P2/O2: During backend editing impossible to handle post from user without role

[tobifjellner]

On make.wordpress.org translators and plugin/theme developers may post requests to appoint certain users as translation editors.
Starting around Oct 14, 2019 something suddenly changed.

Since then, during back-end editing of any post, the field "Author" MUST be set to one of the pre-existing users that already have a compatible role. If the person who edits the post misses this, the first username in the alphabetically sorted list will be set as the author...

In order words, previously, I could just check that the contents of the pending post was OK, perhaps fix a couple of tags, and then publish.

Now I need to:

1. Temporarily save the pending post as a draft in my own name
2. Find out the username of the poster
3. Invite this user as contributor or author on Polyglots blog
4. Wait for them to confirm their new role on the site

4b. Perhaps remind them a couple of times...

5. Pick up the pending post, change the author field to the relevant user
6. Publish

This is MUCH less convenient than before... :(

[tobifjellner]

Image of post list with pending post before back-end editing

[tobifjellner]

Image of post during editing. The field "Author" is forced to have a value from the list of "eligible authors".

[ocean90]

This should probably be reported to the Gutenberg project directly.

To be honest, I thought that this was always the case since only authors are queried through the REST API. This is different from the classic editor which doesn’t change the selected/current user.

[dd32]

To be honest, I thought that this was always the case since only authors are queried through the REST API. This is different from the classic editor which doesn’t change the selected/current user.

AFAIK, that's correct. This has been an issue since the early days of the Gutenberg plugin being used on dotorg.

​https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/11000 is the closest thing I could find to a ticket for this.

I'm going to close this as reported-upstream since working around this on the WordPress.org end isn't exactly ideal and it really deserves being fixed in Gutenberg.