, I mean well and try hard to be polite and do good.

Every time I train new people in how to work our tech support, I tell them that from Thanksgiving to New Years, our busiest time of year, everyone will make at least one, massive, giant, phenomenal “Oh dear GOD am I about to be fired!?” magnitude of an error. Without fail, at least one person will promise they won’t, and I write their name on my white-board with the date. Without fail they will make a huge error. The point is that everyone makes mistakes, everyone forgets how to reset a password, everyone forgets something basic, even you. So just remember that.

It’s okay to not know

I don’t know how set up domain mapping. I have to read the documentation every time, and often I ask Andrea or Ron. On the flip side, Andrea has remarked more than once that when she sees a weird .htaccess request, she defers to me. I know what I know, I know what I don’t, and I have no shame in telling someone “You know, I don’t use IIS and I really have no idea how to help you here.” If you don’t know how to do something, say so. Maybe the person you’re trying to help actually does know how to code it, or maybe someone reading it will know.

When you make a BIG change, document the hell out of it

Recently, W3 Total Cache pushed a new version with a lot of cool features and better tools. The problem was that many people found it broke their site. The fix was really easy. Change the new ‘default’ setting for Minify from ‘Auto’ to ‘Manual’ and set it all up manually. The problem was that the developer didn’t make this clear in an easy to find way. He tweeted about it, certainly, but he didn’t announce anywhere easily (logically) located about this.

Now W3TC also fails on one of my critical hallmarks of support: Nowhere in the readme (or on the official WordPress repository page) does he say how to get help. I happen to know that if you want to report a bug, you go to http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=w3tc_support and use the form there. He also doesn’t link to his website, or even the plugin page on his website from the repository, nor does he mention that he doesn’t help you configure the site for free.

While I love this program and use it on all my sites but one (at 60 hits a day, it doesn’t need it), I think he’s wrong to not spell out how support works, and he failed to explain what was happening. All we know is he fixed this:

Fixed bug with existing installation upgrades: set minify to manual mode by default

Nothing was clearly documented, nothing was clearly explained, and no one really knew where to go for help, which meant the forums were filled with a lot of angry, ignorant, people, getting no responses from the developer. Simply put, it looks bad, and if people feel that the support is non-existent, they’re going to get angrier, and post things like how you suck and they’re leaving your product, which makes you angry and feel bad, and less inclined to help them at all, the ingrates! It’s a vicious circle, and spirals downhill really fast and segues right into my final point…

They’re not attacking you

Take a deep breath. What I just said about W3TC can very easily sound like an attack. A lot of the time, people will argue they’re not attacking, they’re being passionate, and in the same breath accuse you of being overly defensive. You’re going to, rightly, be defensive and proprietary of your plugin because, as we discussed, it’s yours. You put in the sweat equity, you researched, studied and tested, and you made something awesome. It hurts when people tell you it sucks.

Alas, they’ve forgotten you’re a person too. There isn’t a good/easy way to remind them you should be treated as a human, sadly, so when people start getting fired up and telling you that you suck and the plugin sucks, the best you can do is be the better person. I mentioned before that users are people. This is not a repetition of that fact, but a reminder to yourself that there are days where all this is going to be terrible, awful and you feel like the users have pitchforks and want your head

When this happens, they’re not attacking you. They don’t hate you, they just don’t know how to explain problems without hurting you, because you’re always going to be too close to the problem. I’m willing to bet Bill Gates and Steve Jobs still feel twinges of pain when people rant about their products. Like a parent, you love what you’ve created, and every slight against it feels like fishhooks in your skin. This cannot be avoided, and the best you can do is recognize that they are a little unreasonable, and that your reply is probably a little unreasonable, and stop.

If you can’t address the situation without feeling your skin heat up or your blood pressure rise, walk away for a while. We’ll still be here.

In Summary

I would never say ‘don’t sweat the small stuff, and it’s all small stuff’ or anything trite like that. I will say the point of all this is to be honest, be upfront, be clear and keep it all in perspective. That way you will have both respect and your sanity.

24 May, 2011
WordPress: EU Compliance
ETA: Please check out Trac #19622 – There will be a new way to do this in WP 3.4

Before I get into this, you do not need to do anything to WordPress to comply with the EU cookie law. The legal whoo-hah is clear: Third party cookies (and cookies which track data across multiple sites) are the only ones they’re talking about. MultiSite installs are, technically, one site, all owned and managed by one person, so it’s fine. Google.com, gmail.com and anything else registered to Google would also be fine internally.

But if you’re dead set on this…. Let me explain first.

For WordPress, if someone comments on your blog, cookies are stored on their computer that store three things: name, email and website. Even then, they’re only put in when the user enters then. That would entail implicit agreement to having cookies put on your computer, wouldn’t it? Even if you have no idea what cookies are? That certainly is a problem. People don’t know what cookies are, why they’re on their computers, and what they can do. But is that the responsibility of website owners to educate? Certainly, you can easily add a checkbox to your comment for that says ‘save cookies,’ have it link back to an explanation about what’s going on, and make it required.

It would be pretty easy to flip WordPress around to not save cookies for non-logged in users.

First you change your KEYs and SALTS in the wp-config.php (you can get new ones at http://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/wpmu/salt). This will force all users to log back in.

Next you change your registration/login page to alert people to the cookies. There are plugins for this, and on BuddyPress you can edit your theme’s template page for registration easily. By having the login/registration page say ‘hey, you’re gonna get cookies if you log in!’ you’re now in compliance with EU law!

Finally you slap this your header (or functions or a mu-plugin file), to delete cookies on every single page you visit, which will prevent cookies from staying on people’s computer ONLY if they’re not logged in:
```
<?php if ( !is_user_logged_in() ) { wp_clear_auth_cookie(); } ?> 
```
One could go even further, making a check-box to permit cookies or not, though that would be far more complicated to track. This very basic way of making the code you own compliant is enough to get you through the day and keep the enforcers off your back.
19 May, 2011