My recent experience of the wordpress.org forums tells me the mods dislike anyone but plugin authors offering plugin support. The support forum is moderated to the point of obstruction.

Is the .org plugin support forum there for the userbase to support one and other or is the support forum there for wordpress.org to decide who can and who cannot offer help? If it’s the former then wordpress.org should instruct forum mods to let people offer support for both free and premium plugins. If it’s the latter then wordpress.org should disallow replies from all but plugin authors and thread starters i.e disallow wider community input.

A few years back we could all chip in to help WordPress users who request help in the .org forums. Nowadays those of us who try to offer support get our replies deleted by mods for spurious reasons.

I would be interested to hear from others who also have their helpful support forum replies deleted or all their support forum posts held in moderation prior to deletion.

Personally, I no longer feel welcome to offer help in the forums. I’ve worked with WordPress for over a decade. My discomfort with the support forum is true whether I wish to help end users who are stuck with a plugin bug or to offer plugin developers a patch for faults within their plugins.

WordPress needs to have a wider discussion about the .org forums. A discussion that covers a) the purpose of the .org support forums, b) whether to lock threads to OP and plugin author, c) the role of moderators in policing those forums, and d) whether to institute a satisfaction survey/poll for forum users to upvote/downvote mods.