wordpress™ wank

Lucky I had the foresight to take a screenshot of my reply before it mysteriously disappeared, isn’t it?

I am going away for a couple of days, and when I come back I expect I will be leaving the forums for ever and ever and ever (again). My line has always been that I’m not interested in helping wordpress, I’m interested in helping wordpress users. It’s just that now I’m starting to think that maybe it’s not helpful in the long-term to make it easier for them to blog here.

The purpose of these forums is support.

Anyone care to explain how that snide little line telling options and timethief to piss off constituted ’support’? Or how it related to the topic of wordpress.com search? Or why I can’t modlook a locked thread?

I am so done with this crap. (Again.) See you next year.

Yes, I’m relying on screenshots now because I don’t trust the links to remain intact. (I think it would be better for all concerned if it didn’t. </hint to Mark&gt

I’m going to repeat what I said in my reply: is your email down or something? Because, leaving aside the question of whether or not that suggestion is appropriate, email is pretty much the only appropriate place for it. I don’t care if your volunteers (you know, volunteers? people who handle your support for free because you can’t afford to pay enough staff to do all of it?) are trying your patience, there’s no need to disrespect them in public. It makes everyone look lousy. Including you.

I do not agree with everything timethief says or does on the forums, but even her antagonists would have to concede she works damn hard. If sometimes she starts thinking she’s a moderator, that’s kind of an inevitable consequence of not having any regular moderators on the scene. (Having Mark on call through modlook tags is a bit like leaving the class without a supply teacher, on the basis that if they start misbehaving somebody can go and fetch the headmaster.) She’s helped a lot more people on those forums than I have, or indeed Matt has. (Matt’s limited forum contributions consist primarily of locking threads and being rude to volunteers). OK, maybe gratitude is a bit much to ask, but a modicum of professionalism? For once? Please?

Have you learned nothing from the whole drmike mess about how to treat those who work for you? No? I’m sure there are courses you could go on. Something to think about for the new year.

I really, really hope that none of Automattic’s investors run into this post about people using Akismet as a weapon against commenters who piss them off, because not only is it, well, about the potential for Akismet abuse, but there’s some seriously weird stuff going on in the comments with Matt pretending to be somebody else (or somebody else pretending to be Matt), and Mark saying to ignore it, and the blogger not believing that either of them are kosher because if they were, wouldn’t they do the professional thing and email him? Certainly they wouldn’t be running around making each other look stupid.

This time of year, I just assume everyone is drunk. It explains a lot. Like the snow, which apart from being annoying makes my PC’s fan go like crazy every time it appears. (Newsflash: not everyone on the planet got a new computer for Christmas.) Or last year’s pretend sale. (It’s hilarious that a company valued at millions is still too cheap to pay me the five measly dollars it owes me, but then I suppose if they were scrupulous about such things it would be harder to amass the millions in the first place.)

drmike reports in comments that our old friend Browse Happy (you know, the link Matt refused to take off the WP dashboard even though IE6 is now an unpleasant memory that wordpress.com themes are no longer tested in? and just happened to have affiliate links to Firefox he’d ‘forgotten’ to remove? and that is now pimped in the wordpress.org footer as a one-fingered salute to all those who wanted to take the preciousss away from him? That one.)

The latest piece of propaganda Browse Happy is bringing to the masses is a hidden link in the footer to a page of Christmas recipes. How seasonal! (Sorry, did I say ‘bringing to the masses’? I meant ‘bringing to Google’.)

Of course Matt would never make the elementary mistake of not keeping his code up to date in order to secure it from spammers like the people who did Al Gore’s site, nor would he ever put lucrative hidden links on one of his collection of high-PR domains, so this is very puzzling indeed. Perhaps it is a mass hallucination brought about by a collective desire for homemade holiday treats?

I was offline yesterday, so now you get the post I would have made then about the wordpress.com front page being hijacked by spammers.

Here’s the thread, wherein a broken link to a Vietnamese music site appears in place of the support tab. Everyone says ‘uh oh, ads’. (It says much for the way advertising has been handled on wordpress.com — you know, the half-truths and evasions and omissions and general all-around sneakiness — that everyone’s immediate reaction is ‘uh oh, ads’.)

Mark’s explanation is that something got through translation that should not have, and I see that the translation system was being ‘improved’ and locked to users on the 10th and 11th. So my guess is that a hole was being sewn up to prevent further spam attempts through that vector (even if it was impossible to post a successful spam link, broken ones are not especially attractive either), though I seem to remember drmike being sceptical about the translation excuse on the unofficial mu forums. (That thread is inaccessible now, anyone know why?)

My other observation is that it’s actually really strange that we trust wordpress on security more than on ads, given their previous record in this field, and that the possibility of an attack didn’t occur to the original poster or the people who replied to him. Do you think we’ve been led into automattically assuming that the powers that be are so all-powerful that everything which happens on their servers comes directly from them? Have the inhabitants of wp.com been institutionalised?

In response to Nathan Rice’s bitching about the deadness of themes.wordpress.net, Matt provides ‘a quick update for those wondering when you’ll be able to add new themes or update existing ones’ which somehow completely fails to address the question of when we’ll be able to add new themes or update existing ones.

We all know Matt thinks theme designers are morons, but that’s kind of breathtaking in its audacity.

I will answer the question: if he had even the vaguest idea of when this stuff might be finished or even whether it’s achievable, he’d have said. We are certainly talking months rather than weeks, and you’d be a fool to discount ‘never’. My guess is that if the relaunch happens it will be in conjunction with the second phase of the wp.com marketplace (only GPL themes permitted, you have the option whether you want to offer your theme for sale on wp.com when you upload the zip) and I’d wouldn’t expect to see that before mid-2008.

My advice to theme producers and, more importantly, consumers is to forget about themes.wordpress.net. If you’re keeping up-to-date with your wordpress installations, downloading a theme that’s at least six months old and doesn’t support tagging is ever so slightly counter-intuitive. Find another directory, pick something you like and download it from the author’s site; that’s going to be the latest version and the least likely to contain random crap in the footer.

If you’re one of the designers with outdated and insecure themes on there, report them. I can’t promise they’ll take them down, but it’s worth a go. If you’re scouting for excuses, there’s a handy security hole which is Kubrick-derived so should be in more themes than not.

Having plundered everything they could from its code and staff, Six Apart have offloaded the troublesome Livejournal onto some Russians. (The latest incident? Outrage over user flagging of mature content. You know, like wordpress.com has had for, like, ever.)

Let that be a warning to you, kiddies: whine too much and you’ll be sent to the gulag.

Yes, I can totally see why Six Apart felt the community was more trouble than it was worth, and it’s not like they were particularly commited to the site in the first place (I remember having to nag to get userpics accounted for in the Style Contest, which was really for MT/Typepad with LJ tagged on as an afterthought). But as an LJ user? Wow, I feel so unwanted. And, it goes without saying, I don’t trust SUP. I see even more ads and even less privacy in my LJ future.

Oh well, at least the guy who runs Insanejournal is happy. Every cloud…