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Incident: Wordpress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from registry

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Re: Incident: Wordpress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from registry

#51

Post by Flimm »

bilekas wrote: post #39
timkq wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This only tanks the reputation of Mullenweg himself and his WordPress hosting company. WordPress powers about 40% of the web - it is too big to fail (as of now).

Do you have some references to that 40% number, because if that's true, thats terrifying.

It's 40% of websites, but bear in mind that not all websites are of equal significance. Some websites are just spam and never receive any visits. If we measured how much time people spend on different websites, I would guess that WordPress wouldn't even reach 5% of time spent web surfing.

Re: Incident: Wordpress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from registry

#52

Post by CodesInChaos »

kgeist wrote: post #25
Deukhoofd wrote: post #7

Related announcement from Wordpress.org: https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine-banned/

>The reason WordPress sites don’t get hacked as much anymore is we work with hosts to block vulnerabilities at the network layer I wonder what it means.

I guess many webhosters run a WAF that blocks known WordPress exploits, protecting sites that don't update wordpress (quickly). And presumably wordpress.org somehow helps with configuring WAF rules for this.

Re: Incident: Wordpress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from registry

#53

Post by genmon »

notpushkin wrote: post #49
genmon wrote: post #37

I feel like I missed the entire back story to all of this. There was a cryptic post about private equity a week ago https://ma.tt/2024/09/are-investors-bad/ and then Mullenweg's attack on WPEngine (and their PE owners) ramped up 0-60 in no time at all. Like, is this just about support for the OSS project, and is there a conversation on the dev lists I've missed? Why now -- did WPEngine make a threat to fork the proje…

> did WPEngine make a threat to fork the project? WP/Matt’s actions would only make them fork faster, no?

Yes, I'm grasping at straws... just trying to think of some possible precipitating event.

Re: Incident: Wordpress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from registry

#54

Post by notpushkin »

genmon wrote: post #53
notpushkin wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> did WPEngine make a threat to fork the project? WP/Matt’s actions would only make them fork faster, no?

Yes, I'm grasping at straws... just trying to think of some possible precipitating event.

I’d go with the most obvious explanation: Matt found out their biggest competitor makes more money than WP.com and does’t give back (money or development time), got rughtfully pissed, but started doing ridiculous things instead of just calling them out.

Re: Incident: Wordpress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from registry

#55

Post by createaccount99 »

snatchpiesinger wrote: post #19

I wonder what the fallout of this will be. If this results in a successful fork of wordpress with a registry independent from Wordpress.org that would be quite ironic.

The issue started from WP Engine not contributing back to WordPress, I don't see how they'd ever put up the resources to fork anything.

Re: Incident: Wordpress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from registry

#56

Post by dspillett »

Freak_NL wrote: post #20
Deukhoofd wrote: post #7

Related announcement from Wordpress.org: https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine-banned/

Regardless of the claims made, that is a startlingly immature piece of communication.

Yep.

Also: “The reason WordPress sites don’t get hacked as much anymore is we work with hosts to block vulnerabilities at the network layer, […]” — as opposed to not putting the vulnerabilities in⁰ in the first place!

----

[0] Though I've not worked with WP for a long time. I'm told the quality control of the core product has improved a lot over the years and people still running old versions, and/or with unverified extensions, is a large part of the current level of issues.

Re: Incident: Wordpress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from registry

#57

Post by ivanmontillam »

debesyla wrote: post #42
timkq wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His biggest beef with WP Engine is that their code is "bastardized" (???), because it doesn't enable revisions by default for their websites. That's one of the dumbest arguments I've heard. He's trying to convince us that only WP Engine is bad - and all other WP hosting companies are supposedly good.

Yeah, I expected something more serious (like tracking usage analytics, scrapping data for some content generator or etc.) but it seems like the real problem is a minor function that {a lot} of users don't even know about?

The revisions history disabled feature is more of a scapegoat, imho.

Matt is being unreasonable and petty here. Posts once published, they are rarely edited.

Matt just bursted because of envy. He's used to be pampered with attention.

Re: Incident: Wordpress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from registry

#58

Post by kennydude »

prox wrote: post #4
_morgs_ wrote: post #2

WordPress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from updating and installing plugins and themes via WP Admin.

Something I wonder, is it possible to have 3rd party plugin registries, so unconnected to .org ?

Not out of the box really. It's incredibly frustrating where everyone "rolls their own solution" for commercial plugins

Re: Incident: Wordpress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from registry

#59

Post by ivanmontillam »

elashri wrote: post #40

Lets try to take the discussion into something technically more interesting. WordPress is calling the database for most things which make things slow. I don't know how things improved over the years but is there any trial for a hard or soft fork that tries to address this performance bottleneck? The last time I worked with WordPress was 5-6 years ago so I am not aware of the scene now. If there would be a fork result…

The current best practice for solving that is to flatten your WordPress installation in HTML files, or to use a WP cache plugin. Caches like CloudFlare also help a lot.

I don't know the exact details about it, but that solves the bottleneck. Once pages are flattened they do not have to call the database again.

There's also a flat-file CMS called FlatPress, but I was not able to reliably determine if it's a fork or not.

Re: Incident: Wordpress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from registry

#60

Post by Ukv »

createaccount99 wrote: post #55
snatchpiesinger wrote: post #19

I wonder what the fallout of this will be. If this results in a successful fork of wordpress with a registry independent from Wordpress.org that would be quite ironic.

The issue started from WP Engine not contributing back to WordPress, I don't see how they'd ever put up the resources to fork anything.

To my understanding WP Engine already sponsor a dozen developers on the WordPress project, maintain their own open source projects, and host events.

Matt's demand was allegedly specifically for "tens of millions to his for-profit company Automattic" (i.e. WordPress.com, a for-profit competitor of WP Engine, not WordPress.org) for a trademark license.

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