i am officially a sucker

Apparently, wordpress.com is still pimping our blogs with six ads per page.

I am furious with myself for letting Matt fob me off with his ‘bug’ excuse. Now I re-read the email, of course, I notice the conspicuous lack of any promise to fix the ‘mistake’. Or, indeed, any indication that it’s being worked on. Or any suggestion that it will be monitored in future. And I note that a tasteful display of ads is only a ‘goal’. Well, people fall short of their goals all the time, don’t they? Especially when falling short of them brings in extra money.

I thought I was at risk of getting too cynical, but obviously I haven’t been cynical enough. I also thought I was beyond being disappointed, but actually, yeah, I’m disappointed.

I am probably the least trusting user wordpress.com has. I gave them the benefit of the doubt on this one thing and I turned out to be wrong. That may make me a sucker, but what does it make them?

you didn’t expect not to be punished, did you?

Following the phoning-home debacle, Matt, unsurprisingly, wants to kill wp-hackers. Or, at any rate, cut off its balls and allow access only to his friends ‘those who have made substantive contributions to the codebase’.

Everyone immediately starts debating whether the list should become a forum / become a newsgroup / be split up into separate lists / have moderators, as if it actually mattered what they thought. Bless. Once, the coders were more important than the docs writers and the support volunteers and the themers and the lowly bloggers who just use the thing, but now they’re just nobodies like the rest of us. I hope whoever ran off and tattled to Slashdot feels suitably contrite, now the toys are going to be taken away.

it’s not what you know, it’s how many of you know it

One day of Slashdotting and hey presto, we have a privacy policy.

It takes me months to get that sort of result.

[sulks.]

WP, phone home

The day before 2.3 is due to be released, hell breaks loose on wp-hackers as they fail to see why update notifications require Automattic to grab blog urls. Matt explains that they already know your blog url because they’ve been forcing you to ping Ping-O-Matic for years, and anyway it could be useful in the future. (Collecting information when you don’t really know what you want to do with it but you’re sure you’ll think of something? Yeah. That’s going to assauge people’s paranoia.) Hackers point out that Ping-O-Matic isn’t taking notes of what plugins and version numbers they’re using. Matt tells them if you don’t like it, fork. (I cannot be the only person who thinks this response is beginning to sound a little tired.) In response to pressure from Mark Jaquith, Matt racks his brains to think of something he could use the urls for in the future and comes up with some stuff about tying offsite blogs more closely into .org (He’s really not proving that good at this assuaging paranoia thing, is he?)

Doug Stewart’s explanation of how this isn’t going to play well with Techcrunch naturally goes unaddressed, because there isn’t really anything you can argue with:

If TechCrunch, Engadget, Slashdot, Kuro5hin, Linux Today, Ars Technica, etc. get wind that WordPress is “phoning home” and not notifying users that it is doing so (with some explanation as to the full ramifications), well, I think Six Apart’s recent issues with Open Sourcing MT 4 are going to look like a tempest in a teapot. Your reputation is something that is extremely difficult to build up, fairly difficult to maintain and EXTREMELY easy to lose very quickly.

Well, ok, I’m not sure about that last bit since the fanboys have been extraordinarily forgiving in the past, but I’m sure Six Apart could tell you that the more devoted the fans are to start with, the nastier they get when they think you’re screwing them over.

I don’t, as it happens, think this issue is as huge as they’re making out. If you’re so worried about security that you think people are going to hack into the wordpress.org database to find out what plugins you’re using, then why are you still downloading software in which holes are found every month from a server which was compromised earlier this year? And if you’re so worried about privacy, why are you using software that has a long-established history of ‘phoning home’ through hotlinked images and default pings? The majority of wordpress users are, by definition, fairly indifferent to privacy and security.

And the other thing is that, selfishly, I find it really hard to care what crap goes into 2.3 because I have no intention of having anything to do with it. Well, maybe some light theme testing, but it’s not something I’ll ever use. My main problem these days is deciding between Textpattern, MT and Habari.

also, don’t you just love how they only add shit when support is shut?

As predicted, tags are here.

As could also have been predicted, they’re a mess.

Nobody has bothered to explain, either in the announcement or in the faq, whether the ‘global tags’ pages are going to be, in fact, global tags, or whether they are going to continue to be global categories (and change their name accordingly), or whether they are going to pull from both (and, if so, what they are going to do about duplicates). Nobody has bothered to explain whether tags get auto-submitted to technorati or whether this is still the job of categories. Apparently tags aren’t showing up in themes. Lorelle also tells us that post tag links will be internal but post category links will continue to be external. If true, this behaviour is precisely the opposite of what most users would expect: most of us would define a tag as an external, mob-folksonomical term which you use in order to connect with what other people have had to say on the same subject, whilst a category is a recurring topic within your own blog. I have no problem with my TAG links sending people to global TAGS. My category links, however, should stay within my blog.

Basically, because of the lazy way they tried to pass categories off as tags, they can’t now do a sensible, intuitive implementation of tags because it would take too much functionality away from categories. What would make most sense would be the option to automatically convert all categories on archive posts to tags which would link into the global TAGS system, and then let people decide whether they want to continue to use both, or just categories (keeping them out of global tags), or just tags (avoiding redundancy and page clutter).

I’d guess, though, that any such automated process would be far too great a weight for the servers to bear, even if people did have to choose to activate it. Plus, of course, making a clear distinction between categories and tags would a) draw attention to what a godawful mess the taggification of categories was and b) be insufficiently confusing for users. So that’s out.

So: is there any point in tags at all? I mean, presumably if they were getting fed to global tags or technorati surely they’d have mentioned that, as an incentive to get people to use them. But the notion of them being purely internal is boggling my brain, because that’s not what tagging is for. I have to conclude that they are here simply because they are in 2.3 and ignore them accordingly. Can I have an option to collapse the input field, please?

immense brokenness

We are having a day of immense brokenness, including but by no means limited to such luminaries as Lorelle and engtech being informed that their accounts are suspended and being unable to log in.

My assumption is that a shitload of 2.3 code is getting rolled in, but it would be really nice if somebody had had the courtesy to post on the news blog (and the forums, and the status blog we ought to have but don’t) something to the effect of ‘hey guys, we’re doing a code push over the weekend so we can bring you some kewl new features, things may be broken for a bit.’ It doesn’t take long. It reassures people that it’s not just them. It makes sure they don’t try to do anything important while the system is in flux. And it demonstrates consideration for your users. I hope the applicants for the support job are watching and learning.

morally offensive

Apparently, it’s not enough to licence your plugins as GPL anymore. If Matt doesn’t like the look of your site, it’s not going in the official repository regardless of the licence.

I’m not sure that the plugin in question is illegal — it just looks like a cache plugin to me — but clearly Matt is morally offended by it. Maybe there are ASCII nekkid ladies in the readme? No, actually he just seems affronted by the fact the guy is selling enhanced versions of said plugin. What, does Plugin Guy not read Techcrunch? Putting a pricelist on your site and expecting Matt to approve you is just stupid.

I’m a little worried about the precedent this sets, though, if uploads ever do get re-enabled on the theme viewer. If an author links to a site offering themes for sale, will they be banned from uploading? What if they offer paid services? What if they have too many ads for Matt’s liking? What if he thinks their site just looks a bit spammy? What if they have sites he doesn’t like in their blogroll? What if they fail to fill their required quota of pixels in the blue/green part of the spectrum?

unhappiness engineering

Oh, and the .org forums are still definitely in need of a Happiness Engineer. Pronto.

Every time I see somebody on the .com forums getting sent to .org, I kind of want to tell them not to go there. These people don’t even know where they’re hosted, and we’re directing them to a place where sarcastic geeks roam free. It seems unnecessarily cruel. And eventually, yeah, somebody’s going to realise that having two domains called wordpress with two separate support forums is hopelessly confusing for newbies and everything is going to get .commed, but until then, this is how it works: hopelessly confused newbie registers on .com forums, asks question, waits around while volunteers try to extract from them whether or not they are actually hosted here, gets sent on to .org, has to re-register, asks question, then crosses their fingers hoping they don’t end up on the list of no-replies.

Actually, I think we lose most of them on the way to .org. Maybe they resolve the problem by themselves. Maybe they get there, look around and run away. Maybe they decide this WordPress thing is way too complicated and they’re better off on myspace.

Of course, Automattic don’t care what goes down on .org, or whether self-hosters manage to find it, because that’s not where the money is. If anyone complains that you’re being rude on the .com forums, you’ll be kicked to the kerb; wordpress.com users need to be kept around for stats and clickthroughs and potential upgrade dollars. If these are not paying customers, they are at least potential paying customers, and their blogs a means of attracting paying customers. The value of your unpaid labour is not worth risking the reputation of wordpress.com, particularly since there are always others waiting in the wings to take over your duties.

But you can say what you like to wordpress.org users and keep your moderator powers, since Automattic don’t stand to make any money out of those people and anyway, they should be able to look after themselves. Not to mention the fact that there’s a distinct shortage of volunteers robust enough to handle the atmosphere for longer than a week at a time. The moral is, if you wish to demonstrate your lack of grace and patience, choose your forum carefully.

slow start

via drmike in comments comes news that Automattic have finally realised that support for a million users + whoever has been suckered into paying for their executive service is too much for one person (unless of course they have learned to function without sleep). Also, possibly, that restricting official support to West Coast office hours barely constitutes a service at all as far as large proportions of their community are concerned. I am glad to see that ‘patience and grace’ are required, presumably not so much for coping with customers as for being a dutiful underling and not bitching in public when you get overruled by the benevolent dictator.

I bet Trent is secretly a bit miffed they felt the need to advertise, though.

I am very slightly worried that it is mid-September and they are still ‘gearing up for a similarly exciting 2007′. That’s what I’d call a slow start.

wheels spinning

More theme-related kvetching. You know, I’d post this stuff on the news blog itself if I thought it had a chance of getting past moderation.

We made a minor change to the theme that should help with IE when the sidebar content is too wide.

Translation: we threw up a theme that breaks when you put anything wider than 150px into the sidebar, without taking into account that at least one of our widgets is wider than 150px. Sorry, we just assumed that nobody cool enough to use this theme would be using that skanky apology for a browser. Hell, we’re so cool we can’t even bear to use it for testing.

There is no tag line, nor an option to change colours. That’s just how the theme was made.

OK, I get that you don’t want to mess with the sacred blue/green. Takes too long, and imagine if somebody wanted to make it pink. But if you try to tell me that you can’t take two minutes to chuck in and style the blog description because it would compromise the original designer’s vision too much, I’m going to have to laugh at you.

The best place to request new themes is on the forum.

Um, why? Apart from the fact that you don’t want them emailed to staff? It’s not like staff ever respond to those threads or actually install any of the themes requested. I’ve not seen a single forum post asking for Digg 3 column, but there are two separate threads asking for iTheme. If staff paid any attention to forum requests, iTheme would either have been implemented or somebody would have explained that it’s technically unsuitable for the setup we have here. I don’t care whether they add iTheme or not. I just find it slightly irritating that they’re passing these requests on to unpaid volunteers who don’t actually have the power to do anything about them. Half the time, said requests are going to get passed right back to staff anyway, seeing as how they’re the only people who can do anything about them. I know I am not the only person who finds this situation ridiculous.

If you don’t have time to take user suggestions on board, that’s fine. Most hosts don’t. I know it sounds so much nicer to say you’re open to ideas, just the same as it’s so much nicer to let people believe you don’t serve ads, but niceness isn’t everything. Honesty works sometimes too.