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WordPress retaliation impacts community

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Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#111

Post by lrae »

Pikamander2 wrote: post #89
CamelCaseName wrote: post #15

Perhaps I missed something, but I wonder why WP didn't just include ACF functionality in WP Core from the very beginning? Why fight in public when you can just commoditize your dependant competitor?

WordPress's core dev team has had a longstanding aversion to including "unnecessary" features in the core to avoid bloat, with the idea that plugins can take care of any gaps in functionality. It sounds like a reasonable philosophy until you see just how many basic CMS features it's missing and subsequently how many sites are running 20+ poorly-coded plugins that spam the dashboard notifications and have numerous PHP…

Those 20 poorly written plugins make a good amount of money though, which is why many of those plugins' creators and affiliated "wordpress influencers" also do an outstanding job pushing the sentiment against more integrations into the core.

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#112

Post by mpol »

eastbound wrote: post #107
inglor_cz wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't do that, given that I run an e-shop with a card payment system etc. on Wordpress/WooCommerce. The ecosystem of plugins is just too damn useful.

Feels like WooCommerce should buy WPEngine and sell blackjack and h… WooCommerce should become the steward, fork Wordpress, simplify it, and Wordpress should be their freemium offering. Wordpress is a funnel to WooCommerce.

WooCommerce is owned by Automattic, so that won't happen. Owned as in, the trademark and the place in the plugin directory. Automattic bought it some years ago.

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#113

Post by lrae »

thr0w555 wrote: post #38
jjgon1781 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean the remaining mod is on matt payroll and there is a conflict of interest which cause the subreddit not to trust the mods

The mods never behaved as if they were on "matts payroll" or anything of the like. They had a pinned megathread at the top of the front page, they opened up the sub in the past few days to allow any posts even outside megathreads. They also redirected for a period all posts to r/wpdrama, giving free promotion to that sub. Whether you agree with the megathread-only policy or not, they never behaved as if they were doi…

That's not true.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1g29dhm/petition...

And they did apologize for it, I think.

Also, megathreads are what you do when you want a topic to die on a subreddit. Especially now where pinned threads even have less visibility. Their obviously bad faith poll after ending their "no moderation experiment" after not even two days (while announcing it for a week), also speaks a different language.

Probably slightly biased summary: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1g4pr8f/wor...

Yes, I'm sure some reddit users went too far in DMs (it's reddit...), but ultimately,

- the moderators of the subreddit clearly wanted to suppress that topic.

- one (the remaining one) works for Matt, and thinks the whole thing is a nothingburger (https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1fwvs5z/comment/...)

- the creator of the subreddit still seemed completely pro-Matt and also friendly with him

That said, bluesix seemed like a very helpful mod, so, still not great to see them delete their account. And also, some users are for sure in it just for the blood.

The obvious move on moderation side would've been to allow big news around that "drama" to have their own threads, to remove duplicates and have random opinion tweets, blog posts & influencer's thoughts in the megathread / a pinned comment on each of the "big news'" threads.

This is what most mods who wouldn't want to suppress the topic but keep the sub somewhat clean would've done. For some reason, that wasn't even up for discussion.

It was either a "we go on strike and stop moderating" (which ended quickly when it didn't result in the chaos they anticipated), megathread or complete ban of the topic for them.

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#114

Post by jpc0 »

eastbound wrote: post #107
inglor_cz wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't do that, given that I run an e-shop with a card payment system etc. on Wordpress/WooCommerce. The ecosystem of plugins is just too damn useful.

Feels like WooCommerce should buy WPEngine and sell blackjack and h… WooCommerce should become the steward, fork Wordpress, simplify it, and Wordpress should be their freemium offering. Wordpress is a funnel to WooCommerce.

"WooThemes was acquired by Automattic, the company best-known for WordPress.com and Jetpack, in 2015."[1]

It's the other way around my dude. Woocommerce is owned by Matt...

1. https://woocommerce.com/about/

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#115

Post by octacat »

- "most people agree that WP Engine should contribute more to WordPress" - ban them from the contributing.

That is a special kind of logic. Also forking a plugin and replacing the original in the repo - that smells bad, even if it is "legal".

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#116

Post by thr0w555 »

lrae wrote: post #113
thr0w555 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mods never behaved as if they were on "matts payroll" or anything of the like. They had a pinned megathread at the top of the front page, they opened up the sub in the past few days to allow any posts even outside megathreads. They also redirected for a period all posts to r/wpdrama, giving free promotion to that sub. Whether you agree with the megathread-only policy or not, they never behaved as if they were doi…

That's not true. https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1g29dhm/petition... And they did apologize for it, I think. Also, megathreads are what you do when you want a topic to die on a subreddit. Especially now where pinned threads even have less visibility. Their obviously bad faith poll after ending their "no moderation experiment" after not even two days (while announcing it for a week), also speaks a differen…

What part is not true?

And we will have to agree to disagree I guess. Here's how I would summarize some parts of it:

- The moderators didn't want to completely censor or remove good faith threads, they just wanted to contain it within megathreads. this is normal on reddit. I disagreed with this and thought it would be better to have some threads on front page but limit the number.

- The users had wild accusations and conspiracy theories (https://old.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1g4ahoq/is_that_...)

- The mods didn't make an attempt to censor r/wpdrama from being talked about, they redirected users to it

- The users were fundamentally angry and accusatory from the get go which made it even more difficult to come up with solutions

- This is not how I remember old reddit nor the old internet. Back then we would have a civil disucssion with the mods about what things should be allowed or not allowed.

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#117

Post by kergonath »

pixxel wrote: post #79
kergonath wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They profit off Wordpress' brand for free. What the hell are you on about? Wordpress is GPL. Are all Linux distro profiting off Linus’ brand? There is a very simple thing you can do if you don’t want people to do this: use a different license. You cannot eat your cake and keep having it. > Maintaining a fork and building a new brand will be expensive. Publishing free software is a decision. You cannot come years la…

> Are all Linux distro profiting off Linus’ brand Poor analogy. All the distros I’ve ever used are totally free.

But not all of them are (I mean, they all publish the sources of the GPL components, but then WPE does as well). The situation is exactly the same: expecting other people to go beyond the terms of the license is lunacy.

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#118

Post by kergonath »

silverliver wrote: post #95
kergonath wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They profit off Wordpress' brand for free. What the hell are you on about? Wordpress is GPL. Are all Linux distro profiting off Linus’ brand? There is a very simple thing you can do if you don’t want people to do this: use a different license. You cannot eat your cake and keep having it. > Maintaining a fork and building a new brand will be expensive. Publishing free software is a decision. You cannot come years la…

> What the hell are you on about? Wordpress is GPL. Are all Linux distro profiting off Linus’ brand? > There is a very simple thing you can do if you don’t want people to do this: use a different license. You cannot eat your cake and keep having it. Not taking sides here, but the GPL did not include a trademark grant the last time I checked. In fact, treating copyright and trademark rights separately is a fairly well…

You are entirely right. But trademark has nothing to do with the “not contributing to the community” thing, whatever that means. Going after Wordpress-Engine with a trademark angle makes sense. Although:

1- I don’t think that would hold any water against “WPE”

2- trademark needs to be defended (in the US at least) and you cannot let things slide for 5 years and then claim infringement.

In any case, that’s not what happened. The trademark aspect was clearly an afterthought and is not the central point of the dispute.

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#119

Post by bilekas »

anon7000 wrote: post #100
bigiain wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> changing the license in a next version Can Matt do that though? I don't _think_ WordPress has a copyright assignment agreement for contributors? So neither Matt nor Automattic nor wordpress.org nor The WordPress Foundation can choose to re-license future versions of the GPL2 or newer codebase without agreement from _all_ the contributors who retain the copyright in their part of the code.

There is no chance the license changes. Matt has been a very, very vocal supporter of GPL. This self-described war he’s going on is all about commercial trademarks, and other hosting companies having more commercial success than Automattic in the ecosystem while contributing fewer developers and less money to the project. Now, he’s taken it to a very extreme extent, and I fully disagree with his approach, but the cor…

> This self-described war he’s going on is all about commercial trademarks, and other hosting companies having more commercial success than Automattic in the ecosystem while contributing fewer developers and less money to the project.

I don't really buy that, there is no obligation for anyone to contribute to the project at all under the GPL license so he can feel whatever he want's about it but it's irrelevant.

Also as for the trademark issue, in an older version of their trademark stated "The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, meaning people may use as they see fit. "

You can't retroactively change it once you see other people making more money than you. That's not how trademarks work.

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#120

Post by 820jf98ajow »

thr0w555 wrote: post #116
lrae wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true. https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1g29dhm/petition... And they did apologize for it, I think. Also, megathreads are what you do when you want a topic to die on a subreddit. Especially now where pinned threads even have less visibility. Their obviously bad faith poll after ending their "no moderation experiment" after not even two days (while announcing it for a week), also speaks a differen…

What part is not true? And we will have to agree to disagree I guess. Here's how I would summarize some parts of it: - The moderators didn't want to completely censor or remove good faith threads, they just wanted to contain it within megathreads. this is normal on reddit. I disagreed with this and thought it would be better to have some threads on front page but limit the number. - The users had wild accusations and…

The mods could have literally done nothing and the majority of users (as proven by the unofficial poll) would have approved. The mods didn’t know how to moderate without being little dictators. Once they realized this they gave up and ran away.
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