wordpress™ wank

I think we are all aware by now that Automattic are generally averse to having official policies on anything much, apart from affiliate links/adsense/spam/miscellaneous profiteering etc. being Teh Evil (unless they are doing it, in which case it is OK). Official policies, like, totally stifle your freedom to make the rules up as you go along. Hence, while having over a dozen tagegories on your posts probably will get you kicked out of the global ad tag pages and labelled a spammer, it’s ‘not a published rule‘ (in fact, the exact nature of the rule is a closely guarded secret) and the FAQ blithely insists there is no limit on the number of tags you can have. Who knows, one day Scoble might experience an urge to tagspam. It’s so much easier to change the rules if they’re obscure in the first place.

Inevitably, however, sometimes the freedom to invent policy on the hoof leads to staff inventing entirely different policies on the same thing without each other’s knowledge.

Last January, Mad at blog-well.com appealed for the ability to redirect traffic from their old wordpress.com blog to their new wordpress.org blog. Matt responded in comments with a workaround:

Did you try adding the domain to this blog, making it your primary URL, and then switching the DNS back to GoDaddy? It should redirect all visitors from blogwell.wordpress.com to the new domain on the new host, at least as long as you pay the 10/yr for parking.

Yay! Mad was very happy and grateful for this solution, as were several people who showed up later in the same comments thread. In response to the support issues arising from this thread, six months later Mad produced a PDF tutorial on how to make the move from .com to .org. Yay again.

Unfortunately, Matt appears to have neglected to tell his head of support that he has been promoting this feature, and when a year on from Mad’s how-to guide somebody shows up on the forums asking for clarification Mark censors the link to the tutorial, says it’s ‘unsupported’ and could stop at any time, then suggests that accounts caught doing it could be nuked. Raincoaster backs him up, having experience of seeing such blogs deleted.

Look, I know it can be hard for everyone to be on the same page because you’re all in different countries in different timezones doing different things, but your communication breakdowns should really not be the users’ problem. The original poster’s question was very simple: is it allowed, or is it not allowed? That should be answerable with ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Qualified ‘yes’ and ‘no’, perhaps, such as ‘you would need to have hosted your blog here for x amount of time’ or ‘you would have to have bought your domain through us’, or ‘only if you opt out of global tags’. Or even, if that would be too boring and straightforward to fit with the way you like to do things, the standard business-blog response of ‘contact support detailing your individual circumstances so a decision can be made’. But still, you know, some sort of reasoning other than the whim of whoever happens to be answering the question today. People who are promoting solutions given to them by your boss can be forgiven for thinking the solution is company-approved.

There are so many responses by bubel on the forums about how you absolutely can NOT use your own themes on wordpress.com that not only am I now convinced the theme marketplace has finally been shelved but I’m starting to think custom CSS must be on the way out as well This user wanting multiple themes on the same blog, for example, could have been profitably directed to Sandbox, where anyone with a fair degree of CSS competency can achieve different looks for different types of pages. If it was a volunteer giving that answer, I’d just shrug my shoulders and assume they didn’t know what can be achieved with the CSS upgrade, but if it’s staff you have to assume that they have some other reason for not mentioning it.

This sucks, as I was seriously thinking of offering custom custom CSS skins for a small fee even though such services are officially discouraged. Ah well. I should really apply my efforts to learning Drupal instead.

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

In case you missed today’s bout of penguin spam, I’ve archived it for your viewing pleasure here. If you or your family live in the US and have been personally affected by the issue of allowing children to blog here without parental consent, you may be interested to learn that the FTC have made it much easier to file a complaint about COPPA violations. If you are a staff member of Automattic, they have produced a useful checklist to help you comply with US data protection law and pre-empt any such complaints here.

Perhaps once they have ensured that they’re not going to get hammered with a fine they will be less afraid to deal with children when they misbehave. Right now, when they ban a child they run the risk that they or their disgruntled parents are going to grass them up and let them in for a world of pain. Taking personally identifying information from children and claiming to be unable to delete it? Inadvertent pron on kiddy dashboards? Ads for dating agencies on kiddy blogs? World. Of. Pain. It’s a good thing that penguins and their guardians are neither that smart nor that malicious.

(I’m also not wholly convinced that ‘your mom!‘ is an especially constructive approach to take towards trollkids, but if staff think it’s acceptable who am I to argue?)

No. I did.

This is unacceptable. Automattic want to control who gets to comment on my blog. Even spam gets sent to a queue where I can approve it if I want. Hence, I have emptied the contents of my Akismet queue onto my front page, since it is clearly more acceptable to our hosts than comments from my readers.

Also, if you must bitch about people in private blogs, I find that spaces or other miscellaneous characters in the url are very good at preventing those embarrassing trackbacks, assuming of course that your readers are au fait with the mechanics of copy/paste.

I was going to write a post about how it might be a good idea to carry out usability testing before a major admin redesign rather than after, and how it might also be sensible to rip off the Tiger interface before paying Happy Cog to make you something custom, but it will just have to wait.

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 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’.

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.

• 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.

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.