Hello there! I am Eric, the project lead for People Management, a section similar to the Users section in WP Admin. I’m excited to show you what we’ve been working on.
What is it?
People management allows you to view and manage users and followers of any WordPress.com site or any self-hosted, Jetpack-connected WordPress.org site.
This version of people management does not include the ability to add or invite new users to a given site. To add or invite a user, you can click on the “Add” button and you will be taken to WP Admin for the time being.
What to Test
- Are you able to view and update users?
- Are you able to view and remove followers?
- Does the flow between sections make sense?
- Is there anything that is confusing?
Note: to test on self-hosted sites, you will need a Jetpack connected site, with a Jetpack version of at least 3.7 and the manage module enabled.
To test adding people who will have access to your site:
- Add a user you won’t mind deleting later.
- Go to People Management on Horizon.
- Change the person’s role.
- (Jetpack-only) change the person’s public display name.
- Remove the person from the site.
To test followers, you will need an email address not already associated with an account on the site:
- Subscribe to your site using a test email address.
- Confirm the subscription.
- Go to People Management → Email Followers on Horizon.
- Remove the follower.
Write any feedback you have as a comment on this post, and thank you for your interest in helping to improve WordPress.com!
We are going to gather feedback about People Management until October 20th.
Horizon Feedback 
I do not have the biggest blog so when it comes to users I can’t tell much sure enough it might be easy to admin users though For me it was already two clicks to much to get there.
On the other hand I do not think I have any right to change a followers choice to follow me or not. They should have that choice themselves. I am not here to think for them.
Now if one follower might be a bit obnoxious I could delete him as a follower only to most likely fuel his obnoxious behaviour. He can re-follow if that is even a word.
These kind of options and thoughts just do not make any sense. It is like you tell me I can choose who follows me, what kind of attitude is that?
In short let the follower decide whether to follow or not. Let a follower sort his sites.
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Thank you for the feedback about the people management section.
In the past, we haven’t exposed an option to remove followers, however, there are cases which you may not be aware of where it is helpful to have that option and we are hoping the change to allow the removal of a follower will help with those cases where it does make sense.
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Though I can think of a scenario or two. In none of them I do not have any right to oppose a choice of someone else.
In any case I am not ever responsible for the choice of some one else. Neither do I have any right to impose in that choice.
If it is an arse you want to make sure can’t follow you, one should block it not just remove them. There is significant difference. As I would always be able to follow again.
All in all I think it is wrong for us to change a choice that was never ours to begin with.
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Thank you for including your thoughts. It will be considered, and I think that it’s likely the follower remove option will stay but I cannot say for sure whether it will be changed because that will depend on a group of people working on this feature to make a final decision.
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I do understand a decision has to be made. Sometime at some point.
But I do not look at just the here and now.
I try to consider us as humans making mistakes. and though it might become a small percentage of us it can become a cause of conflict.
The basis of the thought for me is that one is not entitled to do someone else’s thinking..
And i do question on what basis we would select who might not want to follow us, or how we do not want to have following us.
And this is but a scenario and maybe only by a few but is it preferable?
examples selections could be based on religion, believes, colour, country.
leave the choice to follow to the follower. If you don’t like the blog unfollow.
I do not want to be excluded from a site find interesting just because I might never say anything. Or some other dumb reason.
It should not be the kind of selection idea we should want. I thank you for taking the time to read this rambling.
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There have been many requests over time for a remove follower option. I understand your argument against too. To move forward, the decision has been made to try to reach a better balance. Removing a follower does not block someone from seeing a site completely, but it may help minimize their interaction which can be helpful in many cases, such as harassment. It was possible to remove followers in the past, but the bottleneck was to go through support. The latest change is a step in a direction to give site owners dealing with serious issues a little more control.
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I did forget to mention (I do try to think about it) once people have a paid subscription or are part of a sop they are becoming customers and not followers..
But even in this case it should come with an idea of how long they haven’t been active to make a sound assessment. As one need a sound proof in order to delete customer profiles. And have a clear legal notice in that order as well.
A follower to a regular blog may also need that feature if you push this through. It makes assessing a little easier. Though if a user hasn’t been active for a long time, I believe you WP would delete the profile/blogs and could also delete all corresponding links to follows. Legal time of inactive use like mail boxes do as well.
And I strongly belief that one should sort their own list of sites they follow instead of a site selecting who can follow them.
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Customer and follower relationships are separate, a similar example would be that paying for a WordPress.com plan does not allow you to become a viewer on a private blog.
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This is going to be a great feature. The interface is quite intuitive and with much less clutter as compared to the native WordPress Edit User page.
I was able to successfully view, edit and remove users. Few things I noticed:
1. Possible to sort by role? The role label has different background colors, so gives an impression of things getting mixed up in the list if you have multiple people in the same role. Like one Admin can appear at the end, while the other at the top, with bright colored contributors/editors in between.
2. I suppose the ability to edit email address and author bio is not part of the release, so can’t really comment on that apart from asking if it’s going to be added later or not, because it’ll be a good addition.
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Thank you for the feedback. I want to hear the why behind your point of view on grouping roles. When you look up user roles for a site you own, wouldn’t you be looking up one person at a time in most cases? What is your reason for needing them grouped?
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Sorry for not being able to respond earlier; my use case was for blogs having more than a handful of users added, where you’re looking at the list with an intent of editing user roles in bulk. For example, promoting two or three authors to the admin role–it might involve scrolling up and down when the list is in alphabetical order. Didn’t mean to nitpick, the current order is absolutely fine if you already have in mind the person’s username and want to edit it directly.
Feedback may be closed now, so it’s fine, just wanted to add my two cents. 🙂
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While I will not be able to fully test this feature within the time frame mentioned, I do want to extend my appreciation for giving users the ability to remove site Followers. Huzzah! Additionally, it would be even more practical if it were possible to link to Follower gravatar profiles.
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Thanks! In the followers section inside stats, we currently link to the primary site instead. The functionality from that section, including the link part, will probably be moved to the people management section. Just so I have a little more context, can you tell me any pros and cons you can think of for linking to Gravatar profile vs the primary site setting?
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Pros: more user information, if user added it; ability to report spam/abuse directly on gravatar. Cons:.. … (still thinking)… hmm, maybe no link available to primary site setting.
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Thank you for taking the time to test and report issues in the People Management section.
The People Management section is now launched on WordPress.com. In the near future we will be working on improving the experience for adding and inviting users to WordPress.com and Jetpack sites as well as polishing the existing user interface based on your feedback.
Thanks again!
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