wordpress™ wank

Elliott Back (still pretending Green Marinee is his own design, I see) thinks there’s something sinister about Automattic’s decision to offer paid support to corporate clients. Um, no. Last time we had a ‘paid support is eeeeevil’ wankfest, Automattic was but a twinkle in Matt’s eye and the idea that businesses would ever chose WP over MT was as laughable as the idea that they’d be happy to rely on volunteer forums for support.

(I see Podz is among those on that old thread protesting the evilness of paid support. I guess things change when you’re the one being paid to provide it.)

It’s not like any of the hackers spend any time on the support forums anyway (they’d rather mess with code than interact with lowly users) so Handy’s worries on that point are probably moot. His concerns that Podz won’t have as much time to spend on the forum probably aren’t, but the nature of volunteer projects is such that there will always be others to step up and fill the gap.

I can’t see it hurting ordinary users too much in the long term. I can’t see it helping them, either (time spent fulfilling the individual needs of paying customers is time not spent fixing bugs for .com users, or adding features for the next release) but it doesn’t actively hurt anyone if development slows down or .com stagnates. So the correct response to this initiative seems to me to be profound indifference.

this is a test

I inquire whether there are any text ads out there which don’t need javascript, and the thread gets slammed shut with a threat that any blog displaying ads before they are officially introduced will be suspended.

Woah. I was only asking.

Well, ok, sometimes I feel that a couple of dollars here and there would be nice, by way of recompense for the time and effort I spend writing and researching and speculating wildly; and I might be tempted to shift over to proper wordpress were it not for the embargo upon domain names with (whisper it) ‘wordpress’ in the title. I mean, if they won’t tolerate it for community projects they sure as hell won’t allow it for snark.

And in any case I don’t believe there are any text ad providers out there which don’t use javascript, because how would the middleman be able to track the clicks without it? But if you know different, feel free to comment. I promise I won’t slam the thread shut.

Anyway, this is what advertising’s going to look like when it comes in: Adsense widgets for paid users. OK, that’s a sensible model, since the takings should cover the cost of their subscription, and after the initial payout to start things working they’ll essentially be getting their paid features free-at-the-cost-of-defacing-their-blog-with-ads. Kind of like what Livejournal are doing now, but more lucrative because wordpress.com will be demanding an upfront payment. You’d be very lucky to make any money on this, but if that bothered you you’d be self-hosting. Or on blogspot.

It goes without saying that free users will never be allowed ads, and paid customers won’t be able to use any ad providers other than whichever one’s officially supported, because a) this would be an invitation to splog and b) wordpress.com wouldn’t be getting a cut. Again, this is sensible, because why should people be able to make money out of something they’re getting for free? Restricting ad choice for paid users is a little dodgy, but could easily be passed off as a security measure. After all, these are people who don’t want to leave the walled garden of .com for the scary world of self-hosting, so they won’t inquire too deeply.

Now, getting VC funding pushed the timescale back for paid services a long way. And if they’re serious about charging they’re really going to have to rethink this policy of using us to test their alpha code (it treats .com users as subservient to the greater good of .org, which is fine if everyone’s getting this service for free but looks bizarre once you start getting money from us and none from them.) So none of this is in the immediate future. I probably wouldn’t go for it myself, since I already chuck away enough money on hosting thankyouverymuch and I can’t even see myself renewing my livejournal paid account at the moment. But if paid features are sufficiently attractive (at the moment I’m thinking domain forwarding, post-by-email, a couple of plugins, some exclusive themes and maybe the ability to edit or link to your own stylesheet) many people might find ads a good way of getting them.

ETA: wordpress is choking on the title and refusing to display it on the blog. For what it’s worth, this post is called ‘ad sense’, and the permalink is http://wank.wordpress.com/2006/06/18/ad-sense. (It censored that when I tried to make it a link: how fucked up is that?) Evidently we’re not allowed to mention the subject of advertising on our own blogs either.

EATA: deleted the offensive ‘a’ in the permalink, everything now works. Can we have a FAQ on which words are and are not allowed in post slugs, please?

XML export is here! Hurray! Unfortunately, they couldn’t quite stretch to making it work with 2.03. So yeah, if you actually want to use this feature to move to a self-hosted wordpress install, said install has to be an unsupported nightly build. Not cool.

Why they would rush this feature out without the accompanying plugin to make it usable with the latest release baffles me. How long would you have to hold back on it in order to finish the plugin? How complicated a plugin can it be? Say what you want about widgets, but they were fully-documented and ready to use from launch. Maybe they feared a mass exodus coinciding with the code push (which, as per usual, has made things decidedly flaky around here) and didn’t want to enable movement until things had settled down?

Toni has a bitch about MySpace claiming ownership of all user content.

The troublesome fine print informs users that by posting any content, “you hereby grant to MySpace.com a non-exclusive, fully-paid and royalty-free, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense through unlimited levels of sublicensees) to use, copy, modify, adapt, translate, publicly perform, publicly display, store, reproduce, transmit, and distribute such Content on and through the Services.”

Sounds dire. But Myspace.com spokesman Jeff Berman says not to worry. “Because the legalese has caused some confusion, we are at work revising it to make it very clear that MySpace is not seeking a license to do anything with an artist’s work other than allow it to be shared in the manner the artist intends,” Berman says. “Obviously, we don’t own their music or do anything with it that they don’t want.”

Not a million miles away from:

By submitting Content to Automattic for inclusion on your Website, you grant Automattic a world-wide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, modify, adapt and publish the Content

Let’s see, what does MySpace do that WP doesn’t? Sublicensing? Well, they publish RSS feeds which any splogger can grab and republish, and there’s no option to turn those off. And most of MySpace’s claimed rights are tautological: what distinction can one make between ‘copy’ and ‘reproduce’? Which of them aren’t covered by ‘reproduce, modify, adapt and publish’?

There is nothing wrong with any of this; it’s perfectly standard legalese, and without these rights they couldn’t handle any content at all. I just think it’s odd that this guy seems unaware of his own company’s terms of service.

The one semi-interesting thing to emerge from the half-hearted Matt-hacking is that Matt owns dashpress.com, .net and .org, and has for the past three months or so. From the context in which it was first mentioned, Dashpress sounds like some kind of server-hosted to-do list, you know, this sort of thing:

• Change password
• Bitch about Six Apart
• Write own version of common software from the ground up e.g. forum, wiki, stats, to-do list
• Become bigger than Google

What has this to do with the hacking? Well, if you see this strange new word ‘dashpress’, and Google turns up nothing, banging ‘dashpress.com’ (or .net, or .org) into your browser is the logical next step.
(It wouldn’t have been mine, by the way — I’d have gone subdomain hunting on wp.org. I tend to forget how cheap domains are these days, or think that there must be some limit on how many can be owned by one person.) There’s nothing there now, of course, but if things were under construction there may have been sensitive information left lying around.

(My other theory is that the strange new word was actually the password, but then I have to doubt whether anyone in the world would be that silly.)

Matt gets hacked. Evidently he forgot the wise words of Podz:

There are sometimes posts on the forum asking about the security of WP, but no-one ever seems to think that their password - which they set - could possibly be at risk. Your password is your weakest link.

Or maybe he just lost track of his random password generator? del.icio.us is your friend. To be fair, if you’re shifting about from machine to machine you haven’t got a hope in hell of remembering a randomly generated 16-digit alphanumeric code, but 8 characters is easy; memorise two of those, and there’s your 16. You store phone numbers in your brain, there’s room for decent passwords. No excuse.

wp-hackers angst about some company repackaging WP and selling it on without explicitly stating what it is.

Whatever the morals of this, the code itself remains open-source by virtue of being PHP and, you know, editable in Notepad; so as long as they keep some form of credit tucked away in a random text file nobody ever reads, you can’t touch them. It’s GPL, you have no rights. The developers are fine with this (who needs intellectual property when you have venture capital?) so I’m not sure why anyone else needs to worry about it.

I can’t think of a diplomatic way of asking this so I’ll just come straight out with it: who is Barry? He ain’t on the guest list, that’s for sure, and there’s no link to his own site to enlighten us.

Is he a mysterious hitherto unmentioned VC? Provider of BBQ? The guy who runs the datacenter? Matt’s dog? I think we should be told.