This will be a bit long. I’m trying to explain well and completely. Please excuse the gross grammar mistakes.
When a user registers for wordpress.org profile, they are not asked to agree to any terms of service or guidelines.
You are correct. But be aware that this place is not a service, it’s not a market place and there is no service level agreements (SLA). In the almost 10 years since that snapshot, yes the forum guidelines have been updated. That’s natural.
If anything this place is a community soup kitchen. I’m not kidding. Have some free opensource code as soup.
The guidelines (they are not terms of service) are just that: guidelines. If you think of that scene in Pirates of the Caribbean where Barbossa says “the code is more what you’d call “guidelines” than actual rules” then you’re not far off. Some parts of it are flexible. Using multiple accounts, sharing accounts and other things like that are not.
As you may be aware of, multiple accounts have been abused horribly in the past here and elsewhere. That’s how most of the items in the guidelines came to be. It’s been updated and will probably continue to be updated.
These forums are not for anyone’s marketing, they are not for real people helping other users. They are not for helping people to establish a company reputation. If you want to help people then please do as yourself.
Other companies do that!
You did not write that but I’m trying to be complete for you and anyone else who comes here to this topic.
Plugin and theme author’s occasionally do use their company account and are asked to restrict that account use to their plugin or theme support forums here. When the “company” account wanders outside of those support forums they are frequently asked to stop that and make a choice: do they want their company account to be made “Spectator” in the forums?
They’re also allowed to reply to topics outside of their support forum if the topic relates to their work. For example if a user had a problem with plugin ABC and it conflicts with theme XYZ and posts about it then yes, they can support users in those topics as well.
What if someone does not want to use their real name?
That’s fine. I would not be surprised if there’s more than a few movie character names as accounts on these forums. An alias or a handle is fine too. Many users here do just that.
But not company names please. That’s not really cool. You can put your company name and bio in your profile here.
None of what you’ve written is in the forum guidelines
Updating the guidelines is a challenge. The goal is to be concise and capture the intent behind them without being a 10,000 word treatise. They will get updated at some point again but that will (again) be a big group effort and attempt to get it as good as it can be.
