4

WordPress is an open source that's mainly well-known for the huge open source plugins ecosystem.

I can understand, not supporting questions for paid plugins.

But what about free open source plugins?

Why would a WordPress forum not allow questions related to open source extensions?

1
  • 4
    note that a forum is a place for discussions, but stack exchange is a question answer site; you can ask open ended questions that have no solution on a forum, or just share stuff, but that's not how stack exchange works. Thinking about it that way avoids closed questions and can help you write questions in a way that get more answers and avoid lots of back and forth
    – Tom J Nowell Mod
    Commented Nov 7, 2022 at 14:30

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
6

As these require detailed knowledge of the workings of those plugins and themes, support is difficult and with thousands of plugins and themes available such knowledge is very specialised. Please consult the appropriate support forum and documentation for the plugin or theme in question. (This includes products and services provided by the 3rd-party company Automattic, which are regularly mistaken as 1st-party.)

Maybe also try to see it from this angle:

If you ask a support question for these plugins here, or if you report errors with a plugin here while trying to solve a problem, the actual maintainers won't recognise and by that can't fix it nor document it properly in a single place – the project page on wordpress.org. That's where the reporting, discussion, documentation and fixing need to take place.

3
  • Thanks for the clear answer. Makes sense, to a certain degree. Though, you may also see it from this other angle. Everyday a new npm package, js library, fancy project... appears in the web developers world. People ask and get support for them on stackoverflow. If you asked people to go to the Tailwind page or the AlpineJs page to ask for support... stackoverflow wouldn't be what it is. The WordPress forums are not great when it comes to UI. WP SE could take over as the default platform where users go for WordPress related stuff, be it 1st, 2nd or 3rd party... but yeah.
    – Álvaro Franz
    Commented Nov 7, 2022 at 13:23
  • 1
    there's a meta team for improving .org, but keep in mind the .org forum is a forum, and you're somewhat at the mercy of wether the plugin devs are doing their duty or not with the plugins they put on .org. StackOverflow is also the catch all general stack for programming, individual stacks have stricter more specific scopes.
    – Tom J Nowell Mod
    Commented Nov 7, 2022 at 14:35
  • @ÁlvaroFranz note that Stack Overflow only supports programming question. For other product support (even if it's about programming project/library), SO also considered it off-topic.
    – Andrew T.
    Commented Nov 8, 2022 at 4:34
6

Because it's not possible to answer those questions without knowledge of how that plugin works, and it quickly becomes less about WordPress knowledge, and more how the plugins API works. We aren't a dev support route for 3rd party products and services, we're a WordPress developer stack focusing on WP itself and the official WP projects.

The result is that we get lots of questions that don't get answered or can't be answered, leading to an unhealthy stack.

A good rule of thumb is can the question be answered using general WP knowledge? Or does it require you to go to the plugins docs and read up on how their filters work?

Also from a cynical side, are they just dumping all their support requests who won't pay here? WooCommerce were notorious for this, though it was well meaning individual staff rather than a company policy. Some plugin authors put WPSE straight in their sites support menu. Note that doing this is against stack exchange terms and services.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .