In protest of the continued inappropriate behavior by the moderators of the WordPress Support Forum just over a month ago we started full disclosing vulnerabilities until the moderation is cleaned up, so far it hasn’t caused them to change their behavior (apparently continuing to act inappropriately is the only thing they seem to care about considering they haven’t even bothered to notify the developers of those vulnerabilities). In the meantime we have continued to run into more examples of them bizarrely getting in the way of the WordPress community.

With one of the moderators we have had run-ins with them acting bizarrely, named Jan Dembowski, we haven’t been alone.

A couple of weeks ago we discussed one instance of that were they stopped any discussion of why a plugin was closed from being possible and claimed that it somehow wasn’t a support issue to ask about why the plugin was closed (you really have to wonder if they think at all about what they are saying).

Last week we detailed a vulnerability that might be related to the closure of the plugin AMP for WP – Accelerated Mobile Pages. Not surprisingly someone started a topic about the plugin’s closure, which at the time of our post hadn’t been closed and another moderator even had participated in it, which is a reminder of the complete lack of any consistency in the moderation (subsequently it was closed and replies just saying thank you were deleted). After that, not all that surprisingly either, the developer put up a pinned topic to explain what was going on, which seems like a good idea to avoid numerous topics started on the closure. That brings us back to Jan Dembowski as they closed that topic and left this message:

I am closing this topic. The support forum is not your bulletin board, it is not your blog. If you wish to send users to your site for your updates then feel free to do so.

That is just head-scratching. It isn’t clear why in general a moderator feels the need to micromanage everything like that person does, but they seem to have no understanding of what the people actually using the support forums for plugins are using them for.

Further proof of that comes from topic started in response to the previous one being closed:

Hi Ahmed, unfortunately your sticky topic regarding the suspension of this plugin has been closed by a keen amateur volunteer. I appreciate you were aiming to update that thread when the plugin is re-released, but thanks to their unhelpful intervention you can no longer do so, nor can you tell us where to seek further information. Please let us know via this thread where we can seek ongoing updates.

In a case of more “unhelpful intervention” that topic itself was closed as well.

That moderator also seems to have obsession with classifying messages as blog posts. Here was part of a response to a review for Gutenberg we happen to run across recently:

OK, I was hoping to not but I am closing this review. The review will stand but here’s the thing about reviews.

The reviews on this site for any theme or plugin is not a blog post. These are not discussion forums. All the reviews here are about a user’s experience with that theme or plugin.

It is worth noting that that plugin reviews not only are part of the Support Forum system, but anyone can reply to reviews, so claiming they are not discussion forums seems disconnected to how things are designed. If they are intended to be different it seems it would better to change how they are set up instead of having moderators micromanage the WordPress community like this.