more from our new spam overlords

OK, who decided that spamming multiple threads with the same chunk of ungrammatical copy/pasted text was a good way for Sphere to handle the fallout on this latest messy little linkbuilding scam?

Was it the same person who thought it would be best if Matt didn’t disclose his affiliation with the company in the announcement post (though he seemed to think it necessary when announcing their acquisition by AOL), and kept quiet about the fact that they have at least one staff member in common?

Also, has anyone seen a Sphere logo on the ‘possibly related links’? Like global tag icons, it may be something I need to add to my skins in the interests of clarity.

eta: and here is Sphere guy promising to ‘B MOR KAREFUL’ with his grammar. I’d never have pulled him up on it if I’d realised he was an idiot. Once more I have violated my policy of not poking fun at the genuinely stupid. Along with my policy of only unleashing my Sword of Pedantry on those who mock the spelling of others. Woe.

the fundamental goodness of humanity

Dear Matt,

Since this would never make it past moderation on this post I am putting it somewhere that people other than you and I will actually have an opportunity to read it. I agree that Monotone looks all kinds of cool and clever, and people have only been asking for a photoblog theme for about two years so it is timely too. However, don’t you think it is a little bit tacky that we have to view CSS in order to find out who actually made the thing? I’ve already seen blog posts crediting it to Automattic. OK, I’m aware that more than one shoutout in a week might destroy your hard-won reputation for hating on designers, but really, would it hurt that much to mention the actual designer somewhere visible? If you don’t ‘fess up on the wordpress.com announcement post I’m going to have to blow your cover. Oh wait. I just did. And don’t think about messing with style.css. I made screenshots.

love, that girl again

P.S.: leaving your car unlocked is not a touching expression of your faith in the fundamental goodness of humanity. It’s just dumb.

definitely yet another car crash

• Engtech on how to enable locally related posts (requires the CSS upgrade). Naturally this was censored from the forums.
• Lorelle isn’t a fan. I think the main issue she and many others are having is that it looks like the links are blogger-controlled and sanctioned. Why isn’t there a ‘powered by Sphere’ label to disclose how they’re being generated? Please don’t tell me it’s Automattic’s reluctance to give credit to third-parties in action yet again. This is one mess they shouldn’t want to be claiming responsibility for.
• why don’t Automattic ever think about how their actions affect people blogging about sensitive issues? or the businesses they’re supposedly at pains to attract? What if a NSFW link turns up on a Club Penguin blog? It’s all very well to direct people to the ‘Report as mature’ or ‘Report as spam’ buttons, but by that point offence has already been taken and you’ve had to deliver the objectional site another pageview in order to report them. And what if the link is offsite? Won’t somebody think of the children?
• I’m still not seeing any related posts on this blog. At first I thought Adblock must be taking care of them, but I’ve now seen them on three other sites so that’s not it. Clearly nobody else is writing stuff related to mine and I am unique in my own little niche! Or I have been shut out of the system because somebody might take offence at my username. Whatever. I’m shutting it off pre-emptively because I’m deriving no benefit from it and it may hurt other people down the line.
• The person who decided to make this feature opt-out rather than opt-in needs to not be in a decision-making capacity anymore. Frankly I am sick of third-party providers getting to call the shots without considering the needs of users. This is a nice feature for those who want it, but it is a bloody terrible one for those who don’t. Sure, it would take longer to build up your database, and you’d end up sending more traffic outside wordpress.com in the short term, but these disadvantages would be offset by not pissing people off by inserting spam into their posts. Sometimes you should go for the less convenient option because it’s the right thing to do.
• Andy Beard wonders why the links, which are clearly search queries, aren’t no-followed. So do I. Well, no, I don’t really. I just think they should be. It isn’t especially fair or intuitive that people are dishing out PR to random unapproved links when they can’t even switch off no-follow for regular commenters.

  And if you’re up for some fresh outrage about the global tagging scam check out his post about language subdomains throwing up identical global tag pages (ht: adam, in comments). Whoa. What strikes me about this is the blatant conflict of interest on Google’s part: they’re not going to block these duplicate search pages because they’re benefiting from the ads served on them. If Automattic happened to be with another ad provider then I have no doubt Google would smack them hard. It all leaves a really unpleasant taste in my mouth.

possibly some more seo gaming

Ah, so that’s what the invisible Sphere .gif was for. I did wonder.

Isn’t calling these extra links ‘possibly related’ a really weaselly way of avoiding criticism about the inevitable crapness of their algorithms, much as calling the blog surfer ‘beta’ neatly sidesteps any obligation to make it work properly?

Obviously I will be switching off this latest pagerank-garnering device as soon as we have had an opportunity to see and mock the inevitable crapness of their algorithms. Let’s go!

[edit: wahey, either it's broken already or they haven't got around to adding it to this theme. OK, now I see why it was only possibly an announcement.]

will the last person to leave the forums please switch out the lights?

Everyone with actual power has left already:

Also, sonific died. Since they did not actually offer any music that people wanted to listen to (that is why they died), autoplay never proved to be the scourge that some of us feared. Nonetheless it is odd that wordpress.com continues to offer a widget which people have been advised to remove asap and which will cease to work a week from now.

Never mind, widgets and themes are so 2006. We’re only meant to care about gravatars now.

army of meatpuppets

Is it me, or has the ‘tone’ of the .com forums, along with the level of staff/moderator presence, significantly failed to improve since the holiday purges which were supposed to fix everything? I mean, some of the responses to user discontent with the new dashboard were just snide. And while it’s your right to refuse to rush to the aid of penguins, because the ongoing transformation of this place into MySpace really doesn’t need any extra help, this might be best accomplished by, you know, not responding to them, rather than swearing at them and feeding them wrong answers. It’s not that I abhor cruelty to penguins, more that I’ve seen others banned for less (come to think of it, I’ve seen others banned for nothing) and double standards irk me. Plus, said wrong answers sit in the archives waiting to mislead the innocent. Collateral damage, I suppose.

(To be fair, I do think language is an issue too. Mods working in a second language can come off as extremely abrupt; moshu on .org is the prime example, of course, but I’ve also see isadora come out with some things a native speaker would get ‘inactivated’ for.)

Raincoaster is safe for the time being at least. Is she the first volunteer to be publically backed up by staff when complaints are made, rather than being hung out to dry? Is she also the first volunteer to have a high-enough-traffic blog to scare them off canning her? You don’t want to be messing with people who could potentially raise an army of meatpuppets and get your unique approach to human resources mentioned on Valleywag. That would not be smart.

business v. business. that is how things work now

Perishable Press on, among other things, what is wrong with the plugin repository, and the quiet removal of the community-maintained plugin list on Codex.

I don’t need to spell out how this relates to the long slow death of themes.wordpress.net (where not even the previews work anymore) or the wider strategy of transferring control of community resources from the community to Automattic. Third-party theme repositories are thriving because everyone knows themes are an effective form of linkbuilding: add your link to every theme you redistribute, sell ads, profit! It’s not ideal from a user perspective because you get more links cluttering up your footer, but it’s ever so much better than having to rely on the moribund place your dashboard sends you to, full of broken old themes you have to evaluate on the basis of screenshots. The plugin community doesn’t have any such incentive to build its own resources; so it doesn’t happen; so if Matt happens not to like you, or your plugin, or your plugin’s licence, it’s going to be very hard for potential users to find you.

Is it just me, or does that not seem very open?

We seem to be arriving at a point where we rely purely on third-party commercial interests to create and maintain open community resources. It’s become too time and money-consuming for volunteers to do for free. And .org/extend is waaaaay at the bottom of Automattic’s priorities, because serving ads on talkpress is going to make them more money for less effort than selling themes, and plugin distribution is not going to make them anything at all. So I’m wondering whether Matt’s going to have to start rethinking his hostility to those who sell links, charge for themes, and try to profit out of wordpress without contributing a line of core code, because right now they’re keeping the theme community going. And without a theme industry, what would you have? Ye Olde Kubrick and some ancient thing Dave Shea threw together in his spare time. Impressive.

priorities

In the course of breaking everything else, they accidentally fixed global tags again. Obviously Matt fixed it as soon as he found out, gaming Google being so much more important than letting people upload images or check their spelling.

I think they will lose a few people over this dashboard thing. 150-post threads where staff do not bother responding are never good. You’d think they’d have put someone on firefighting duty, publically addressing people’s concerns and giving some vague impression that they listen to their users, even if that isn’t actually true. Clearly we are going with the SUP school of community management (’so what if a vocal minority of customers hate us? they can go cause trouble on someone else’s service’) rather than Six Apart’s (‘we’re so sorry we upset you! we love you! we’re listening! right up to the point we sell you out!’)

Fair enough. I mean, we all know they’re not going to listen to their users, so it would be disingenuous to pretend.

stilts

It’s the weekend! Hence we’re having a major upgrade!

I am, admittedly, the only person in the world who thinks the colours are an improvement on that godawful dark blue (though that blazing orange bar in the middle of the page? what were you smoking?) but we now have two different navbars and it’s messing with my brain. I used to think 1024×768 was a perfectly average resolution but no, apparently we’re a disabled minority who need to be SHOUTED at. Logging in is like having someone standing in your personal space and talking VERY LOUDLY AND DISTINCTLY. And yet the pimpage and recent activity links are teeny-tiny. If the massive fonts in the ‘Right Now’ panel are comfortable for you, those are going to be too small. Scale, people, scale. It’s all over the place.

Why can’t I move modules around? I don’t care about stats, I care about recent activity on my blogs. That was the only bit of the dashboard I ever found useful and you’ve shoved it away at the bottom. I don’t use tags, I use categories, so I want the category module somewhere I can get to it without scrolling. There’s all this empty space above the fold. They really hate 1078×768, don’t they?

(Actually, this is my sister’s preferred rez, I just can’t be bothered to change it every time I log on. I think from now on I’m going to have to.)

Thank the lord, for the forty-seven millionth time, for Scribefire, which will save me having to deal with this ridiculous post page ever again.

Obviously the forums are overrun with people saying DO NOT WANT, which was to be expected as the target audience here isn’t especially techy and they don’t appreciate having to learn how to use their blogs all over again:

No learning the new dashboard is not like riding a bike. It’s more like now that I’ve learned how to ride a bike, you’ve taken the bike away and giving me stilts.

Not to mention the broken stuff. Nobody appreciates broken stuff. I’m so glad I tweaked my widgets yesterday as naturally the widget interface is broken big-time, along with image uploads. At least it gives the forums a respite from made-up penguin drama.

unhappy feet

A new feature for the Big Blue Navbar, possibly prompted by this forum thread

(I don’t know what on earth Isadora thinks is the main problem. I thought all the ‘bad elements’ were banned so as not to get in the way of her and the happiness engineers? Something’s scaring Trent and the happiness engineers off posting, and it ain’t me.)