Author: Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

Balancing Information and Monetization
One of the many ways in which newspapers are failing online is in monetization. We have very few options, when you get down to it.
1. Ads
2. Subscriptions
3. Donations
No company can really survive off donations, so the question really becomes how do we balance ads and subscriptions? Many newspapers have tried the simple tracking method of allowing people to read X number of articles before informing the reader they have to pay. Others throw up splash ads before the article is posted. And another one shows only some of the article before requiring registration.

They’re all problematic.

Users ignore the ads, they don’t register, and they walk away instead of reading. The issue for the user is that they want as few barriers as possible between themselves and the news. They want to pick an article, click the link, and read. To be inundated with ads and signup popups is annoying, and I suspect the attrition rate is abysmal.

This only gets worse when ads get ‘clever’ and make it hard to find the X to click out and get away from them. They trick users into clicking the wrong thing, which only annoys them more. Plus ads can slow things down on mobile, which is increasingly the way for things to go.

Recently I caught myself thinking that one way to encourage registrations in WordPress would be to have the post content ‘disappear’ after X days, unless the user was a member. Of course, that wouldn’t work for all sites, as not everyone wants to register on People.com. Also the old, archival news on The New York Times are things that really only the deep diving researchers (and weird net denizens) are after. Considering we can all go to the library and look everything old up on Microfiche, why do we have to pay for everything old?

So what should be limited?

How about we start with that cesspool of the internet: Comments. This is a double edged sword. If you allow open comments on a news site, consider requiring registration for them. This will allow you to more easily track and ban assholes. Sure, they can make new accounts, but in doing so you can follow them and block them. A win for everyone. Also you can track people who false-report bad people. Spam catchers will stop most bots from signing up at all.

In addition, you can turn off comments for older posts to non-paying users. After 45 days, only paid up members can comment. And make sure you don’t offer refunds if the guidelines are violated. If haters are gonna hate, make ’em pay for it.

Aaron Jorbin – Haters Gonna Hate (by Helen)

As for what content to restrict, it has to be more granular than just time. Take an election year. All articles about Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump should be readable. But read-only. No comments on any of them. Be realistic. Someone famous dies? Unlock all their posts so everyone can read all about them. The Olympics should have historical, important, events unlocked, but at the same time you don’t need every little detail.

This would be a tremendous amount of work, don’t get me wrong, but the days of assuming the internet is free money are long over. If we want people to pay us for content, we have to make it worthwhile.
29 July, 2016
The Need for Mobile Speed
I took the train from NYC to Montreal, which I will never do again. It was too long, too uncomfortable, and customs actually made the TSA preferable. But while you ponder that in your back brain, I want you to consider this as well. The internet on the train sucks.

For the first time in years I was back on pre-smartphone speeds. And the problem with that is I was in a world that expected 3G or faster speeds. Here’s what would not load:
- Twitter
- Facebook
- Tumblr
- Most news webpages
- Anything with video
Here’s what I could do:
- Text
That was a pretty shitty smartphone experience. As I sat on the train, I wondered why it was so shitty. Didn’t we build everything to be mobile first? Wasn’t the point of the responsive systems to make it faster? Turns out we didn’t.

One of the things we do well in the modern web is device detection. If I’m on a mobile device, everything’s cool and perfect and my sites will load for that device. There are PHP libraries like Mobile Detect and Detect Mobile Browsers], but what they’re really doing is device checks, not mobile. Knowing what kind of device someone’s on lets us customize a web experience to that device, and that’s all we tend to do. We put in the hours to check “Is this a mobile device?” but not where we should be.

Of course, that’s really hard to do. Apps like SpeedTest and TestMy.net work alright, but when you’re traveling by rail, your speed is incredibly variable and confusing. One minute I’d have 4 bars, the next 1, and then I’d drop from LTE to 3G and worse. Oh, and don’t bother asking about the WiFi. It was a joke.

Somewhat related, I travel a lot for work. I recently did a 12 day run to NYC and then Montreal, where I was in hotels most of the time. Hotel Wifi is a spotty thing. Either they charge you up to $40 a day for the privilege of their shiternet, or they give you free wifi that loads everything but images. Trying to work from hotels is a hit and miss proposition as well. I can connect, but as soon as I hop onto my VPN, everything drags.

Then we have conferences. I’ve yet to go to a tech conf where we didn’t kill the Wifi, or nearly so. While that’s kind of our faults for leaving on our various automated updaters and DropBoxes and the like, there isn’t a ‘Conference Wifi’ mode on laptops to say “Hey, I’m on a bandwidth so don’t do the automated background things please and thank you.” This is, by the way, why my presentations are always on my local box as well as online. I assume the wifi will die.

In all cases, as soon as the internet quality drops to slow, our experience online crumbles. We simply haven’t built most tools to work in a one-bar world. And much of this isn’t a solution we can easily grasp. Even the big guys, who have servers built for stress and speed, are slow in these situations. Because we assume too much. We assume minimum connectivity.

The race for faster wireless service is on, but we should step back and look at the simplification of our sites. If we can make a low-speed version that is as fully featured, we should.
27 July, 2016
Keep A Name In Mind
When you’re making your own project for small things, it’s not a huge deal when you try to think up a name. As soon as you realize your project is going to be shared with the world, however, the game changes.

Project Names

A project can be as massive as a new release of an operating system (Longhorn anyone?) or as small as a new plugin for WordPress. If could be a library for PHP or JS, or maybe a simple NPM add on. In all cases, the name you pick should be unique.

This gets hard when you want to name a tool something like “Foo for Bar” like “Color Coding for Quickbooks.” Wy is that hard? Well while your name is certainly descriptive, it’s not unique. Because someone else can make the same tool. “Joe’s Color Coding for Quickbooks.” Or worse… “Color Coding 4 Quickbooks.” And the problem here is that neither of you really have the right to the name, do you? You’re both leveraging ‘Quickbooks’ and their brand, so where do you have a leg to stand on when someone uses a similar name?

A unique name, though, like “Color Me Quickly,” would be so much better. Think of displaying it like this: “Color Me Quickly – A tool to colorize Quickbooks” and then having a description that talks about the idea and how to use it. “We love Quickbooks, just like you, but we hated the color schemes. We were always mixing up Receipts and Refunds. That’s why we came up with the Color Me Quickly tool. One simple install and we could see, right away, what was what. With our accessibility friendly default color schemes, and fully customizable colors, you can make your Quickbooks look how you need.”

The name is unique, the description is SEO friendly, and you will be easily able to stand out in a crowd.

Function Names

Oh but then we have function names.

If you’re a library, please please please remember to wrap your code in “If this code is already included, do not include it again” checks. PHP has function_exists() and class_exists().

Using Javascript?
```
if (typeof obj === "function") { 
    // Function is safe to use
}
```
The point here is that if you’ve made a library, always make sure it’s not already running before you try to run. This is a huge issue in WordPress land. With over 45,000 plugins, the odds that two will include the same libraries are pretty high. The odds that two will have conflicting versions? Right, you got it.

But you should watch out with those checks. I’ve seen a lot of plugins use a check that if the function doesn’t exist, run their plugin. That’s a great idea, except that it’s not. If you name your function wp_get_post() and check for it’s existence before loading, what happens if it does exist? Your code won’t be called. And what happens if your code doesn’t get called? Your function won’t run. Your plugin won’t work as expected.

Function and class names have to consider their world. A WordPress plugin should never use a non-prefixed’ anything. As Nacin says:

It’s a simple concept. Anything you create in the global namespace has the potential to conflict with a theme, another plugin (including one you wrote), and WordPress core itself. Thus, prefix everything with a unique-enough character set.

Be Unique

Consider the environment that you code for when you name things. Always check for trademarks and possible conflicts before you name something you plan to release to the world. Remember to be unique.

Also remember it’s 2016. All the good two and three character prefixes are probably taken.
25 July, 2016
Blocking Together
Out of GamerGate, the amazing Randi Harper created Block Together which allows you to block everyone associated with the nasty parts of the whole mess.

To use it, it’s two steps.
1. Sign up on Block Together
2. Click on the link to @randi_ebooks’s list and press subscribe
That’s it. Once you do that, you’ll automatically block the masses. But this goes far further than Gamer Gate. By making a blocklist of your own, you can manage the people who regularly harass, offend, or otherwise make your life on Twitter miserable.

I’m a firm, devoted, supporter of freedom of speech. I also defend my right not to listen to someone I don’t want to hear. I don’t have to listen. Those blocklists can be incredibly useful to share with people, like your friends and people who face similar harassment, so you can protect yourself.

Sharing your block list

If you choose to share your block list with friends, Block Together will create an unlisted, unguessable URL to access your block list. You can share the URL by email or Direct Message if you want to keep it private among friends, or you can tweet the URL if you are okay sharing your block list publicly. You can always disable sharing from the Settings page. If you do so, the URL to access your blocks will be deleted forever. If you choose to share again in the future, you will create a new, different URL. If you choose to disable sharing, you need to separately remove any subscribers you no longer want, on the Subscriptions page.

Many people find that they don’t want to share their block list because they find there are accounts on it they don’t remember blocking, or that aren’t particularly abusive. This is partly because Twitter, for a long time, did not offer Mute. So if you wanted to stop seeing a merely unfunny account that gets frequently retweeted, blocking used to be the only fix. Now Twitter offers Mute, so you can Mute those accounts instead. Block Together makes it easy to remove them from your shared block list with the ‘Unblock and Mute’ button on the My Blocks page.

I don’t public share my list. I have shared it to a few people, but since I block rather than mute people, it’s very easy for people to take offense at me putting them on the list. To me, blocking someone means “I don’t chose to have conversations with you in this manner in Twitter.” There are companies of friends I’ve blocked because they follow me to Twitter after a conversation on the Plugin Repository team.

Actually for me, most of my blocked people are either people who have violently responded to social activism tweets, people who tweet me thinking that’s a faster way to get their plugin approved/reviewed, people who are implicitly aggressive towards me without taking the time to learn the whole story, concern trolls, and passionate people who have gone overboard.

Yes, I block people who ping me about their plugins. My Twitter account is not the right way to address those things. Neither is Facebook. People who cannot respect the fact that I’m not working 24/7 don’t deserve my attention. I block them, and all the begging in the world won’t change that. I block probably faster than most people would consider ‘fair’ but it’s my Twitter account, not theirs, and I have a way I wish to control access and information. I need a reason to block people, but I’m not required to explain that to everyone.

But if I make that list public, people would probably use it as leverage to harass me more or treat me worse. They have in the past. It’s the double edged sword where I want to help my friends but I need to protect myself. For now, my list will be private to people whom I know well only, and who won’t take it as offensive.
22 July, 2016
Hiding Custom Taxonomy Parents
I have a few custom taxonomies that I want to be shown as textboxes and in order to do that, the simplest way is in the custom taxonomy, you set them up as hierachical true. This makes them behave like categories. The problem is I really don’t want these things to be hierarchical. That is, I don’t want people adding in a parent/child relationship.

The simplest way around this is to cheat with CSS:
```
select#newtropes_parent {
    display: none;
}
.form-field.term-parent-wrap {
    display: none;
}
```
That hides the parent value. In order to have it show on the proper pages, I put it in a file called shows.css, in the same folder as my shows.php file that controls all the settings for the shows CPT (this includes the custom taxonomies used by shows) and wrapped it in this:
```
add_action( 'admin_enqueue_scripts', 'shows_my_scripts', 10 );
function shows_my_scripts( $hook ) {
	global $current_screen;
	wp_register_style( 'shows-styles', plugins_url('shows.css', __FILE__ ) );
	if( 'post_type_shows' == $current_screen->post_type || 'tropes' == $current_screen->taxonomy ) {
		wp_enqueue_style( 'shows-styles' );
	}
}
```
Now you can’t see that there are parents. Perfect. Done.
20 July, 2016
WordPress Multisite: Block Site
This came up when I was looking at WordPress.com, where one has the freedom to post anything within their ToS, and I saw someone’s moronic blog about how specific people were evil. Pick whatever you want, it doesn’t matter except assume it was something offensive to a minority.

The Terms of Use says this:

In particular, make sure that none of the prohibited items (like spam, viruses, or serious threats of violence) appear on your website.

This was not a serious threat of violence, it was just ignorant, offensive, and stupid. I looked at the site and thought “What I want most in this moment is a big ass button to block this person from posting on my .com site, and to prevent them from ever being able to comment on any blog I own.”

It doesn’t exist. (I will note I found BuddyBlock but I have no idea how well that would work, and it’s for BuddyPress only.)

Part of the cool thing about WordPress Multisite is that you can run your own social network. With that power comes responsibility though. Users should be able to protect themselves while remaining on your network, allowing them to block other users they just don’t want to talk to.

So why don’t we? Well effective blocking is hard. As I mentioned in my post about how (most) contact forms fail at this, the biggest issue is people can just fake who they are are try again. This is a little harder on a Multisite, where a legitimate email and account can be required to comment, but by default all members of a network can comment on any blog on the network. This means we’re opening ourselves up to the potential to more abuse.

How would that big block work? There are a few approaches and I think the best route would be two fold.

Blocking Users

Everyone should have the ability to mute or block a user. As an end user, if I never want to see comments from John Smith again, I should be able to press ‘block.’ Then I would just see a note like [comment hidden] whenever I run into a comment from him on any blog on the network. On a non Multisite, I’d actually like to see that for any site that requires registration. Allow users to mute each other.

As an admin, if I block John Smith, then his comments are immediately discarded. If you wanted to get fancy, then you’d hide his comment from everyone who isn’t him, so he thinks he’s still talking to people and just being ignored. A silence mode. Use some JS so an admin has to click to expand and see what’s going on, so if John Smith is escalating, he can be banned.

That would be the other thing. Banning users from your sites on a Multisite should be totally possible. And on .com a way to report “User X keeps working around my blocks.” would help a lot.

Also for admins, perhaps they should be able to see “X people have blocked this user” on the Dashboard. That said, I can see a massive possibility for abuse with that. If John Smith was an admin of his own blog and saw ’10 people blocked you…’ it could cause problems. It would be trivial to hide it from the user, so you could never know how many people blocked you, but I can think of a few fast workarounds. Easiest is to add a second admin account to my own blog on the network and check.

Blocking Blogs

This is mostly an issue on WordPress.com, since it’s one of the few places I know of that has a ‘reader’ that shows you blogs that you might be interested in. That’s how I found the offending blog, by the way. A friend runs a religious blog on .com and the one we both found appalling was a recommended blog to her. I’ve already talked to some people behind the scenes of .com about that and how the algorithm may need some turning. But even if she had stumbled on to it via a search, should she not be able to say “Ew! Block!”

I would write it so that if someone clicked ‘block blog’ the following things happen:
1. The owner of the blog is blocked from commenting on any blog I own
2. The URL of the blog is placed on my blacklist
3. Optionally, all admins of the blog are added to my blacklist
Now I don’t have to see anything anymore.
18 July, 2016