what is the unset to stop media from creating an image of 155x155??? Searching forever I can't seem to find it and Ive done unset( $sizes[ 'thumbnail' ]);
I feel like we need a close reason like SO's 'this was caused by a typo or error that can no longer be reproduced and was solved in a way that won't help others' :P
I've been digging in to old meta posts to read more about the history of unanswered/offtopic questions. Is it true we 'no longer have a consensus' about third-party plugins being off topic?
it's more a question about how strictly we should enforce that rule
I think many third-party questions could be reworded to fit into our scope, and we should give the asker help and an opportunity to do that, especially when they are new on our site.
I think the premise of that sounds fair enough, particularly when the best solution might be to use a plugin or combination of plugins (i.e. why go and rewrite something like ACF, for instance)
But if a question requires answerers to go and download, test and debug a particular plugin... how could that be rewritten/reworded?
the comments on the first example are … instructive. :) I had a small conversation with the plugin author later, he said I was right, but they couldn't change it anymore.
The biggest problem with allowing 3rd party questions is the lack of research on the user's side, almost always. Then trying to get the information needed to reproduce or attempt to solve becomes pulling teeth and usually a lengthy comment section.
It certainly is more important than our scope but this medium doesn't allow lengthy discussions to rely the central problem. That's more of a forum approach where this is more direct QA.
(on another topic) Is there a way to see historical rates of unanswered/no answers questions? Going to start working on this and just wondering if I should keep track of progress or if I can already see it somewhere
Regarding the third-party topic … excluding these topics had one sad side-effect: Some users come to WordPress development by solving plugin issues. We had some users who stopped almost all activity here, when we tightened our scope.
I remember some users who where active in BuddyPress or BBPress topics.
I don't mind solving Contact Form 7 topics - I still try to when they pop-up on my feed anyway. I would say we could do a 6-12 month experiment allowing these types of question and just closing low quality questions but that would probably undo everything we've done so far to keep 3rd party plugins under-control.
A lot of the contact-form-7 questions are pretty low quality or broad though.
If we were going to make any change I think we'd need a big, community effort on considering the pro's and con's, the wording, what to do in this situation/that situation etc.. i.e. we'd need to consider everything. We wouldn't want to rehash old ground just for the sake of it
Yeah, seems to be the case in which once a year we have a discussion on what is considered on/off-topic and what we can do to better communicate that to new users.
Sometimes it's constructive and sometimes nothing ever comes out of it.
Unless ppl search and use similar questions as justifications to ask their own. Or, they got an answer last time so they come back again with another off-topic question
@TimMalone I don't think that answering off-topic questions should be discouraged. The close banner should be discouraging for users enough not to ask the questions.
I've never seen Dennis, thus he doesn't exist and the answer is invalid :)
Usually with Off-topic questions I'll throw a comment with a short answer, push in the right direction, plus letting them know the type of question is off-topic. That being said if a question does has a solid answer that I can quickly put together and it may benefit other people, I'll leave an answer.
