2. There are plenty examples of themes with options on WP.com, they’re just more trouble to integrate. What’s the easiest? 1.2-era Classic styles.

2. Theme authors are constantly being told that they should put more options in their themes, to make them more attractive to non-tech users like the target audience of wp.com (Lorelle has a post or ten about this); yet when we do so, they get excluded from the theme browser and wordpress.com because the code is too complicated. I wish you people would make up your minds.

3. Not selling blogroll links was a good call. I think it would have been ethically defensible — everyone would have been able to see exactly what was happening, and, WP being GPL, we’d have been free to remove the links — but it would have split the community in a major way.

4. ‘Ridiculously tedious’ may be overstating the case, yes, but “check all’ is a relatively new feature. At any rate, it wasn’t in 1.5; people had to go through the list and delete them individually.

5. Thank you for the wp.net clarification, its status is making slightly more sense to me now.

I’ll look at Barthelme again, but given it uses the template toolkit it might be more of a pain than it’s worth right now. (Themes with configuration options take a lot longer to secure.)

The blogroll links have been around since WP started and before anyone ever thought of the Google implications. They were there to prime the feature and recognize folks who were selflessly donating their time without expecting anything back. There have been high 6-figure offers to “buy” into that list or the templates, which I’ve always ignored even last year when things were financially rough.

I have no idea what PIJ means by “ridiculously tedious to remove”, there are checkboxes, a “check all”, and a “delete checked” button in links.

wordpress.net is for hosting independent but related projects that need some official support, for example if they have extremely high traffic or otherwise would be difficult for someone to support.

I am reminded of this one time, somebody put hyperlinks to Matt and his groupies in the sidebars on all default wordpress installations, and then made them ridiculously tedious to remove. It gave Matt and the rest of ‘em the high PageRank they have today.

You raise a good point; even though end-users have the right to remove the link, reader inertia is a powerful tool. Mike Little is still the top result in Google for ‘Mike’ even though he no longer actively contributes and all he posts on his blog these days is birthday greetings to members of his family.

If it weren’t for the default links to wp.org and selected developers, it’s doubtful that any firms would have cottoned onto the fact that getting your link onto a wordpress theme is a fantastic way of gleaning PageRank. In that respect, the developers only have themselves to blame for this trend.