wordpress™ wank

I know that nothing this mob do should surprise me anymore, but when options posted a screenshot of wordpress.com showing Flash ads for Scientology I admit it, I was shocked.

But I see your screenshot and I raise you Scientology Flash ads on an anti-Scientology blog:

Naturally, wordpress.com spare themselves the flash on their tags pages and content themselves with loads of links:

Also, if you’re bored of linking to the last set of splogshots, how about some wildly inappropriate text ads?

I don’t know in which universe it’s OK to advertise ‘Hot & Sexy Single Women’ on a feminist post about an alleged sexual assault, but it’s not mine. Nor do I think this guy necessarily wanted ads for used women’s knickers on his site:

Obviously I would have contacted support immediately to demand that the Thetans not be given airtime on my blogs, except oh, it’s Sunday, and even though they hired a bunch of support staff what, five months ago now? support is still closed on weekends. And I can’t post to the forum because I once asked Matt whether his email was down. I did send a couple of feedbacks to Google, though. For all the good that’ll do. At least they pretend to care.

Also of note: Snap = popup ads disguised as a ‘feature’. Anyone know why neither this nor the Flash are mentioned in the tiny little chunk of disinformation hidden at the bottom of the features page? Or why they decided to encrypt the x-noads code that told us why ads weren’t being served on a given page? The obvious conclusion is that they’re tweaking their algorithms to serve ads to more readers more of the time, and they don’t want anyone to realise.

And now? I’m going to clear out my spam, make my regular backup, and see whether anyone bothers coming over to try and spin this one. I wouldn’t, if I were them. If there’s a single issue that’s destroyed my trust in Automattic, I’d have to say it’s their repeated failure to be honest about the issue of advertising. I’m some months past believing a word they have to say on the subject.

Even if it’s ’sorry’. Actually, especially if it’s ’sorry’.

Andrew on why the long-promised adsense upgrade remains vapourware.

Here’s what I think the basic problem is. Not all wordpress.com blogs are equal. A personal blog by a housewife or student is in an entirely different league from icanhascheezburger or stuff white people like, and ad revenues will vary accordingly. Automattic are not going to launch any feature which leads to them losing money, therefore the cost of the annual upgrade must equal (and preferably exceed) the annual revenue from the blog. But how do they know the annual revenue? And how do they know what it’s going to be in the future? Your bumpalong bogstandard blog could take off like a rocket overnight. An average figure is going to be far in excess of what the people in the long tail are generating (or willing to pay for), and far below what the handful on the threshold of VIP status can bring in. Pitch it too high and nobody’s going to bother paying up, pitch it too low and you risk losing out. Charging everyone different amounts is an impractical adminstrative nightmare.

On the other hand, the current system is working pretty well for them. People don’t see ads on their own blogs, aren’t informed about them when they sign up, and can blog for months and years in blissful ignorance of their existence. Even if they do leave when they twig what’s going on, Automattic have still profited from the period when they were unaware. In any case, they’re less likely to leave than to stick around grumbling at intervals and waiting for the vapourware upgrade. Far easier just to keep things the way they are and claim to be looking into solutions whenever anybody asks. It ain’t broke. Why fix it?

OK, so whose fabulous idea was it to deploy identicons without bothering to tell anyone about them? At least they now appear to have switched them off by default. I have switched them on, though the option I am missing is the ability to upload our own fallback image. I can’t see why that wouldn’t be possible, though I can see the potential for abuse.

Question: if your settings enable X-rated gravatars, do you get marked as mature?

Also, blogging about gravatar gives me a chance to point and laugh at Matt pretending not to know that a .png is an image file, and, when informed that it is, trying ‘it looks bad in IE6′. Dude, everything looks bad in IE6. It is IE6. That is what it does. Perhaps if you occasionally tested new wordpress.com stuff in IE6 it would be less unconvincing that you suddenly care so very much about the avatar viewing experience of its unfortunate users. But you don’t. So it is.

What the gravatar users need to understand is that Automattic didn’t buy Gravatar because they are lovely charitable people with superduper servers who cruise around looking for services to rescue from their bandwidth woes. They bought it in order to extend the native wordpress.com system. So in the transition existing users are going to lose some features they liked, as well as gaining some they might enjoy and others they will find profoundly useless. WordPress.com doesn’t support .png, therefore Gravatar won’t either. Getting screwed over is a standard side-effect of being bought by a larger company. Ask any livejournaller.

OK, who decided that spamming multiple threads with the same chunk of ungrammatical copy/pasted text was a good way for Sphere to handle the fallout on this latest messy little linkbuilding scam?

Was it the same person who thought it would be best if Matt didn’t disclose his affiliation with the company in the announcement post (though he seemed to think it necessary when announcing their acquisition by AOL), and kept quiet about the fact that they have at least one staff member in common?

Also, has anyone seen a Sphere logo on the ‘possibly related links’? Like global tag icons, it may be something I need to add to my skins in the interests of clarity.

eta: and here is Sphere guy promising to ‘B MOR KAREFUL’ with his grammar. I’d never have pulled him up on it if I’d realised he was an idiot. Once more I have violated my policy of not poking fun at the genuinely stupid. Along with my policy of only unleashing my Sword of Pedantry on those who mock the spelling of others. Woe.

Dear Matt,

Since this would never make it past moderation on this post I am putting it somewhere that people other than you and I will actually have an opportunity to read it. I agree that Monotone looks all kinds of cool and clever, and people have only been asking for a photoblog theme for about two years so it is timely too. However, don’t you think it is a little bit tacky that we have to view CSS in order to find out who actually made the thing? I’ve already seen blog posts crediting it to Automattic. OK, I’m aware that more than one shoutout in a week might destroy your hard-won reputation for hating on designers, but really, would it hurt that much to mention the actual designer somewhere visible? If you don’t ‘fess up on the wordpress.com announcement post I’m going to have to blow your cover. Oh wait. I just did. And don’t think about messing with style.css. I made screenshots.

love, that girl again

P.S.: leaving your car unlocked is not a touching expression of your faith in the fundamental goodness of humanity. It’s just dumb.

• Engtech on how to enable locally related posts (requires the CSS upgrade). Naturally this was censored from the forums.
• Lorelle isn’t a fan. I think the main issue she and many others are having is that it looks like the links are blogger-controlled and sanctioned. Why isn’t there a ‘powered by Sphere’ label to disclose how they’re being generated? Please don’t tell me it’s Automattic’s reluctance to give credit to third-parties in action yet again. This is one mess they shouldn’t want to be claiming responsibility for.
• why don’t Automattic ever think about how their actions affect people blogging about sensitive issues? or the businesses they’re supposedly at pains to attract? What if a NSFW link turns up on a Club Penguin blog? It’s all very well to direct people to the ‘Report as mature’ or ‘Report as spam’ buttons, but by that point offence has already been taken and you’ve had to deliver the objectional site another pageview in order to report them. And what if the link is offsite? Won’t somebody think of the children?
• I’m still not seeing any related posts on this blog. At first I thought Adblock must be taking care of them, but I’ve now seen them on three other sites so that’s not it. Clearly nobody else is writing stuff related to mine and I am unique in my own little niche! Or I have been shut out of the system because somebody might take offence at my username. Whatever. I’m shutting it off pre-emptively because I’m deriving no benefit from it and it may hurt other people down the line.
• The person who decided to make this feature opt-out rather than opt-in needs to not be in a decision-making capacity anymore. Frankly I am sick of third-party providers getting to call the shots without considering the needs of users. This is a nice feature for those who want it, but it is a bloody terrible one for those who don’t. Sure, it would take longer to build up your database, and you’d end up sending more traffic outside wordpress.com in the short term, but these disadvantages would be offset by not pissing people off by inserting spam into their posts. Sometimes you should go for the less convenient option because it’s the right thing to do.
• Andy Beard wonders why the links, which are clearly search queries, aren’t no-followed. So do I. Well, no, I don’t really. I just think they should be. It isn’t especially fair or intuitive that people are dishing out PR to random unapproved links when they can’t even switch off no-follow for regular commenters.

  And if you’re up for some fresh outrage about the global tagging scam check out his post about language subdomains throwing up identical global tag pages (ht: adam, in comments). Whoa. What strikes me about this is the blatant conflict of interest on Google’s part: they’re not going to block these duplicate search pages because they’re benefiting from the ads served on them. If Automattic happened to be with another ad provider then I have no doubt Google would smack them hard. It all leaves a really unpleasant taste in my mouth.

Ah, so that’s what the invisible Sphere .gif was for. I did wonder.

Isn’t calling these extra links ‘possibly related’ a really weaselly way of avoiding criticism about the inevitable crapness of their algorithms, much as calling the blog surfer ‘beta’ neatly sidesteps any obligation to make it work properly?

Obviously I will be switching off this latest pagerank-garnering device as soon as we have had an opportunity to see and mock the inevitable crapness of their algorithms. Let’s go!

[edit: wahey, either it's broken already or they haven't got around to adding it to this theme. OK, now I see why it was only possibly an announcement.]

Everyone with actual power has left already:

Also, sonific died. Since they did not actually offer any music that people wanted to listen to (that is why they died), autoplay never proved to be the scourge that some of us feared. Nonetheless it is odd that wordpress.com continues to offer a widget which people have been advised to remove asap and which will cease to work a week from now.

Never mind, widgets and themes are so 2006. We’re only meant to care about gravatars now.

Is it me, or has the ‘tone’ of the .com forums, along with the level of staff/moderator presence, significantly failed to improve since the holiday purges which were supposed to fix everything? I mean, some of the responses to user discontent with the new dashboard were just snide. And while it’s your right to refuse to rush to the aid of penguins, because the ongoing transformation of this place into MySpace really doesn’t need any extra help, this might be best accomplished by, you know, not responding to them, rather than swearing at them and feeding them wrong answers. It’s not that I abhor cruelty to penguins, more that I’ve seen others banned for less (come to think of it, I’ve seen others banned for nothing) and double standards irk me. Plus, said wrong answers sit in the archives waiting to mislead the innocent. Collateral damage, I suppose.

(To be fair, I do think language is an issue too. Mods working in a second language can come off as extremely abrupt; moshu on .org is the prime example, of course, but I’ve also see isadora come out with some things a native speaker would get ‘inactivated’ for.)

Raincoaster is safe for the time being at least. Is she the first volunteer to be publically backed up by staff when complaints are made, rather than being hung out to dry? Is she also the first volunteer to have a high-enough-traffic blog to scare them off canning her? You don’t want to be messing with people who could potentially raise an army of meatpuppets and get your unique approach to human resources mentioned on Valleywag. That would not be smart.

Perishable Press on, among other things, what is wrong with the plugin repository, and the quiet removal of the community-maintained plugin list on Codex.

I don’t need to spell out how this relates to the long slow death of themes.wordpress.net (where not even the previews work anymore) or the wider strategy of transferring control of community resources from the community to Automattic. Third-party theme repositories are thriving because everyone knows themes are an effective form of linkbuilding: add your link to every theme you redistribute, sell ads, profit! It’s not ideal from a user perspective because you get more links cluttering up your footer, but it’s ever so much better than having to rely on the moribund place your dashboard sends you to, full of broken old themes you have to evaluate on the basis of screenshots. The plugin community doesn’t have any such incentive to build its own resources; so it doesn’t happen; so if Matt happens not to like you, or your plugin, or your plugin’s licence, it’s going to be very hard for potential users to find you.

Is it just me, or does that not seem very open?

We seem to be arriving at a point where we rely purely on third-party commercial interests to create and maintain open community resources. It’s become too time and money-consuming for volunteers to do for free. And .org/extend is waaaaay at the bottom of Automattic’s priorities, because serving ads on talkpress is going to make them more money for less effort than selling themes, and plugin distribution is not going to make them anything at all. So I’m wondering whether Matt’s going to have to start rethinking his hostility to those who sell links, charge for themes, and try to profit out of wordpress without contributing a line of core code, because right now they’re keeping the theme community going. And without a theme industry, what would you have? Ye Olde Kubrick and some ancient thing Dave Shea threw together in his spare time. Impressive.