wordpress™ wank

• 713 different user suggestions for features from the ideas forum garnering 36,676 total votes; 10 different releases; 1,090 commits to the codebase; 2,849,349 downloads; 1,041,846 new blogs, 20,212,994 posts and 1,648,046,157 page views on WordPress.com; and over 2 billion spams caught by Akismet.

  Sorry, not good enough. I want kvetch stats. I don’t care if the whole ‘kvetch’ feature was a Habari-inspired publicity stunt and there was never any real working code behind it to count the comments, archive them or send them to a person who would read them. Make some numbers up to please me. You know, like you did with feed stats.

• And speaking of restrooms, the Men’s room trash can was continually overflowing and the paper towels were often all out.

  What do you expect, if 85% of attendees are men? Their toilets just aren’t designed to cope with that sort of overload.

• Multiple data centers FTW! To be honest, I am more inclined to mock all the other sites for putting all their eggs in one earthquake-prone basket than to congratulate Automattic on their wisdom and foresight, but that’s because I’m an ungenerous glass-half-empty kinda girl.

Email response from Matt to my expression of extreme dissatisfaction with the sploggy look:

I agree that screenshot is fugly. We’re on an alternative ad serving system from Google and there were some bugs in the code when certain number of ads were returned. Since we don’t see the ads ourselves it went undetected. Our goal is obviously a tasteful display of ads when we show them, and I’m sorry for the mistake.

• Point about getting special treatment from Google clearly valid, sorry Shoemoney
• You don’t monitor the ads yourselves? Sorry, but what? I realise I don’t apply Hanlon’s razor anything like enough, since evil is so much more interesting than incompetence, but the possibility of it being a bug honestly never occurred to me because I assumed that everyone involved knew that advertising was a sensitive area that needs to be implemented and watched carefully.

And in response to my request for clarification on whether using custom CSS to hide ads makes your blog vulnerable to deletion:

The official way to turn off or otherwise control ads will be with the forthcoming Adsense upgrade.

I am reading this as ‘actually, we don’t have a policy on the unofficial way of turning off ads and it’s unlikely we would ever find out you were doing it, seeing as how we don’t monitor ad display. But I’m not going to admit this because then the ‘no ads’ people might buy custom CSS instead of the Adsense upgrade, getting more features for the same price and screwing up our stats.’

Obviously if it were against the ToS he’d have said so; but we all know they can change the rules on a whim, so use with caution.

Also, options points out that a paragraph on advertising has just been quietly added to the features page. Result!

Today, I would like to apologise to anyone who has been unfortunate enough to view this site without being logged in or having sufficient adblocking measures in place:

You know what? I think making your users’ pages look like that is going to hurt your image as a purveyor of ‘high-quality blogs’ one hell of a lot more than footers full of sponsored text links.

Look, I have no problem with a single block of ads. I’m freeloading. You have to make your money somehow. If I want an ad-free environment, I expect to pay for it. But this, when you don’t even mention ads when we sign up? Come on guys, that’s not just sly, it’s greedy.

I do not want to be fobbed off with ‘people hardly ever see the ads’. One person seeing that and thinking I’m the moneygrabbing one is too many. And I do not want to be fobbed off with ‘it’s just something new we’re trying out’. You said that about ads. They’re still here.

Here’s the deal. I will send a feedback tomorrow asking for reassurance that if I buy custom CSS for this blog I can hide the ads without the risk of being ToSed. Or whether they want my $20 and whatever pennies they’re making from clickthroughs. And then I will consider my position.

Because I don’t want to give them the satisfaction of getting rid of me, but nor do I want to be mistaken for a splog. And nor do I want to give them any money. So I need to decide which of these options is the least bad.

Looks like the Week of Purging has begun with some transitional feed weirdness:

Downloads aren’t working and registered users are no longer able to log in. If you’re looking to download a theme this week, I suggest you get googling for alternative directories.

OK, so this argument may make no sense:

I think soon your going to see wordpress.com hosted blogs allow Google Adsense and its going to be a huge deal. So right now the wordpress gang will do whatever they need to not piss off Google.

because a) how do you need to be cosying up to Google in order to host ads? like every account holder is Google’s BFF?, b) they’re totally already using Adsense on wordpress.com and c) far as Google’s concerned, the more sites hosting ads the better, so if anyone needs to be sucking up to anyone it’s Google to Automattic.

But then people started bitching in the comments about Matt’s pagerank and I had a thought.

I pride myself on my complete ignorance of SEO and Google algorithms, so maybe somebody else could tell me: if links to wordpress.org are frequently found amongst spam links in people’s footers, could this impact adversely on their standing in Google? Obviously, the last thing Matt wants would be another blacklisting.

Even if this is not so, isn’t it the case that hanging out with spam links in people’s footers might adversely affect ‘the WordPress brand’?

This is how it is. Sponsored themes are to WordPress what splogs are to Blogger. They are endemic, and they make you look tacky. If a large proportion of WP-powered blogs boast spam links in the footer along with the ‘Powered by WordPress’ tag, there’s a risk that people are going to associate WP with spammy links. Worse than that: most people aren’t at all clear about the distinction between wordpress.org and wordpress.com (primarily because they’re both called wordpress), so it’s hurting .com’s image too. And Matt’s trying to build a brand here. He wants to evoke ‘high quality blogs’ in a splog-free environment. Sponsored themes are undermining that goal, therefore they must go.

I think this is the right thing to do, so I’m going to do it whether it’s popular or not.

And I think that puts to rest any notion anyone might still have that this is being done for the benefit of the community. It’s not about protecting naive newbie users who are scared of touching footer.php, it’s about protecting Automattic’s precious brand, and not a community which has no stake in its value.

We may not have a date for the introduction of the Adsense widget yet, but hey, at least we have a price point:

Mullenweg plans to allow users to add Google’s AdSense to their blogs. But will this open the floodgates to sploggers? “Part of the WordPress brand is high-quality blogs, and we’re not going to do anything to damage that. We have an extraordinary number of really high-quality blogs, and some of them could do quite well with AdSense,” says Mullenweg. “We plan to make it a paid upgrade, at least $15 (£7.45) a year per blog, and our policies on splogs or spammy content aren’t going to change.”

Pretty much what I was predicting this time last year, then.

I’m still not quite sure why it’s still so much more important to keep the media informed than your users. Or, indeed, the people who give up their time to answer the users when they ask what your policies are, because you can’t be bothered to tell them when they sign up. Now the good news is out, I’m sure they’ll be delighted to tell people that if they wait a few weeks and give Automattic $15, they’ll get what they want. (My money is on another WordCamp announcement). And that, for future reference, if you want to know what’s going to happen on wordpress.com you need to be reading The Guardian rather than the news blog.

Mostly, I want to know whether the anticipated extra revenue from this move means that Automattic will no longer be slapping their own Google ads on people’s blogs without telling them about it. I’m not expecting an answer to that, either.

My comment on this went mysteriously missing (and no, the moderation excuse won’t cut it this time — it showed up as soon as I posted it, then its existence was concealed by a (0) on the index page even though it was still on the post page, today it has gone entirely). Never mind, we’re used to this by now. This is what it said:

Before WordCamp all sponsored themes should be removed from themes.wordpress.net.

Is this you publically ordering Thomas to do it, or have you already taken the site back under your wing?

I would kind of appreciate an answer, though I’m not holding my breath. The wording seems to me ambiguous. ‘Should’ rather than ‘will’ might imply that it’s someone else’s responsibility, but surely nobody seriously believes that theundersigned is going to sweep through four thousand themes in a week, checking and deleting them, when he hasn’t done a site update since March and there is no indication on the site itself that sponsored themes should no longer be uploaded?

My prediction is that Matt will sweep in sometime before WordCamp, wipe the whole thing and replace it with the contents of the wp-themes net repository (which, I note, is currently unreachable), throw a couple of wp.com themes in there so it looks less bare, maybe relocate to wordpress.org/extend/themes and then unveil his shiny new GPL-only official theme directory to the conference-attending masses.

I really hope this is just wild speculation on my part, because even though Thomas clearly isn’t up to the job of running the site on a day-to-day basis, that doesn’t negate the work he and others put into building it and he doesn’t deserve to be screwed over to that degree. Either way, he’s clearly not in charge anymore. Last week he was responding to demands that sponsored themes be removed with ‘Try to refrain from irresponsible comments, nobody needs your career guidance’, so no way is their removal his own decision. Evidently Matt thought he did need career guidance.

I’m really past caring about Matt’s personal vendetta against sponsored theme designers (though I still think it’s hypocritical to fulminate against sponsoring whilst being quite happy to use the fruit of it on wordpress.com). They’ve had a decent enough run, and if they’re savvy they’ll switch to developing for other platforms which actually need more themes and don’t treat designers with contempt. But I’m not sure reducing the number of easily-findable themes helps users, I’m not sure screwing over yet another volunteer helps the community, and I know that forcing themes into a GPL straitjacket, if people actually knew what the GPL entailed, would kill a lot of good, creative work at birth. I don’t know what Matt thinks is so terrible about using a beautiful CC-Attribution photo off flickr, and crediting the photographer in the footer, but in his GPL-only world it would never happen.

(Obviously, this is all the fault of the evil photographer for seeking recognition for their work. I suppose he thinks all books should be published anonymously as well.)

Yeah, ok, so you’ve saved us having to actually pay someone to take care of the .com forums for the past year and a half, but you’ve been asking too many questions about our nonexistent advertising policy so it’s time you went. Bye now. Don’t let the door slam on your way out.

I especially like ‘the amount of work and time you have put into the forums has been valuable to users’, because it clearly wasn’t valuable to staff. I get the impression that Mark has been offloading a lot of the support emails onto that new guy who’s come over from Textpattern, so maybe he’ll be modding the forums from now on. Or maybe he’ll just grab a feed of the modlook tag and rely on the other mugs to do all the work of tagging dodgy threads and warning people about inappropriate posts. You know the sad thing? They probably will. Habits are hard to break.

Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m not bothering with the ‘modlook’ tag if there are no actual mods around to look at it. And I’m not telling anyone else they need to be over at wordpress.org. And I’m not telling anyone that ads are not allowed unless they’re Automattic’s own and/or you are a Friend of Matt. Hell, I’m not telling anyone anything other than ’send a feedback’. Not staff. Not my place.