are WooComerce questions considered off topic as it is a "3rd party" plugin?

@kero that's right

a good heuristic is if it requires knowledge of that plugin to answer then it's offtopic

e.g. if someone asked a question about filters that just happened to mention WooCommerce, but anybody could answer without knowing the specifics of Woo then that's probably fine

e.g. they're listing products on a page via WP_Query and want to know how to list 100 products instead of 50, that can be answered entirely with WP knowledge via posts_per_page

but if they then asked how to add a 1 click purchase button, you'd need to know how WooCommerce handles purchases, and that's off topic

to my knowledge the only 1st party plugins are Hello Dolly, the beta/nightly testing plugin, Gutenberg, classic editor plugin, and any featured plugin slated for integration with core, e.g. the REST API before it was merged

otherwise we're just providing free support for some company that probably charges for it

Thanks for the explanation @TomJNowell

I do understand the reasoning behind it. I usually comment that the plugin author's / support channel / knows this better, especially for very specific plugins it is unlikely that there are many here that know them

But WC is so broadly used, maintained by Automattic as well, and I believe many WP developers also know about WC

I would note that Automattic isn't WordPress, so being an Automattic product makes something 3rd party

anybody who tells you WP is made by Automattic, or that Jetpack is a first party plugin has confused .com and .org

admittedly it doesn't help that with Automattics size, the 5% for the future means a tonne of A8C people working on .org

or that people working on .org tend to end up working at Automattic, or that Automattic makes it easier for people to work on .org

usually people just make up a conspiracy theory to explain it