On Plugin Support

When I started developing WordPress plugins, most people asking questions in the support forums seemed like hobbyists building sites for themselves. Since then, I’ve noticed two trends that irk me.

Freelancers

Nowadays, there seem to be a lot more people that get paid to build WordPress sites for others. There’s nothing wrong with that, until you ask me to do your work for free.

I’m not talking about the “Hey, this feature doesn’t work.” type of requests; I’m talking about people dumping some code and asking how to make it do a very specific thing that their client requested.

If you are getting paid to do something, you should either already know how to do it, or spend the time needed to learn how to do it, instead of relying on the kindness of suckers strangers.

Commercial software

Commercial themes are booming and paid plugins are also becoming common. Again, there’s nothing wrong with that, but don’t expect much sympathy from me when the premium theme you’re using conflicts with my plugin. I know my code is solid, so why should I spend my free time debugging someone else’s product that they charge money to support?

Post in their support forums; if it turns out there’s an issue with my plugin, they should be competent enough to fix it and send a patch, or at least explain it to you. ¹

Whenever money enters the picture, the gift economy goes out the window; you can’t have it both ways.