wordpress™ wank

I haven’t bothered mentioning WordCamp since geek conferences are of no interest to anyone other than the geeks who attend them.

I am, though, wondering who’s going to be looking after the place while the entire staff’s eating BBQ.

Random Guy: Hey, I found a new exploit in wordpress
Devs: …
Devs: There is no security hole. People who say there is are lying.
Random Guy: Help me Spam Karma Guy, the devs are not listening to me and you’re the only one who can help!
Spam Karma Guy: They’re not going to warn anyone that their installs are at risk? OK then. Listen up everyone, you need to disable user registration for guests or bad stuff could happen.
WordPress community: [goes and disables user registration]
Matt: You should have told us about this rather than scare all the users
Spam Karma Guy: Actually we did, not my fault you’re too inept to listen and would rather clog up the dashboard with boasting about your latest conferences than with useful information such as, oh, I don’t know, security alerts?
Me: [has sense of deja vu]

So: if heavy traffic –famous author –unique subjec–soaring traffic –press coverage –or if friend of WP employee allowed to do it, everyone else not? What is criteria to enable advertising on WP blog?

That would be ‘be Scoble’, I assume. Scoble really needs his own FAQ entry, doesn’t he? Suggested wording:

Yes, you have seen a wordpress.com blog which used a custom theme. That was Scoble’s. He is special. Yes, you have seen a wordpress.com blog with the top half of the sidebar taken up by affiliate ads. That was Scoble’s. He is special. Maybe when you are an A-lister who writes WordPress.com’s Top Blog of Every Day, such favours may be granted to you. In the meantime, Scoble is special and you are not. Deal with it, or buy your own domain to be king of.

I think that strikes the authentic note of ‘piss off and buy your own hosting if you’re not content with what we’re giving you for free’, don’t you?

You forget to renew the domain where the official plugin repository lives, then get pissy when people start stressing about what’s happened to it? [rolls eyes] Ah well, it’s not like anyone was expecting a polite or even an appropriate response. This is the Moose we’re talking about, after all.

Things like this do help me understand why Matt doesn’t like farming too much stuff out to others; you don’t want important stuff like the official plugin repository in the hands of people too flaky to remember they even own the thing. How do people forget to renew anyway? I know GoDaddy spams me relentlessly whenever one of mine is due to expire.

#wordpress regulars plead for some form of moderation as they are being overrun by trolls.

They have, apparently, been wanting this for over a year now, but Matt doesn’t have time to op the channel himself and doesn’t want to give anyone else that kind of power.

This seems reasonable enough; if you let the channel degenerate to such a state that everyone stops going there, it won’t be a problem anymore. And don’t most people going on to IRC in the first place expect it to be a crap-filled beargarden? True, it doesn’t give a great impression of wordpress, but then neither do the forums. Get with the program, people! #wordpress doesn’t involve AJAX, it won’t pull in blogging newbies and Automattic are never going to make any money from it, therefore it is never going to get any love.

Is there any reason why the regulars can’t create another channel, appoint some ops, and migrate support and productive discussion there? Because that seems a lot more fruitful than continuing to bang their heads against the brick wall that is Matt’s ego.

The crew on wp-forums decide to launch their new service for non-sploggers too dim to master the intricacies of Fantastico by means of a newly-registered forum user called Install4free posting a thread about it at the .org support forums. Pointing to a wordpress.com blog with the same classy username.

And then they wonder why the ‘naysayers’ are a wee bit chary of handing over their usernames and passwords to this anonymous newbie, before shouting at them for not being regular readers of wp-forums.

Um, I’m a regular reader of wp-forums, and knowing that you were planning to set up a free installation service would not have made me one whit less suspicious of ‘Install4free’, seeing as how literally anyone can set up a new account on the .org forums and at wp.com, and there was nothing to tie that username to any of you.

The highlight, I think, is the argument that it must be official because it’s on wp.com. Quick poll: raise your hand if you think this site has Matt’s full approval. No? But it’s a wordpress.com subdomain! Matt knows everything that’s going down here and officially sanctions it all!

(Partial approval, yeah, OK — he’s a subscriber and he hasn’t ripped it down yet. Full approval is the day I pack up and leave.)

Anyway, in an email to wp-forums, Christopher Hradil says all the obvious and sensible things about the most egregious failure of common sense I have seen since, ooh, this morning; so rather than repeat them I’ll send you there instead.

Via regular reader Pissed off Joe in comments and the help of nofollow, I bring you WPManagerDX, wherein a splogger named Edna extracts money from fellow sploggers who are too dim to master the intricacies of Fantastico. (They’re sploggers, they’re stupid, they deserve to get screwed. You won’t catch me shedding any tears for them.)

I especially love how every mention of wordpress has ™ affixed to it. Now they have me worried about whether it’s sufficient to do this in my header, or whether I need to sprinkle them throughout the text as well. I don’t want those nasty lawyers coming after me, do I? Also, I love how this bogstandard theme apparently has a ‘value’ of $200. That would be Zimbabwean dollars, obviously.

(General Petals is my favourite variation. It sounds like a brutal military dictator with an inner fluffy core.)

No. Please, just stop already.

I mean, what is the rationale behind this one? That there’s only about 110 styles for Classic already, and we need to be catching up to the Kubrick clones?

See, I fear that kcyap opened the floodgates on this and now everyone and his dog thinks they can run a wordpress design contest, but they can’t. It is hard. You have to get good prizes. You have to get good judges. You have to co-ordinate the judges. You have to co-ordinate the sponsors. You have to co-ordinate the entries. I do not believe you can do it successfully by yourself unless you make a full-time job of it.

And I do not understand why anyone would want to make a full-time job of it when there are already, literally, a thousand themes out there. You don’t get any glory from it, if the themes aren’t needed and everyone and his dog is doing the same thing. You don’t get any pagerank, if we can’t muster up the enthusiasm to link to them anymore. I suppose you could always con people into sponsoring prizes then take them yourself, but it’s a fair bet the sponsors will get jaded even before the designers do.

Look, just go read this old entry, I can’t be bothered to make the same points over and over again.

As for theundersigned’s contest, it’s all very well saying you’ve got Automattic on board, but how far does that go? As far as being able to call it ‘official’? As far as getting a guarantee that the winners will be adopted on wordpress.com? All I can see is a vague offer from Matt to post about it on the dead blog (whoopee!) and ‘kick in some sponsorship’. Which is, admittedly, more than anyone else has got so far. But sorry, it’s going to have to be official and the prizes are going to have to be extremely kickass to tempt me to chance my luck again.

via sunburntkamel, I learn that they are having yet another bloody theme competition.

I have no words.

Well, I probably will later, but right now I’ve just been stunned into silence by the sheer pointlessness of it all.

The bad news is that three weeks after first announcing XML import/export, Automattic still haven’t bothered coming up with a plugin that would make it usable with the latest stable version of wordpress. The good news is that Aaron Brazell has stepped up to the plate and done it for them.

That’s the nice thing about being a business based on open-source software; if you procrastinate long enough, somebody else will come along and do it for you. For free. There can’t be many arenas where you can contract jobs out to people without anyone expecting you to pay them. No wonder investors find it so attractive.