wordpress™ wank

It’s really unfortunate that BrowseHappy keeps getting hacked in this way, isn’t it? I suppose its artifically enhanced pagerank, along with its neglected state, makes it an easy and attractive target for spammers. It’s lucky that other people are keeping an eye on it, or those juicy little PR8 links would be hanging around indefinitely. And that would never do.

Maybe Matt should consider moving it to a more secure server. Or switch it to a secure CMS. Or get rid of the frickin’ spamlinks to his outdated little hobbysite altogether, except of course said domain wouldn’t then be worth nearly as much should he ever decide to sell it on to a browser manufacturer of his choosing. (Bubbles burst, you know; got to have a few insurance policies in place.)

If you don’t have time to maintain the domain, quit squatting it and hand it over to Mozilla already. That would be the beautiful, self-sacrificing, open-source thing to do. You could even write a beautiful, self-sacrificing post on ma.tt and the dead blog about it. I can hear the faraway echo of fanboys cheering already.

They’re closing threads for asking how to check which ads are being served on your blog, now.

Isn’t it strange how when you write an article slagging off TypePad and praising WordPress you are inevitably ‘honest’ and ‘insightful’, ‘interesting’ and ‘eloquent’, and when somebody from Six Apart tries to make a counterargument they are ‘venomous’ and guilty of ‘falsehoods and misdirection’?

Sadly, my comment on Lloyd’s post is still languishing in moderation. I’m sure this is merely an oversight, since nobody would tell their readers ‘Please challenge me on my views!’ if they were going to censor dissenting comments. I’ll reproduce it here for now, and link to it when it’s published:

I don’t see that Anil’s any more abrasive in his defence than Matt is when people come out attacking WordPress. (That is, possibly a little too forthright, but hey, fanboys are annoying.)

For someone with ‘extensive experience of both platforms’, Michael seemed strangely confused about the distinction between wordpress.com and .org and TypePad and MT, attempting to draw direct comparisons between Automattic’s non-hosted software and Six Apart’s hosted service when it suited him, and switching back to comparing TypePad with wordpress.com when that fitted his argument better.

For example: he thinks TypePad makes it too difficult for people to add third-party widgets, conveniently forgetting that wordpress.com doesn’t let you add any third-party flash or javascript widgets at all. But he thinks it’s cool that wordpress.com won’t let you use Adsense, conveniently forgetting that wordpress.org has dozens of plugins which make it easy.

I’m afraid that by the point where he claimed the separation of WordPress and WordPress MU was ‘a different developmental strategy’ rather than a historical accident I’d lost all patience. WordPress MU isn’t a fork of WordPress; it’s a fellow fork of b2 that got swallowed up by its sibling. Incorporating multiblogs into core would have broken backward compatibility so much it was no longer an option. And it’s not for people who need to run a handful of blogs off a single installation, it’s a specialist tool for site admins who need a blogfarm. It would make more sense to assess it alongside the Livejournal open source code than to pit it against Movable Type. http://mu.wordpress.org makes this perfectly clear, but proselytising fanboys trying to push it as ‘the upgrade to the upgrade’ don’t do anyone any favours.

I left out how he’s praising the 2.5 interface when Matt has already pretty much acknowledged it was a failure. Or how he thinks monthly security upgrades are cool because they’re a ‘a testament to a vibrant developer community’, which comment alone constitutes the loopiest piece of fanboying since ‘the blogging market is c.l.o.s.e.d.’

But no. Mocking the fanboy is a cheap distraction. My point is how nasty things are getting now the market is contracting. I’m not talking about the consumer market so much; people are still starting new blogs, though in the current economic climate they’re going to be less willing to spend money on them and that’s not good for either company. I’m talking about getting more funding, or going public, or finding a parent company willing to take you under its wing and shield you from the hard times ahead. These things are not going to be as easy as they were a couple of years ago. You are competing for increasingly scarce resources. It’s easy to be nice to each other when things are going well, but these days it’s survival of the fittest, and the way these spats are conducted both sides seem about equally worried.

Which would be odd, if Six Apart really were the underdog; but they’ve stolen a march on Automattic by making their anti-spam service free to everyone. Short-term this shouldn’t make too much difference as most paid-up subscribers won’t be interested in switching till they’ve got their money’s worth, but long-term it threatens one of Automattic’s major revenue streams. That’s the real reason the gloves are off again.

And the accusations of being splog-ridden have evidently hit home because they’re, um, true. How could they not be? Akismet can’t hope to catch them all at sign-up and you’re relying wholly on volunteers to report the ones they happen to see. Plus, all reports have to be dealt with individually by support staff, who are generally sort of busy with support. At least they’ve blocked drmike’s wordpress.com account now so they won’t be getting any more of those pesky spam reports from him. That should help with the workload even if it doesn’t help with the splog situation.

Another secret staff member sighted in the wild, would seem to have been in post about a week, CV suggests hired to handle public relations. No trace of her on the forums, so obviously that ‘three weeks in support for all hirings’ policy has been junked.

Another box ticked. They’ve been needing someone to handle public relations for a very long time. Matt has got much better at it over the past few years, true (I remember when he advocated googlebombing a host that complained WP was a resource hog, but hey, he was a kid at the time and he didn’t have to pretend to be professional) but he does have an unfortunate tendency to undo his hard work with the occasional inexplicable freakout.

Yes, I’ve been quiet lately. They’ve been quiet. They don’t want to rock any boats at the moment.

Oh, polls. People have only been asking for them for a couple of years. More fuel for raincoaster’s theory that they’re piling on the geegaws in preparation for another date with the venture capitalists.

Also, the forums seem an odd place to put that announcement. Either Mark doesn’t have posting privileges on the news blog or PollDaddy aren’t paying enough to get that sort of linkage

Is anyone else in love with the fact that the ‘possibly related’ spam links at the end of this encourage us to equate usability testing with a cholera epidemic?

(BTW, Toni’s linked post appears to confirm that Hanni didn’t stick around for long. All 21 staff are now namechecked on the about page. )

Meanwhile, on the .com forums, mikecane and fromtheleft have been unpersoned for hating on Sphere and the new dashboard, and this poor guy got shunted over to wordpress.org before being shoved right back over here, none too politely at that (why yes, it was moshu, since you ask). He asked for help ever so nicely, too. It was quite sad.

I have to admit, I’m a bit surprised — this conversation is about how all of us at Six Apart try to stay involved in the conversation, and with you being the lead developer responsible for meeting the needs of millions of WordPress users out there, your contribution is to pick at one ambiguous sentence in the middle of the article. I hope we can find more positive ways to help the community we both support.

Yup, I think we can safely say that Six Apart are still winning the snark wars.

I know that nothing this mob do should surprise me anymore, but when options posted a screenshot of wordpress.com showing Flash ads for Scientology I admit it, I was shocked.

But I see your screenshot and I raise you Scientology Flash ads on an anti-Scientology blog:

Naturally, wordpress.com spare themselves the flash on their tags pages and content themselves with loads of links:

Also, if you’re bored of linking to the last set of splogshots, how about some wildly inappropriate text ads?

I don’t know in which universe it’s OK to advertise ‘Hot & Sexy Single Women’ on a feminist post about an alleged sexual assault, but it’s not mine. Nor do I think this guy necessarily wanted ads for used women’s knickers on his site:

Obviously I would have contacted support immediately to demand that the Thetans not be given airtime on my blogs, except oh, it’s Sunday, and even though they hired a bunch of support staff what, five months ago now? support is still closed on weekends. And I can’t post to the forum because I once asked Matt whether his email was down. I did send a couple of feedbacks to Google, though. For all the good that’ll do. At least they pretend to care.

Also of note: Snap = popup ads disguised as a ‘feature’. Anyone know why neither this nor the Flash are mentioned in the tiny little chunk of disinformation hidden at the bottom of the features page? Or why they decided to encrypt the x-noads code that told us why ads weren’t being served on a given page? The obvious conclusion is that they’re tweaking their algorithms to serve ads to more readers more of the time, and they don’t want anyone to realise.

And now? I’m going to clear out my spam, make my regular backup, and see whether anyone bothers coming over to try and spin this one. I wouldn’t, if I were them. If there’s a single issue that’s destroyed my trust in Automattic, I’d have to say it’s their repeated failure to be honest about the issue of advertising. I’m some months past believing a word they have to say on the subject.

Even if it’s ’sorry’. Actually, especially if it’s ’sorry’.

Andrew on why the long-promised adsense upgrade remains vapourware.

Here’s what I think the basic problem is. Not all wordpress.com blogs are equal. A personal blog by a housewife or student is in an entirely different league from icanhascheezburger or stuff white people like, and ad revenues will vary accordingly. Automattic are not going to launch any feature which leads to them losing money, therefore the cost of the annual upgrade must equal (and preferably exceed) the annual revenue from the blog. But how do they know the annual revenue? And how do they know what it’s going to be in the future? Your bumpalong bogstandard blog could take off like a rocket overnight. An average figure is going to be far in excess of what the people in the long tail are generating (or willing to pay for), and far below what the handful on the threshold of VIP status can bring in. Pitch it too high and nobody’s going to bother paying up, pitch it too low and you risk losing out. Charging everyone different amounts is an impractical adminstrative nightmare.

On the other hand, the current system is working pretty well for them. People don’t see ads on their own blogs, aren’t informed about them when they sign up, and can blog for months and years in blissful ignorance of their existence. Even if they do leave when they twig what’s going on, Automattic have still profited from the period when they were unaware. In any case, they’re less likely to leave than to stick around grumbling at intervals and waiting for the vapourware upgrade. Far easier just to keep things the way they are and claim to be looking into solutions whenever anybody asks. It ain’t broke. Why fix it?

OK, so whose fabulous idea was it to deploy identicons without bothering to tell anyone about them? At least they now appear to have switched them off by default. I have switched them on, though the option I am missing is the ability to upload our own fallback image. I can’t see why that wouldn’t be possible, though I can see the potential for abuse.

Question: if your settings enable X-rated gravatars, do you get marked as mature?

Also, blogging about gravatar gives me a chance to point and laugh at Matt pretending not to know that a .png is an image file, and, when informed that it is, trying ‘it looks bad in IE6′. Dude, everything looks bad in IE6. It is IE6. That is what it does. Perhaps if you occasionally tested new wordpress.com stuff in IE6 it would be less unconvincing that you suddenly care so very much about the avatar viewing experience of its unfortunate users. But you don’t. So it is.

What the gravatar users need to understand is that Automattic didn’t buy Gravatar because they are lovely charitable people with superduper servers who cruise around looking for services to rescue from their bandwidth woes. They bought it in order to extend the native wordpress.com system. So in the transition existing users are going to lose some features they liked, as well as gaining some they might enjoy and others they will find profoundly useless. WordPress.com doesn’t support .png, therefore Gravatar won’t either. Getting screwed over is a standard side-effect of being bought by a larger company. Ask any livejournaller.