As part of the big picture goals for WordPress in 2023, the project is embarking on an effort to work through old tickets that are stuck due to no consensus, missing decisions, or multiple possible solutions. WordPress Core Committer Jb Audras has organized Trac triage sessions dedicated to moving these tickets forward or closing the ones that are no longer relevant.

Audras’ audit shows that there are 19 tickets that are more than 15 years old, 688 that are 10 years old, but the largest chunk of 3,484 tickets falls into the 5-10 year old category.

The first kickoff session was held on January 26 in the #core Slack channel. Contributors started with a small selection of very old tickets with the goal of identifying a path towards resolution and an owner for the ticket. This generated some renewed discussion, for example, on a 17-year-old ticket where “HTML comments in posts aren’t handled properly” and another of the same age regarding an unwanted slash in get_pagenum_link(). 

In some cases tickets were closed and in others contributors are working on reproducing the issue, testing, and refreshing patches where possible. One 13-year-old ticket, which fixes the wp_get_attachment_url() function not returning a valid URL if the filename contains unescaped URL characters, was added to the 6.2 milestone with a PR awaiting review. Some tickets require deep historical knowledge of WordPress and will benefit from having participation from veteran contributors.

The next “Classic” triage session will happen in the #core Slack channel on Thursday, March 9, 2023 at 10:00 AM EST. Anyone who wants to be part of finding a resolution for some of these old tickets is invited to join. Participants in the kickoff session also discussed alternating between very old and very new tickets, which are often easier for getting newer contributors involved.