ecstatic sheep
September 7, 2007 
Beep beep! Plugin heading for core alert!
Seriously, would a trivial, limited-appeal feature like word count have a cat in hell’s chance of getting into core if it wasn’t an Automattic production? OK, so it’s nice if you’re doing Nanowrimo, or if you’re one of those people so enamoured of useless information you need three sidebars just to hold your chatboxes and weatherpixies, but I’m thinking you’re a minority.
Also, is it me, or does Matt now only approve comments on the news blog if they sound like the bleatings of an ecstatic sheep?
Is there a limit to the number of words one can write for a .com post? If not, who really cares how many words it takes before they enter a deep rooted paranoia, etc.? If you’re really concerned about the exact number of words your post has so that you don’t put your readers to sleep, maybe you should focus more on the content of the post itself. If people (not me) can read all 5,000+ pages of the Harry Potter series and stay awake, then word count really doesn’t matter. Thanks for bringing this new development to our notice.
Sorry to add another comment, but here’s one from that post that doesn’t sound so ecstatic.
And of course the movie Blog Runner was based on the book Do Automattic Dream of Ecstatic Sheep?
The unspoken agenda in the word count is that it is good for gaming the search engines.
And the news blog is not only heavily moderated – it is lazily moderated. Witness the critical *Why WP is blocked in Turkey* thread. I have had comments in mod for days.
I’m actually amazed that single space in front of paragraphs comment was allowed. Fairly tame though.
Note that Matt weighed in on it as positive so we’re stuck with it, even though most folks ‘-1′ it in trac.
2Andrew:
Kipple, as we know, drives out nonkipple. such as an unobtrusive update notifications, for instance.
and I’d rather think here about such Sheeps, which being under heavy hypnotic dream, could always be easlily convinced by Napoleon/Squealer that: “Four legs good, two legs better!”