wordpress™ wank

Alas, my comment on Prologue was deleted for insufficient quantities of ‘OMG u r AWESOME!!!’, so here it is in full:

I know releasing themes is a new thing for Automattic, but I’m not sure SVN is really the most convenient way of doing it. Most theme authors use zips. It seems to work quite well.

Not mentioning the lack of an official theme respository to distribute it was really hard, but, you know, I need to accept the fact that themes.wordpress.net is dead and let it rest in peace.

Here is the latest on ads:

advertising helps pay to keep WordPress.com running. Hiding ads puts our ability to provide free hosting at risk.

Um, if people have the ABILITY to hide ads, that means they are PAYING you.

By all means insist that $15 for the custom CSS doesn’t cover what you’re making from the ads on their blogs (though I suspect you won’t, because the obvious question after that is ‘how much money are you making from my content, then?’) but please don’t pretend that $15 a year is ‘free’.

Except for when it is. I recently checked ntuat.wordpress.com and found it had reverted to the default sandbox style after the upgrade expired, in spite of Mark’s previous assurances that it wouldn’t.What actually happens is that although the CSS is ‘retained’ in the system (it’s still saved in the textarea and you can preview it), it is no longer displayed on your blog. I was actually OK with that, since I bought the upgrade long before that thread and assumed at the time that it would cease to work after a year. Not to mention the fact that a one-time charge of $15 for a skin that could remain in place indefinitely would leave paid themes dead in the water. But anyway, he apologised and generously issued me with 15 credits. Yay! So life on wordpress.com is not an endless cycle of incompetence and gloom, after all.

(I haven’t actually applied them yet. I did think about using them over here, but I’m not quite ready for the pain of getting stuff to work for drmike in Netscape. Plus it is sort of wrong to have a custom-CSS-promoting blog that doesn’t actually use custom CSS. I’m going to try and get some skins done over the next few weeks so it doesn’t go to waste.)

Well, OK, it’s not going to be bbpress.com. bbpress.com is taken, as is bbpress.net. This is just as well since, let’s be honest, the name ‘bbpress’ sucks almost as much as the product. No, it’s going to be TalkPress, currently home to a delightful phpBB installation, which if nothing else will teach them about COPPA declarations:

This is clearly hyperbole, as phpBB is a bloated piece of crap which is only about twice as good as bbPress, but in addition to COPPA maybe they will be able to figure out stuff like thread-splitting and post counts from it.

This will actually work. If you’re looking for a reliable free forum, you’re not in a position to quibble about features; you take what you can get. Plus of course it will be plugged over here in the manner of signmyguestbook.com on diaryland back in the day, when pretty much every diarylander had an smg account to match. The forums themselves will look like hell, of course, all massive fonts and unnecessary whitespace, but they’ll probably allow colour customisation and custom headers, plus the ads won’t be as conspicuous as on the average free host, so your average Snow Lover will be in clover. bbPress can’t compete on the self-hosted front — it remains a toy for dedicated fanboys and career moderators — so this is a smart move.

Since I have now been re-unpersoned, could somebody pop into this thread and pass on my apologies that she cannot hide her tagegories because ul#catlist fails to exclude the ‘Categories’ label and div.postinfo nukes her commentlink and does not in any case include the tags, which are in a

without a class and include a random
even though the doctype is XHTML 1.0 trans and this platform is supposed to be in love with semantics.

(You don’t have to go into that much detail, just say ‘no, they definitely DO NOT WANT you hiding global tagegories in Ocean Mist.’)

Also, Lunarpages popularity contest finals! I’m really just happy to have engineered my way into the final, all I ask now is that you please do not vote for anything with a blue header. Unless it is Modern Magic, which I have decreed acceptable because of the presence of pink.

Ah, they’re all celebrating being millionaires.

Whose brilliant idea was it to start rolling in the new admin on the day that thousands of randoms would be arriving to check the site out and staff would be off drinking having one of their meetups? Would it be the same person who thought breaking the .org forums on the day 2.0 was released was a good plan?

It kind of scares me that people with millions of dollars to chuck around think this is a safe direction to throw it. Stuff breaks, yeah. But this spectacularly? When will people have bought enough upgrades for this not to be a venue for beta testing anymore?

Everything on the forums has gone to hell. A whole bunch of people have been marked inactive (lettershometoyou, thesacredpath, carocat, universalgeni, lots of randoms), Trent has been demoted, and I’m not sure I believe this can be entirely due to the botched implementation of the new login page, because why would that screw with people’s status on the forums?

(btw, my screenshots look odd because at the point where I was banned I was working on a custom stylesheet to make it look more like a forum and less like a blog. I haven’t bothered to finish it but I haven’t bothered to disable it either.)

I did not have any trouble logging in at all. But then, I was already blocked from forum posting. Make of that what you will.

Has everyone else noticed the recent flurry of forum posts about being excluded from global tags? Either something’s broken or there’s a serious crackdown going on. Conspiracy theorists may wish to dissect the following Mattquote:

Things may or may not show up on the tags pages based on a variety of factors, many of which we can’t talk about. I wouldn’t worry about it too much.

One of these things of which we cannot speak, presumably, is that global tags don’t work for future-dated posts, which turned out to be the solution to the poster’s question, and neatly much disproves to the argument that volunteer support sucks and staff always know best. (Sometimes volunteers are better placed to give an answer, because they actually blog here on a daily basis and are not afraid to say that something is a bug.)

Oh, and speaking of things of which we cannot speak, staff have admitted that ‘[b]logs created by young children outnumber mature blogs many times over’. OK, there goes your COPPA deniability. I hope you took legal advice before doing that. Or at least checked that Matt was happy to pay the fine.

You know the Adsense upgrade Matt was running around telling the media about last summer without a word to the actual users? Well, their latest member of staff appears to know nothing about it, and a guy asking about revenue splits is being ignored (never mind, eh? at least there’s a ‘better tone’ in there now). And while there are multiple strings relating to the theme marketplace already in the translation system (here, have a screenshot), not to mention an as-yet-unlinked-to page on the news blog regurgitating the stuff on Matt’s blog, on the adsense upgrade? Nothing.

Speculation is invited on why this has been put on hold. Has the second round of investment rendered it unnecessary? Do they now think they can get the revenue from selling themes instead? Have they twigged that ‘no ads’ is such a good selling point (in spite of not being true) that allowing users to display their own ads might actually cost them signups? Are they worried that they’ll make a net loss if people opt-out of having ads on their blogs? (I have no idea whether ads displayed to Google searchers on a moderately high-traffic blog would bring in more than $15 a year, but it seems probable.)

My money is on the first. That is why I put it first. I still don’t feel that theme-selling is motivated as much by money (the market for paid non-unique themes that look and behave like free non-unique themes is really not that large) as it is with gaining leverage over the manufacture and distribution of themes.

Now, this cannot possibly be a serious attempt at providing support, since wordpress.com’s target audience (i.e. people who can’t spell FTP) are not going to be comfortable on IRC in a zillion years.

So either it’s intended as a replacement for the off-topic forum or it’s a place for staff to chat about who to ban next. Whatever. I’m starting to tire of this particular trainwreck. It’s all a bit staged. I had one of my epiphanies over in adam’s comments, wherein I realised that the good people of Automattic are clearly addicted to these little flamewars, else why would they provoke them and go on provoking them? OK, part of it’s so that people will run around slagging them off and consequently look so bad that the decision to ban them is retrospectively justified (they pulled the same trick on that guy whose username they stole, winding him up to such an extent that he started to sound like the unreasonable one). And part of it’s to make the remaining forum regulars feel so unwelcome that they’ll leave without having to be ‘asked‘.

(Of course, nobody ever requested that I stop making forum posts, they just stopped me making them. It’s not a lie, though. It’s merely a redefinition of the verb ‘to ask’.)

But also? It’s a break from the routine. Maybe it makes them feel a little more edgy, a little less corporate. It makes a weird sort of sense that if you’re being forced to make your support operation more professional and less personal, you should take the sting out of the sellout by doing it as personally and amateurishly as you possibly can.

I’m slightly annoyed with myself for playing into their hands.

Oh, Design Vitality threw some themes up for people to vote on. [dies of shock]

They had seven whole entries, so obviously it was worth making the deadline a moveable feast. Voting closes on Monday, but since I gave up on this one before I even entered it, I’m not going to beg for votes again. If for some unlikely reason you wish to own your own copy of Auric (perhaps you are addicted to sidebars and/or bling) don’t download it from them, download it from me, for they have of course added their own link to the footer and very Matt-unfriendly it looks too.

Would it count as volunteering if I were to write an article about .com-specific things that theme designers should take account of if they’re planning on exploiting people’s stupidity by selling them the right to use free themes participating in the theme marketplace? (I’m thinking big blue navbar, avatars, proprietary widgets, global tagegories, the smiley, ads…) My concern is that most theme designers are unfamiliar with wordpress.com, and I don’t have a lot of faith in Automattic’s willingness to volunteer this information. What they’ll do instead is say ‘oh, we’ll sort that out for you’, but I’m not sure everyone would be happy to hand control over something like comment avatar display to a bunch of people who are into unstyled forms and big teal buttons. On the one hand, I’m disinclined to help the carpetbaggers. On the other, people who pay for ‘premium’ themes are entitled to expect something designed with wordpress.com in mind, rather than wordpress.org themes which have been hacked about a bit by staff. I don’t know. Meh.