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Support Monitor

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Support Monitor

by Emtiaz Zahid

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Description

If you publish plugins on WordPress.org, the questions arrive whether you are looking or not. Support Monitor keeps a list of the plugins you maintain, reads their public support feeds, and tells you what still needs you.

  • Unanswered topics — the questions nobody has replied to yet, oldest first.
  • A reply target — set your own, and anything past it is flagged in the menu and can send you a notification. This is the part a feed reader cannot do: knowing a topic has been sitting there for three days takes a memory, not a snapshot.
  • Reviews — new ones as they land, with an alert on anything at or below the rating you choose.
  • Directory stats — installs, downloads, rating and tested-up-to for each plugin, with a warning when one falls behind the current WordPress release.
  • Notifications — a Slack, Discord or plain JSON webhook, an email digest, a dashboard widget, and a count on the admin menu. Each alert fires once, when something actually changes.

What it talks to

Only WordPress.org, and only the public parts:

  • wordpress.org/support/plugin/<slug>/unresolved/feed/ — open topics
  • wordpress.org/support/plugin/<slug>/feed/ — all topics, if you switch that on
  • wordpress.org/support/plugin/<slug>/reviews/feed/ — reviews, if you switch that on
  • api.wordpress.org/plugins/info/1.2/ — directory stats

No account, no API key, no third-party service, and no tracking. Requests are spread out and rate-limited; the default is one check every thirty minutes, shared across your watchlist.

Honest about its limits

Each WordPress.org feed returns the last 30 items and cannot be paged. On a very busy plugin, topics can come and go between checks — when that happens Support Monitor says so rather than quietly showing you an incomplete list, and suggests checking more often.

  1. Install and activate the plugin.
  2. Go to Support Monitor Plugins and add the slug of a plugin you maintain.
  3. Optionally set a reply target and a notification channel under Support Monitor Settings.

Checks run on WordPress’s scheduler, which only fires when someone visits your site. On a quiet site, set up a real cron job — the settings screen shows you the exact line and warns you when checks are running late.

  1. The inbox: every topic across your plugins, with the unanswered ones one click away.

    The inbox: every topic across your plugins, with the unanswered ones one click away.

  2. Reviews, newest first, with low ratings called out.

    Reviews, newest first, with low ratings called out.

  3. Watched plugins with their directory stats. A tested-up-to version that has fallen behind is flagged.

    Watched plugins with their directory stats. A tested-up-to version that has fallen behind is flagged.

  4. Settings: how often to check, when to consider a topic overdue, and where to send alerts.

    Settings: how often to check, when to consider a topic overdue, and where to send alerts.

Do I need to own the plugins I watch?

No. Everything it reads is public. Watching plugins you did not write works fine.

Why does it contact WordPress.org?

That is where the support forums are. It reads the same public RSS feeds your browser would, identifies itself honestly, and never sends anything about your site anywhere.

Will it slow my site down?

No. All the work happens on a schedule, never during a page load, with a cap on how many requests each run may make.

Can I get alerts in Slack?

Yes. Paste a Slack, Discord or generic webhook URL into the settings and send yourself a test.

What happens to my data if I delete the plugin?

It is removed, tables and all. There is a setting to keep it if you would rather.

2.0.0

  • Rewritten from scratch. Not an upgrade of 1.0.3 so much as a replacement for it.
  • Topics are now stored locally, so the plugin can tell you how long something has gone unanswered instead of only what is in the feed right now.
  • Added reviews, directory stats, webhook and email notifications, a dashboard widget and a menu badge.
  • Removed the unauthenticated REST endpoints from 1.0.3, which let any visitor read, add or delete watched plugins and trigger outbound requests. If you ran 1.0.x, updating closes that.
  • Removed the JavaScript build entirely. The admin screens are server-rendered, so there is nothing left to rot.
  • Your 1.0.x watchlist is carried over on activation.

1.0.3

  • Remove extra dependencies.

1.0.1

  • Initial release.
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