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Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress injects Black Friday adverts without permission

wordpress.org

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Re: Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress injects Black Friday adverts without permission

#51

Post by huxflux »

jonny383 wrote: post #40
asadkn wrote: post #39

Let's get a few things right since the link is misleading. - It was an upsell to the Pro version of free plugin. Not some random ad spam. - The ad was an admin notice - which appear in WordPress on top of every page in the backend Admin Area in what's generally the notification area. - It's free, GPL, and open source - you know, "No Warranties" and all that. Grayhat, and not something you should ever do. But not as n…

1. It goes directly against the WordPress Detailed Plugin Guidelines to both upsell, and to hijack the admin dashboard [0]. 2. If the ad was an admin notice, it didn't look like one. It's a banner image with an outbound tracking link [1]. [0] https://developer.wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-org/detail... [1] https://imgur.com/a/oN7ZFRU

Neither could you click the [X], or it was intentional overlapped for people to missclick. Crooks.

Re: Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress injects Black Friday adverts without permission

#52

Post by huxflux »

Perhaps Yoast thought they were cleaver. I hope someone reads this who works there. Because of "this", and as a precaution for further abuse one of my agencies removed Yoast SEO from over 2000 Wordpress-sites last week.

Update: Just found out that Yoast CEO is a woman and apologize with GIF:s on Twitter. Awaiting my ban and #forevershame.

Re: Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress injects Black Friday adverts without permission

#55

Post by ponsin »

peterangular wrote: post #10

When people rip on WordPress development this is the sorta crap they're talking about. In many ecosystems this would warrant the plugin getting pulled from the ecosystem but WP just lets it fly.

A lot of people complain how apple app store removes apps that Apple doesn't like. Or how Firefox no longer allows users to provide add-ons that are not through the Firefox store. That and other walled gardens make the the new tech world much less free and much more dependent on tech giants. I personally would prefer WordPress to allow whoever wants to make an app and give the users the responsibility to choose what to add and what not

Re: Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress injects Black Friday adverts without permission

#56

Post by snowwrestler »

asadkn wrote: post #39

Let's get a few things right since the link is misleading. - It was an upsell to the Pro version of free plugin. Not some random ad spam. - The ad was an admin notice - which appear in WordPress on top of every page in the backend Admin Area in what's generally the notification area. - It's free, GPL, and open source - you know, "No Warranties" and all that. Grayhat, and not something you should ever do. But not as n…

As someone who has contracted with a bunch of agencies and contractors for Wordpress sites, I have paid for such retainers even though automatic updates are on.

I want automatic updates on; its better for security.

And I want the folks who built the sites available on short notice, so if automatic updates break something, I can get it fixed quickly without trying to do a contract with some random WP dev on short notice.

Re: Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress injects Black Friday adverts without permission

#58

Post by jtbayly »

aliswe wrote: post #48
asadkn wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe they played with the semantics here to perhaps get a pass on it not counting as an exact violation of wp.org repository guidelines. There's a proposal to have strict policies and disallow any sort of global ads now but it seems dismissed [1]. It was a dismissable admin notice that looked like an ad and wasn't exactly a tracking link (in the wp.org classifications at least), but a generic marketing campaign…

Dismissable? Didnt the x button lead to a sales page?

Not when I clicked it.

Re: Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress injects Black Friday adverts without permission

#59

Post by jtbayly »

huxflux wrote: post #51
jonny383 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. It goes directly against the WordPress Detailed Plugin Guidelines to both upsell, and to hijack the admin dashboard [0]. 2. If the ad was an admin notice, it didn't look like one. It's a banner image with an outbound tracking link [1]. [0] https://developer.wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-org/detail... [1] https://imgur.com/a/oN7ZFRU

Neither could you click the [X], or it was intentional overlapped for people to missclick. Crooks.

It was hard to click, but I managed to click it, and it worked.

Re: Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress injects Black Friday adverts without permission

#60

Post by arkitaip »

levosmetalo wrote: post #47
sleavey wrote: post #20

I'm a big fan of vanilla WordPress, especially the new block editor, but the plugin ecosystem is a total mess. Almost all popular plugins come with a free version that spams you to upgrade to "pro". They add menu items to the admin panel with different colours so you find it harder to ignore them. They add messages to the dashboard. The look and feel of their settings pages don't match WordPress core. And, even if yo…

> I'm a big fan of vanilla WordPress, especially the new block editor, but the plugin ecosystem is a total mess. Well, the root cause why the plugin ecosystem is a mess is the way plugins management and monetization is implemented in the vanilla wp. As oposed to, e.g. Atlassian Jira plugins, WP doesn't really help plugin developers to seamlessly integrate with the core product.

"seamlessly integrate with the core product."

Plugin devs can generally NOT be trusted with seamlessly integrating their plugins because it usually leads to all kinds of dark patterns and poor UI for WP as a whole. WP.org's strict plugin guidelines is one of the main reasons why plugins behave relatively well considering how huge the WP.org repository is.

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