Last Monday I asked for your help in sending a message to the Happiness Engineers who build the bridges, paint the crosswalks, and fix the potholes on the section of the Information Highway owned by WordPress. 15 of the 38 people who were able to see and complete the poll, indicated they had been dropped from following this blog. Another 15 people – perhaps there was some overlap, but it was clearly not the same 15 – mentioned that this phenomenon has happened to them. They too have lost followers. Before I continue, I’d like to thank everyone who responded.
I summarized the information from the poll and the comments. I presented the summary to WordPress’ Tech-Support team, and I asked them to reopen the ticket they closed last June. The tech I was chatting with wanted to look into the situation.
The following is from the chat log:
WP-HE: “Yes, it doesn’t look like much progress has been done and I’m afraid there’s not much else I can do in this case. I’m going to ask for an update on the Github issue mentioning the developer who was working on it, but there’s a good chance they were assigned to another task with a higher priority and haven’t been able to go back to this issue.”
Me: “How long does a problem have to exist before it’s the higher priority task?”
WP-HE: “It is important, but in a large platform like WordPress.com there are many other problems that are just as important, and we don’t always have enough people to fix them all. So we have to set priorities.”
He ended with: “I understand this is frustrating, but I’m afraid there’s nothing else to do at this point but wait.”
After that exchange, I was less than optimistic. GitHub is the technical repository where programmers and designers share and store information. I’ve used GitHub many times. I follow the thread where various developers have contributed their input in the past nine months – trust me, the volume of reading hasn’t been a burden.
The support engineer I spoke with did track down and follow-up with the last developer who looked into my issue. I saw that thread when it was updated Monday night. I left a comment, emphasizing A) the lack of progress and, B) the length of time. Tuesday afternoon, I received the following response:
“I’m sorry this has dragged on so long @DanAntion 😕 But I can tell you that it’s on leadership’s list for handling, and is understood to be a frustrating, long-running problem.”
So, (finally, he gets to the one-liner) as Bill Murray said in Caddyshack:
“I’ve got that goin’ for me…which is nice.”
This post is part of Linda G. Hill’s fun weekly series One-Liner Wednesday. And, given the time of the year, it’s also part of Just-Jot-January. If you have a one-liner, I encourage you to join in on the fun. You can follow this link to participate and to see the one-liners from the other participants.
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