The WordPress.org forums for our WordPress SEO plugin are rather busy. Unfortunately, there’s no way for us to keep up with all the questions there as we have millions of users, which leads to a few hundred questions each month. So we need your help!
Loads of the questions there are rather simple, others are harder and require going back and forth a few times. Some are just plain bugs, but hard to reproduce. All of them together cost more time than we can spend on it and keep the plugin free at the same time. I’m saying officially now what’s been the case for quite a while already: we don’t do support on the WordPress.org forums. It’s easier to just state it like that than to hop in every once in a while and get people’s hopes up when we might not have much time for a while after.
Which is why I’m writing this: I’m asking all of you to be involved there, to help us help others. If you could answer just 1 question there each month, we’d already appreciate your help. If you can find bugs that people report, reproduce them and turn them into Github issues that are easy to reproduce for us, we’d be even more appreciative.
We’ll be looking at the forums regularly to see what’s happening, to check if no big issue is suddenly popping up. If we see you in there giving truly outstanding support to our users, we will reward that as much as we can.
Premium Support
For those of you who dislike forums and want to be supported by me and the rest of the Yoast team, don’t fret. Starting in August, we’ll start offering a premium version of the plugin, including support (as in, you’ll get a direct email address and we’ll reply to your questions as soon as we can), at a yearly fee, starting from $89 for a single site to $349 for unlimited sites. That’s $29 a month for support on unlimited sites and just $7.50 for a single site. And of course we won’t remove the download from WordPress.org and we won’t disable the free forums, so you don’t have to pay us anything if you don’t want to.
The plugin will have some other functionality that’s not included in the SEO plugin (what? that’s still a secret ;) ) and we’ll use those users as a “testbed”, if they want to, for new features.
Google Analytics for WordPress
Exciting work is happening around our Google Analytics plugin too, it’ll soon move to Github properly as well so that people will be able to contribute more easily. It too has forums that we can’t spend time on, so if you want to dive in there, please, please do!
In all, I hope this change in our support policy for our free plugins makes it a bit more clear where we’re headed and what we’re doing and not doing. I’d love to hear your thoughts below!
This post first appeared on Yoast. Whoopity Doo!