Our wooes and future of platform plugins at WPSE

Question

I think that after fair amount of time (well over a year) and discussion it is clear that "Woo issue" is not going away.

However after spinning it in my head for a while I think we might be having case of fixation on a tree instead of a forest here.

Platform Plugins

I foresee that one of the outcomes of whole "application platform" thing, WP is getting into, is core fading out of focus in many such use cases. It is something that WP fights tooth and nail (personally I attribute many decisions on admin/interface side to it) however it cannot not happen, since WordPress is not:

• ecommerce application
• form processing application
• elaborate data input editor
• genealogy research solution
• bunny farm management app

Plugins that run on WordPress are.

Questions about such plugins are quickly becoming akin to asking about WordPress on Server Fault. Because it runs on top of web server, right?

And Their Authors

While extensions for a long time were part of vision for WPSE scope (such as seriously pondering promoting it as additional kind-of-support channel for extension developers) it failed to produce any positive results whatsoever.

I know that this keeps circling back to Woo because:

1. woocommerce is giant in ecosystem
2. they publicly and rudely (IMHO) disowned their non-paying users
3. the link thing exploded big time on already fertile ground of negative feelings

Well, it's not about Woo. Or just Woo. It's about extension vendors not interested in productive relationship with WPSE.

And really they don't owe us any relationship. Stack Overflow has some wonderful examples of cooperation with seemingly eager vendors. We don't and we need to deal with it.

And Our Experts

As current situation goes - we are getting a lot of competent experts getting pissed at poor questions.

This is deadly dangerous situation since we are historically struggling with volume of experts (as echo of general proportional lack of expertise in WP ecosystem).

We simply cannot cater to extensions at the cost of losing core expertise. Even if we attract woocommerce (substitute with any other platform plugin) expert... If it cost us losing core expert (or even half, or third of core expert) - it is bad trade.

Plan of Action

Currently I see no better solution than reinforcing and upholding our scope of WordPress development. The poor questions are already poor and primarily already fall out of scope. We only need to enforce that clearly and better than we are doing now.

I propose that:

1. Down voting and close voting on out of scope questions is cranked up to 11, especially for extension-specific ones. They are not wanted here, they are getting toxic to community and their levels must go down.

2. Extension-specific tags (such as plugin-*) are eradicated. They serve little purpose and send wrong message about what is welcomed. I have seen "there is a tag for it so I am right to ask whatever I want" line of reasoning too many times.

Answer 1

I personally think about this problem a little differently. I think it's not a question of plugins vs. core, but only about use vs. develop.

There are large plugins that could be called Platform Plugins that I feel are constantly getting interesting questions I like to read & answer. I could also imagine that there are a lot of hypothetical woo questions that are interesting and worth to answer like:

I'm using Woo and I have this custom build functionality (no copy & paste from site X without understanding ....) how can I integrate it in the Woo process?

But in fact we don't get a lot of these questions. We only get questions that come down to:

How can I use/configure plugin Y in a way to make thing X happen?

Which have absolutely nothing to do with development or where the questioner clearly is not looking for a development solution, but surely for a plug&play solution.

---

My personal bottom line of this whole discussion is:

The site has a lot of bad questions and most of them are about plugins.

But we shouldn't mix up cause and effect. Plugin context questions aren't bad. Woo questions aren't bad. They should still be valid. Basic usage questions are bad. No matter if plugin or core.

We need to get rid of these questions that absolutely belong to the first-level support of the plugin authors. The people that are actively answering questions here are mostly code-centric. They don't like to answer/read questions that are not connected to development in atleast a theoretical way or have a strong technical background.

Like the Wordpress Support Forum is the place where you should ask questions about Wordpress usage, plugin author support channels are supposed to answer plugin usage questions.

---

PS: I'm sure the new site name is a good first step to get rid of this issue. :-)

Answer 2

I would like to see a rather soft rule for this: If the solution for a plugin specific problem can be abstracted, so it applies to other plugins or general WP development, it is on topic.
If the solution is very specific and will never work in any other context, it is off topic.

Examples:

• Fatal error with jigoshop and woocommerce on topic because name collisions can happen between other plugins too, especially between forks.

• How to create a flexible abstraction for WP_Query? on topic, because a query for custom post types or taxonomies is not specific for that plugin.

• https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/123688/display-different-coloured-products-as-separate-products off topic, because the solution depends on Woocommerce internals and can probably not be used in other plugins.

The soft part of this rule is: When someone knows the answer for a plugin specific question, we should still allow it. We want to help each other after all and not send people away to SO too early. Sometimes it might be hard to see the difference, we should default to on topic then, if the question matches all the other criteria for a question on our site (research efforts, focused, easy to understand).

Answer 3

One of the biggest problems at this point is that we have plenty of WPSE members with close-vote privileges, but either not enough currently active or else not enough willing to use their close-votes en masse to help deal with this issue.

Just in casual, anecdotal observation, most off-topic close-votes come from a group of about 6-7 WPSE members. We either need to change the culture such that more members are more willing to use their close votes, or else we will have to rely on the moderators to play clean-up.

But the moderators, for better and/or for worse (perhaps appropriately under WPSE moderation standards) seem to want to eke out any modicum of relevance for these kinds of questions. I think we need to change that approach, and put the burden on the person asking the question to:

1. Clearly explain how the question is in-scope for WPSE
2. Write a high-quality question according to WPSE standards

It gets tiresome trying to hand-hold so many question askers through remediating their questions so that they meet both of these criteria. Especially when 80%+ of [Platform Plugin] questions are inherently off-topic, and pretty much all of the remaining 20% are poorly written and do not conform to SE question quality standards.

I believe we have reached the point where we're spending more time on remediation for [Platform Plugin] questions than answering high-quality, relevant questions. I would rather we simply close such questions with prejudice, and move on to doing what we're here to do: answering WordPress questions.

On-topic, high-quality questions will be inherently apparent, even if they exist in the context of [Platform Plugin]. Let's let those questions rise to the top, and stop wasting time on the rest.

Answer 4

Does this pretty much mean that all plugin questions will be off-topic? I'm just curious where to draw the line. I don't mind a good WooCommerce question, the problem is that so many are absolute crap... which is why I support minimum competency requirements before users can post.

But I'd also support being able to close stuff more quickly. Is there a level at which mods can close with a lone vote? Leave closing by committee for certain rep users (as currently exists) but let a few of the mods close automatically. Coupled with better close reasons that eliminates the hand-holding and puts the onus on the user to write a better question if she expects any help. I still prefer this happened before the question, but a single close-vote is a decent alternative.

Answer 5

Just to reiterate on the point, I was thinking about this over the last week, extensions that are very popular, Woo being a great example, can muddy the waters of anything WordPress specific for WPSE.

It's just not a great fit, it's bad for the end-user and annoying for the experts. Most devs are very familiar with core but how can anyone expect plugin expertise given the sheer amount available?

+1 for your suggestions, not directed at just Woo, they just happen to be the catalyst of a larger problem.

Answer 6

As a rarely active member , I couldn´t agree more .

I Honestly rarely come to the site ( well, because I have a life and work outside of WP .. ) , But when I do come, I try to answer questions , but find myself "skipping" one after the other , for .. ( in lack of better word ) well - Boredom. ( .. and in the specific case of the keyword "woo" in the title - I find myself on automatic skip mode - not even finishing to read the title )

I ( want to ) believe that many of the so - called "Experts" do come to answer questions for the simple reason that they know that answering other people´s doubts is sometimes the best way to learn and UNDERSTAND something yourself . Or in other words - seeking some kind of ( intellectual ) Challenge.

The above mentioned "Boredom" Vs. "Challange" is a key , IMHO , to keep the "Experts" and such questions as " How do I Put my name below a Blue Product on my Kitchen utensiles page " really do not help.

The problem IMHO , is not the "woo" as per se, but the fundamental difference between a "user" and a "developer" .

In this sense , this issue might be related to THIS thread, in a sense that if this site is title is "WordPress Development" than all the rest would be much clear.

When the title is "Wordpress Answers" - it might be difficult to sustain and obtain the goals of the OP without creating a ( somewhat understandable due to the title ) public out-roar .

But .. ( And I am talking to myself here ) Caution should be taken with these issues , as one must understand or accept that there is a very big difference between a "developer" and an "expert" , and under such note - to examine if "simple" or "boring" questions might be truly valid ( Css-classes ?? HTML markup ?? Layout?? ) even if not hard-core wp related.

On the same note - one must remember that only questions of type "triple query loop excluding 2 custom-post-types and filtering 4 custom-taxonomies with 5 SQL queries on multisite network" might be intimidating for first-time users, which I believe the community wants and needs ( because we all were first-timers once ) so a place must also be kept for simpler ( read boring ) questions..

Under this context - coming back to the "User"Vs. "developer" issue - In comparison to a simple any-other-software , it is clear that there is a big distinction between the "API" and the "User Manual" - and I think that this might be a valid criteria for one ( Read - Myself ) to Evaluate a question.

I am by no means suggesting to rename the site as "WORDPRESS API" ( I think that "Developers" is much more adequate , and such was my vote ) - but I do think that the word "API" can really be a criteria for selection and closing ( or "Seek and Destroy" ).

One issue, though, remains open - and it is the obvious overlap with the "stack-overflow" site wordpress tag . What questions should remain there, and what questions transferred here ? Where would a simple "user" question will go ( How to add a widget to my site .. ) ?? and what is the line that defines a clear distinction between the two sites ( applied only for certain types of questions of course ..) ??

As a semi-conclusion - The human factor and judgment must be applied and understood at each step - and sometimes question that are poorly written are actually a "hidden gem" simply becasue the novice user did not had enough knowledge to find the right terms to phrase the question..

Just my 2 cents. It was supposed to be a comment/vent - but too long. Ignore at will.

Answer 7

I think there are alot of great points made here and i agree it should be about context of the question, but think that to really fix the issue means that an authoritative source needs to be made when it comes to plugins, which I will get to below. I don't think that if a wordpress plugins stack-exchange was made, that it would honestly get rid of questions about plugins.

I think a great quote is: "it's bad for the end-user and annoying for the experts". I think when you define WordPress as a content management platform, then by design plugins fall under that whether you like it or not. Yes core should be a main area of focus, but how many plugin creators really know the core? To a degree the core is so powerful and expansive that few could honestly say they are experts. More importantly plugins on any system, not just wordpress is an environment where people don't need to understand everything about the core to develop; and isn't that the point?

To get the user up and running with a base site without understanding anything at all? If you look at the roots to WordPress it was started as a blog wizard, and not so much a platform. I think to a degree there is a huge cultural shift going on and this is where those crossroads meet.

Here is how i could see regaining control of the anarchy going on:

1.) Get rid of wordpress.org/plugins since anyone can throw what they want into the wild. Create a authoritative source based around trust/trust points. For example, authors who update plugins often, have super responsive support, and who follow best practices (yes this would mean having experts review plugins committed to the mall, and preventing bad plugins from even being published) get trust points for quality. if plugins are not updated every 6 months to stay abreast of core changes, then they fall out of plugin search and go to an archive part of the site. If you did this then only good plugins bubble to the top of your search and inferior ones fall away. This means over time fewer questions about obscure plugins ends, and the ones with questions about known plugins find their answers easily (no repetition of the same questions on SE). Right now if you wish to add a plugin from within wordpress admin, and search for something like "image cleanup" you get old, new, abandoned plugins and some of the old ones have 5 star ratings because at some point they worked well but now are so far behind core they just outright don't work; and of course users don't even bother to leave a review or rate the plugin. What this means is a crap shoot which of itself is annoying, but also that those who don't know better break their site and then come here.

2.) The codex needs to be more organized and/or needs more content. Alot of the codex discusses the minimum steps to get something functioning, with maybe a small blurb or warning about best practices or of what not to do. I would like to see some better examples on there.