wordpress™ wank

Further highlights from the Thread That Nobody Is Reading Anymore:

• The hasty rewriting of the FAQ in order to accommodate the right of staff to filch your username any time they feel like it [gestures vaguely in direction of 'recent comments' widget]
• drmike directs us to another trac ticket which does not require any commentary, really. You should be able to guess what sort of pattern it is going to take by the fact that I am linking to it. I love how links that Matt wants to keep are always really trivial and unimportant and a waste of everyone’s precious time to even be discussing, yet links Matt wants gone are the subject of passionate campaigns across multiple high-traffic sites. Odd, that.
• our new friend Steve (I assume it is the same one based on his flexible approach to grammar) shows up late to the party, having already commented on my post about him back over at photomatt. I did try to explain, for future reference, that most people respond to blog posts by either a) commenting on said blog post or b) writing about it on their own blog and trackbacking, and that option c) blogging about it in the comment threads of third parties, is generally considered poor form. But sadly this did not get past the Great Firewall of Photomatt, which is fair enough.

  I do actually feel quite bad about posting that, because 90% of the time when I pop the ‘idiocy’ tag on a post I am mocking the stupidity of clever people, who should know better. Mocking the stupidity of stupid people is just a cheap, mean, easy laugh, and I sincerely apologise to anyone whom it may have offended. Onward and upward.

[claims victory]

[admits yeah, ok, it wasn't her, it was techcrunch, but hey, still victory]

[notes presence of wordpress.org/extend/themes and absence of themes.wordpress.net]

[thinks it is probably safe, after six weeks of inactivity, to declare the latter dead.]

[will just plug the idea one last time, so Matt can claim it was a democratic decision by the community rather than because he was fed up of getting called a hypocrite.]

[goes to bed]

I don’t suppose anyone’s still reading the comments over on that Techcrunch article which calls out Matt for not wanting anyone other than himself to make money out of open source, but there’s a guy over there going nuts because his wordpress.com username got hijacked for an Automattic staff member without them bothering to ask whether they could have it.

WTF? If you’re a staff member and the username you want is already taken, suck it up and deal with it like the rest of us have to. If I were to contact support and say ‘hey, you know what, Kate isn’t being used, can I have it please?’ I very much doubt I would get any joy. Not even if I could provide documentary evidence that my name was Kate. (Which it isn’t, it’s just a random name. I could just as easily have gone for Emily or Rebecca.)

And you know why you have that policy? Other than it being too much trouble to faff around with the database? And other than the fact that they might be using the username for the API key or to read their friend’s private blog? Because of the risk that the original owner might be a raving drama queen who promptly accuses the new holder of the username of trying to steal their identity. That is why. I think it very unlikely that Nikolay really is hacking into his namesake’s Twitter account; but if you’ve already illustrated that your company can’t be trusted, he hasn’t got much reason to believe your denials.

(Also, did the controversy over Scoble’s Specialness not clue you into the fact that people really don’t appreciate it when staff and their friends don’t have to abide by the same restrictions as the proles? Why do I have to keep spelling this stuff out?)

Is this for real? Are Automattic actually so lacking in spine that they need their community to tell them how to handle third-party attempts to censor their content?

This bit worries me:

The number of our attempts to inform and warn you regarding these defamation blogs must have been at least twenty, many times through your support page, a couple of times to your legal department and we even sent a regular mail to Mr. Matt Mullenweg. Most of our attempts were unanswered.

Guess what? Ignoring complaints, even if you think they are groundless, even if they are coming out of repressive states with a dodgy record on human rights, even if they are about blogs in a language you can’t read, doesn’t make them go away. You hire a translator and give the translations to your lawyers. You tell the complainants you are doing this. If the blogs are in violation of US law and/or the ToS, they come down and the bloggers are informed of your commitment to upholding US law and/or the ToS. If they are not, they remain in place and the complainants are informed of your commitment to free speech.

It worries me that Matt seems to think there is a decision to be made by anyone other than the lawyers.

Even if your entire Turkish community were to cry out with one voice ‘take down those pesky blogs, so we can get back to writing about cars without having to faff about with proxies!’ it makes no difference one way or the other to the legality of the content. We should not need to have a poll on this. And I should not need to be spelling these things out.

And another thing: who is this apparently blogless ‘Steve’ guy spamming Matt’s comments whining that he can’t download or install MT, offering to provide a new admin interface for 2.3 and telling Matt to split the development team into departments including ‘art and interface’?

Isn’t it the cutest thing ever? And don’t you feel bad that he’s going to be so cruelly disillusioned in the very near future?

Never mind. Maybe he’ll get to be a moderator or something.

Maybe other companies would be more willing to adopt WXR as a standard if the specs existed somewhere other than inside Matt’s head?

OK, so they should be smart enough to reverse-engineer it, but really, if you’ve just invented your own flavour of RSS and you want people other than yourself to use it, documenting it would seem to be the smart thing to do. Otherwise, they’re just going to go off, make their own version, and then bitch at you for not using their special flavour, which is superior to yours in at least thirteen ways which they are now going to enumerate for you.

(Actually, they’re probably going to do that anyway. That is what the world of feed formats is like.)

I want the right to post cat macros in my own damn comments. You pop an ‘img’ quicktag above the comment editor and then continue to strip my images? One, this alone is moronic. Two, I am the admin, and I can post as many images as I like, yet you don’t trust me enough to let post them in my own comments? This is lame and makes no sense.

(I still sort of think it would be the funniest thing ever if even a tiny portion of the livejournal fandom refugees wound up here, posting porn and bitching about the ToS. Though of course we only get one icon, so this will never happen.)

No, this isn’t my post on the Sandbox competition results. That’s probably coming, though. (It’s going to involve the word ‘paradigm’. Be warned.) No, this is about Automattic’s latest attempt to tell us how to categorise our posts.

You know, when I look at the most popular tags on the front page, I don’t see ‘Cars’ or ‘Business’. I see ‘Music’. I see ‘Books’. I see ‘Food’. Apparently Automattic don’t see these topics, or think they are important enough to merit their own ‘department’, and would prefer for us to tag such posts as ‘Entertainment’ (books are entertaining, right? along with music and tv and movies and celebrity gossip and games and concerts and theatre and I don’t know, did I miss anything that can’t be shoved under that header so as to further deprive the tag system of any usefulness?). Or ‘Family’, presumably, for ‘Food’, because, you know, families eat. Obviously too many people are writing about music already. We need to encourage them to write about cars.

I was puzzled by this for approximately thirty seconds before I realised that a post on ‘Cars’, linked from the front page so as to capture some of that random traffic from the cookie-free masses, is going to have higher paying ads than one tagged ‘Art’.

Just as every wordpress-related decision nowadays is made in the interests of wordpress.com, so every wordpress.com-related decision is made in the interests of increasing revenue. There is nothing wrong with this, of course. They’re a business. Making money is their job, and if they can’t do it properly then all of us on wordpress.com are screwed. So it’s in everyone’s interests to make this look like a place where middle-class American men chunter on about cars and finance and technology, rather than one where people chat about unprofitable things like culture.

Allow me another thirty seconds in which to be depressed by this, please, before moving on?

By my fairly arbitrary reckoning, the BBH quotient is nine and a bit (score 1 if your big header is blue, score 0 if it’s not, 0.1 if your header is 10% blue, etc.) This works out at about one in five. I haven’t got stats for themes.wordpress.net because I can’t really be bothered, but I’d imagine it’s not much different.

I’m not bitching about this, seeing as how I’m personally responsible for 0.75 of a BBH. Sorry everyone. Sometimes the lure of conformity gets to be too much.

A surprising number of people seem to have gone down the imageless route. I don’t know whether this is because they’ve been influenced by Scott’s minimalist ethos, or because minimalism is the Next Big Thing, or because it’s difficult and time-consuming to source GPL pictures and icons and therefore easier not to bother.

Trying to get an answer on whether and when the wp.com version will be updated to accommodate these new skins remains akin to extracting haemoglobin from granite, seeing as how feedback is closed so Mark can go on holiday. I suppose feedback was always more of a beta thing anyway, not to mention being buggy, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it never returns. Yay, more traffic for the forums to handle without the benefit of a moderator. (Staff wandering in once a day if they feel like it? Doesn’t count.) If people come in with broken stuff, I don’t know what we’re supposed to tell them now that ’send a feedback’ is out and the ‘contact support ‘form is down because it happens not to be office hours on the east coast. (This actually inconveniences people on the east coast more than anyone else, unless they’re all blogging on company time. They may be.)

‘Try again in a few weeks’ seems the best option. Or ‘move to another host’.