After being told that categorically third-party plugins are off-topic I'm seeing a lot of WooCommerce questions getting bumped back to the front page by "community". Either the masters are no longer watching or WooCommerce is on topic now despite protests otherwise.
I officially I have no what is on-topic here.
Is WooCommerce on-topic or isn't it?
(You can begin downvoting me now).
The TLDR: WooCommerce questions are offtopic, and has always been offtopic. If you see a WooCommerce question, vote to close it. WooCommerce is offtopic
Part of the maintenance of the site is more akin to gardening. None of us get paid and we can't triage questions for wether they fit on topic or need editing in realtime.
We also have a long history of questions, so what happened 5 or 6 years ago might not have gotten much notice back then, but get bumped up by the system on to the homepage. Similarly there are some very popular old questions that ask for recommendations, with lots of upvotes and answers that pose a quandry when they resurface.
Think of it as weeding the garden. You want to close the offtopic questions, edit and downvote/improve the poor ones, and upvote the good ones, and improve any answers similarly. If you garden well, and the answer rate is high enough, your stack thrives
After being told that categorically third-party plugins are off-topic I'm seeing a lot of WooCommerce questions getting bumped back to the front page by "community".
A great opportunity to close vote! The community user is just Stack Exchanges automation, it doesn't know if a question is on or off topic, not unless it gets closed
Either the masters are no longer watching or WooCommerce is on topic now despite protests otherwise.
It's still offtopic, it's a 3rd party plugin, it's time to start voting to close
Since these are being bumped, you'll notice these are older questions that might have escaped the oversight of users able to vote to close or leave feedback. Think of it as Stack Exchange percolating deep water back up to the surface for attention so it doesn't get stale, inevitably something it dredges up will be offtopic.
It doesn't help that lots of people want WooCommerce help but there's not much of it going around, deep WooCommerce knowledge is not so common. As a result WC questions don't get many answers, but they do get asked a lot. It's one of the main reasons the attempt at a dedicated WC stack failed, lots of questions, very few people able to answer things outside of basic theming questions
Some other notes
Not all questions are ran through a filter, things get missed. It could be that before a high rep user gets a chance to see a question, it gets answered and marked as correct and fades into the background. Perhaps the stack was especially busy that day, who knows. There is no perfect filter, nobody here gets paid, so there will be examples of open WooCommerce questions. That doesn't mean they're on topic. Vote to close them.
As for the tag, I believe multiple attempts were made to delete it and others, but they kept getting recreated by users. So yes, we did delete it, multiple times! But anybody past a certain amount of reputation can recreate it.
There's also the problem that sometimes it's useful to tag WooCommerce, e.g. it may be related to the question ( just because it's not a WooCommerce question doesn't mean it isn't involved ). For example, someone might want to work with a hook in WooCommerce, but has never used WP hooks before and needs to know how add_action works
The TLDR: WooCommerce questions are offtopic, and have always been offtopic. If you see a WooCommerce question, vote to close it. WooCommerce is offtopic
