wordpress™ wank

Sorry everyone. I get snippy with Lorelle for ordering people about on the .com forums when she’s been here, like, five minutes. You’d have thought she’d be too busy single-handedly running the Codex to bother with anything else, but evidently I was wrong.

When Matt makes her a moderator, I will put up and shut up. I will cut-n-paste her approved answers and point as many newbies to lorelle.wordpress.com and the codex as she desires. (Though, personally, I think sending .com users to the codex is likely to seriously confuse them, seeing as how it documents a bunch of stuff they can’t do.) Admittedly it is more likely that I will get bored of being her minion and leave in a huff, but we shall see.

Until then, she’s a rather less active support volunteer than three or four of us, and if I hadn’t called her on it somebody else would have.

I have changed themes again. Today we are with Toni, a vague attempt at a girly template with flowers now available in purple. Two things are annoying me about Toni so far:

• her insistence on surrounding my new pink feed icon with a purple border. Piss off, purple border! I have three words for you: a img {border:0}. Every stylesheet should have one.
• Ye Olde Classic Comment-Box Overlapping Sidebar Bug:

  

  Wow, takes me back. [feels nostalgic]

dot com users complain that all comments in Hindi or Korean get labelled as spam.

Now, Akismet was developed for English language blogs and I honestly don’t know whether it was tested with any other charsets. A quick glance at the mailing list for testers suggests not (there is just a guy being pleasantly surprised that it handles Dutch).

I suspect you might need to get a critical mass of people blogging in Hindi/Korean and marking their comments as non-spam in order to ‘teach’ it that these unfamiliar characters are in fact OK. But are you going to use Akismet if it gobbles up all comments in your language of choice? Uh, no. Unless you are on wordpress.com, in which case you are locked into it and must continue to rescue your discussions from the hungry maw of the automated spameater, hoping that one day it will understand that not everyone in the world speaks American.

I dropped into the textpattern forums to see what I could see. And if you scroll down to the bottom you will see what I saw.

(I’ve always thought textpattern had a more subtle touch with the whimsy than wordpress. Already I am sick of my admin saying ‘howdy’ to me. You are a personal publishing platform, not a bloody cowboy. I am going to have to dig around in my RC1 install, see if I can’t change it to something like ‘Welcome, you are logged in as…’ or something normal like that.)

What happened to the donate page? inquires a forum dweller. Bless you, child! They don’t need our pennies anymore, not with friendly venture capitalists around. Put your credit card away and go donate to Wikipedia or something. Or maybe even an actual charity. (yes, 34 Dreamhost customers who chose to donate to WordPress rather than Katrina relief, I’m looking at YOU.)

Is it really wise to be operating a free hosted blogging system without a visible privacy policy or TOS? You’d not have to do much, just put up a page saying ‘you can’t sue us if the server goes down, we can suspend your blog at any time if we don’t like the content, we won’t give your personal details to anyone unless you’ve actually broken the law, this is the kind of stuff that will get your site taken down yadda yadda’.

(Blogsome has a mother of a page, if anyone wants a cribsheet.)

must. not. reply: ‘no you don’t, you just need a link to wikipedia, seeing as that’s the place you’re lifting all your content from.’

must. not. reply: ‘because it looks totally ghetto’.

This was going to be a reply here but it kind of spiralled out of control. So…

Expect username suspension to be a major source of user irritation as the namespace fills up. People wanting their deleted usernames back. People wanting someone else’s deleted username and failing to see why they can’t have it. A lot of spur-of-the-moment deletion goes on with any service that offers free accounts and encourages people to write about their personal lives. Ask livejournal. In fact, ask any free hosted blogging system.

Livejournal, of course, is on a far bigger scale than this place, sees a lot more posting and a lot more account deletion. (I don’t think, by the way, that you can count on keeping the schoolgirls out forever. They like shiny new things as much as everyone else, and are undeterred by rubbishy template systems.) Their 30-day grace period before final deletion is mainly for the sake of their servers, but handily also serves as… well, a 30-day grace period. Because sometimes people do stupid things that they regret.

In the lofty world of wordpress.org this maybe didn’t happen so much. Or if it did, you could just reload from a backup. WordPress.com is a land without backup. Here, deletion is forever. My guess is that we’re too used to having Recycle Bins on our desktop to nod quietly and accept that.

My subsidiary point is this. Running a free hosted blogging system is a whole different ballgame to coding one for the use for other people. You thought the wordpress community were unreasonable in the level of accountability they demanded? You ain’t seen nothing, compared to the personal stake people are going to feel they have when their beloved blog is actually on your server. Or when a wordpress.com blogger behaves unacceptably towards them. Or when we start seeing the splogs. Expect even more stupid forum questions, now the dot commers have a place they’re allowed to ask them.

If you want a community, somebody’s going to have to manage it. Is that going to leave time for coding?

according to a link in the wikipedia article on wordpress (no mention of 2.0, why am I not surprised?), Alex King plays fly-half for Wasps. Somehow I doubt that this Alex King is the same Alex ‘Template Contest Guy’ King who populates the unthinking blogrolls of many, but it gave me a millisecond of amusement.

(I was going to add that I didn’t believe bbPress was written ‘from scratch in a few days over the holidays’, but, unfortunately, I can.)