Ideas for plugin release announcement formats

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#1

Hello @azurecurve. :wave:

Thank you for recently publishing the plethora of release notes in #plugins:plugin-release! It’s going to take me a while to process all those. :slight_smile:

This discussion regards the practice of locking release topics, and nothing more; I just wanted to discuss it and some options.

Each topic pointers directing folks on how to interact, which is :100:; they are all actually informative README docs for those plugins!

I think it sends a mixed signal when so many topics are added, but are closed, not allowing easy discussion (and showing a bunch of lock icons down the page). And yet, with so many done at once I imagine there is a specific reason for the status of the topics. I would offer to reconsider, as from my novice perspective, it seems discouraging to discuss.

Another approach might be to create a digest of changes made, and consolidating them into a single topic. Two formats I’ve seen that were easy to parse, despite having a lot of information:

This is a general discussion, otherwise I would have send it privately. I hope more plugin developers will follow the example of @azurecurve in sharing their updates with us here! Thanks!

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#2

The locking of posts in that fora is automated; it is not at the discretion of the poster.

Personally, I don’t like locking (especially after only a couple of minutes); a few days or a week would make more sense.

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#3

I think that the reason why topics in the Plugin Release forum are immediately locked is to prevent people from using the threads for support questions. (I used to do that with one plugin.) There is a dedicated forum for that: Plugin Support.

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#4

I figured something like this was the case (it’s a lot of clicking around to do that manually! ^_^).

That is a valid concern, of course. We want folks to ask questions in the correct place and not burden mods and developers with forum administrivia.

Taken all together, I propose we adjust that categories auto-closing timer to be 7 days after the last comment. I would hope that gives folks enough time to check in each week to see what’s released, and discuss.

And if and when we get a bunch of support requests in the incorrect topics, we can adjust the settings again; currently we have less activity, so I’m hoping we can have our cake and eat it too (until so many awesome discussions about plugin releases causes a new spike in activity and we have to lock everything down; a great problem to have sometimes!).

I’m unable to create a new topic in #plugins:plugin-release (presumably it’s for a group developers may join?), but I was going to add that the template used by @azurecurve would make a great base for the topic template for that category, especially the links to #plugins:plugin-support, etc. :slight_smile:

#5

There is already a template defined which has most of the sections I am using, although I am using an amended version created by Code Potent.

I think it should be increased as well, but maybe 2-3 days would be more suitable.

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#6

Let’s try it on and see how it fits. :slight_smile:

(cc @staff)

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#7

Updated to 3 days :+1:

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#8

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