Half-Elf on Tech

Thoughts From a Professional Lesbian

Category: How It Is

Making philosophy about the why behind technical things.

  • Balancing Information and Monetization

    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
    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.

  • The Need for Mobile Speed

    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.

  • WordPress Multisite: Block Site

    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.

  • Looking Back at MovableType

    Looking Back at MovableType

    For the first time in years, I looked at Movable Type.

    I walked away, like so many people, in May of 2004 when the restrictions and pay requirements were too much. I’d played with b2 before and WordPress, but that was when I fully moved to WordPress. While I’d remembered that the Open Source version had been fully restored in version 3.3, I forgot that when they released v6 in 2016, they ‘terminated’ the Open Source licensing option. Again.

    In doing normal research of things, I ended up on MovableType.com, and was struck by how modern and out of date the site felt.

    The site isn’t mobile friendly. Or at least not iPad friendly. It does this peculiar zoom in where the content is focused but it still has a sidebar. This means flicking down to read can causes my screen to wobble side to side as well. The zoom also didn’t work consistently, making me have to fix it over and over.

    That said, it has a much nicer design and layout than I expected.

    MovableType.com front page

    I have to say, that’s a much more modern front page than WordPress.org and less cartoony than the current WordPress.com pages. The same can’t be said of navigation, which was a little confusing. If you don’t know you have to purchase to download, seeing the Software License section without clarification is weird. That should be even more obvious, I think. I shouldn’t have to click on “Release Notes” and then see Install MT on the sidebar.

    Once I ended up in the documentation, I poked around and had a laugh at the software requirements.

    PHP 5.0 or higher (5.3 or higher is recommended)

    Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

    The rest of the install direcrions are incredible weird and hands on. It has none of the simplicity I’ve come used to with WordPress. And please remember, I think that WordPress is far too complex for a new user, still, because WP’s NUX sucks. MT’s is worse.

    What interested me the most is that, while you can’t get MT for less than $900, they have a public GitHub repo available.

    Still, I didn’t install it. Instead I read the documentation to see what using it would look like, and was rather startling to read the author page on creating entries and see an interface that looked old.

    MT's post editor looks like WP 2.x

    It reminded me of WP 2.5. Which I guess is understandable since the documentation on how to import from WP to MT is very old. No, I’m serious, it has screenshots of what looks like WP 2.5 as their documentaion.

    While I still think that MT lost out big time when they decided to separate from the Open Source community, their product doesn’t draw me in. It doesn’t look fun or nice to use, and that’s probably a reason it’s not as popular as it could be. The GitHub page has 22 contributors. WordPress 4.5, led by my coworker and friend Mike, had 298. Even the official, but not really used like that, WP GitHub repo has over 30 contributors.

    I wonder how the web would have looked if Six Apart had never made the license changes.

    I wonder would power 26% of the Internet in that world.

  • Not Mailbag: Where Contact Forms Fail

    Not Mailbag: Where Contact Forms Fail

    My friend Andy, reading last Friday’s post, remarked no one should have to put up with crap like that. He’s right, and I mentioned that most contact forms don’t allow you to filter via your WordPress blacklists or comment moderation settings.

    Surprised?

    You should be.

    Back in March 2014, I raised this with Jetpack, saying that the Feedback ignores Blacklists.

    You have a moderation list and a blacklist.

    You have a user you want to block from commenting forever. You add them to the blacklist. Surprise! They can still use the feedback form!

    This should behave just like the blacklist on comments: It blackholes them. Done and gone. After all, you didn’t want them around.

    Logically I can see why it doesn’t use the comment checks. If you have a check to only let users who have an approved comment, leave more comments freely, this would be a problem. There’s no ‘pending’ value for feedback.

    And the first reply … Well it made me mad back then. I say this as someone who is good friends with the fellow who commented, but back in 2014, I wanted to smack the back of his head.

    This would be super easy to get around, just changed the alleged from email address. Besides, blacklist tends to be things that shouldn’t be displayed publicly automatically, allowing contacts would let them appeal the blacklist.

    I could see grounds for adding a filter to have grunion follow the commenting blacklist though. Less sold on an admin option.

    Now go back and read last week’s post. I have not blacklisted the rather vile word used in that comment because I have a friend who is dyslexic and often says ‘cuntry’ instead of ‘country.’ It’s an honest mistake on her part. We added in an autocorrect to her phone and tablet. But blocking short words is hard. Still. The IP address? You bet that hit my blacklist.

    If I still had a comment form, that moron could still harass me.

    As I replied to George:

    Sure, and it’s just as easy to get around the current blacklists in WP. The point is, though, if you’ve put someone’s email on your comment blacklist, the assumption can be made that you have a good reason. You DON’T want this person commenting on your site, so why are you making it easy for them to harass you? And yeah, I used ‘harass’ intentionally.

    Certainly I can and do block their emails on the server, but I still have to go in and clean out the messages in feedback once and a while, and I for one get a lot of pretty vile garbage from people. So having one less place to have to read their BS would be beneficial.

    It’s always been relatively easy to work around if you’re a dedicated troll, but if the blacklist just blackholed their contact messages, it does a lot for your mental health.

    Because he’s right that a dedicated asshole will work around the blacklists. They do it today. Still, I feel there’s no reason to make it easier for them. And while I can block from a server level, not everyone has my skills. And for those people, should we not introduce Akismet level scans on feedback forms?

    You see, the reason I was mad at George back then is his argument felt like he was saying “since it can be worked around, this is a bad idea.”

    That is absolutely not what he meant.

    Even if I didn’t know George well, I have simple proof he didn’t think this was a stupid idea, he thought it was an idea that begat caution. What proof? He didn’t close the issue. In fact, he gave it a milestone to review.

    Now, sadly, it’s been two years with no traction. Every so often someone bumps the milestone, which means it’s among the 600+ tickets that need attention. But it lingers. It’s not a priority.

    Jetpack and Akismet are both owned by the same company. If you have the Akismet plugin installed and activated, and have an active subscription, every form submission will be checked for spam.

    They need to take it to the next level. So do all forms plugins. From what I can tell, Ninja Forms has a field simple spam prevention but no blacklists. Gravity Forms has an old, not-updated, 3rd party plugin for a Gravity Forms Email Blacklist.

    In fact … the only contact form plugin I could find that actually uses WordPress’ built in blacklist would be Takayuki-san’s Contact Form 7.

    Let us protect ourselves from abuse.

  • What Are You Paying For With That License?

    What Are You Paying For With That License?

    My friend Andrea recently complained about confusion between support licenses and the GNU Public License:

    This lead to a WP Tavern post about how Commercial WordPress Product Descriptions Can Mislead Customers into Purchasing More Licenses Than Necessary.

    GPL Freedom to Use

    WordPress is licensed as GPLv2 and in the preamble it says, rather boldly:

    The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software–to make sure the software is free for all its users.

    The GPL is intended to be about freedom in the code you acquire (be that for free or for purchase) and your ability to reuse it as you see fit.

    If you really want to understand the GPL and WordPress, I highly recommend you pick up A Practical Guide to WordPress and the GPL. It’s actually written by a lawyer and it’s $25 for the ebook, which seems like a lot until you realize that to hire a lawyer to go over all this would be over $400.

    The point for this post is pretty simple though. The GPL gives the user of a theme or plugin in WordPress the freedom to use the code as many times as they want, on as many sites as they want, for as long as they want.

    The Restrictions of Products

    I purchased a theme called Utility Pro from Carrie Dils. I love that theme. On her site, the various licenses are restricted by support.

    • Support for 1 Site
    • Support for 5 Site
    • Support for 25 Site

    All licenses come with “1 Year Support and Upgrades” and the ‘pro’ version has these extras:

    • DesktopServer Blueprint (quick setup for DesktopServer users)
    • Developer’s Edition (Grunt, Sass, and more)
    • WP Development Workflow course

    What am I paying for here? Support for X sites for 1 year, and updates. It doesn’t say if the updates are for all my sites, but I’m going to assume that if I get support for 5 sites, I get upgrades for 5 sites. The thing here is that the GPL would allow me to install this theme on 250 sites if I wanted, and not only can Carrie do ‘nothing’ about it, but she wouldn’t care. She knows how the GPL works, after all.

    This still leaves me with a couple questions:

    If I pay for support for one site, what happens when I put my license on two sites?

    The best case scenario would be I’d get a message telling me that I’ve used up the sites available to my license, and I’ll have to remove one to add another. I’d add in a link to buy more licenses personally.

    What’s to stop me from lying about the site I’m having a problem on?

    Well … Nothing. And unless I need Carrie to log in, she’ll never know! Even if I did let her log in, I could show her a demo site and explain “I’m working on a new version of my site and this is my code…” Which is a totally legit reason to be testing out her code on an ‘unlicensed’ site.

    Can she stop me from copying the updated version to an unlicensed site?

    Nope! In fact, if I’m super smart, I’ll always leave an unmodified version on a site that gets updates, and then use that as my base to update anything I’ve forked. Oh, and my version is so forked, it’s practically not her theme anymore. But that’s okay. I renamed it from utility-pro to utility-jo (it’s funnier to me).

    Change What We Pay For

    I’m going to propose a different way to handle licenses.

    Instead of paying for X number of sites for support, pay for X years of support + updates + features.

    That’s right, I’m suggesting this price point:

    • $80 for 1 year of support and updates on unlimited sites.
    • $200 for 3 years of support and updates and those nifty things on unlimited sites.

    The word ‘unlimited’ may sound terrifying. If you allow unlimited usage, what’s to stop me from opening a million tickets for my million sites for help? Nothing. Not a damn thing. Except there’s nothing stopping me from doing that right now anyway except my own pathological honesty when it comes to respecting the work of others.

    The people who will abuse this system are, for the most part, the people who already are. All the license has to check is “Is this license valid? Yes? Push the update!” Now the theme developer will always be pushing her latest, most secure, code to everyone, which is a win all around. Oh yes, did you think about that? If everyone always gets an update, then everyone always has the ability to be secure.

    Now there is one big pain point here. What if I give someone else my license key?

    Well… What if you just give away updates anyway?

    Genesis does. No license check needed. I can take my Genesis core theme, install it on any site, and if it’s out of date, I get an update alert.

    If you buy their Pro Plus All-Theme Package, it works like this. You shell out $499.95 at first and then $99.95 per year for access to every single theme they make, plus 3rd party themes, plus theme updates, plus support.

    The thing is I never put in a license number to Genesis core or my children themes. Ever. The updates just happen, even if I don’t have an account. So what am I paying for with Genesis? I’m paying for the code base, the support, the advanced documentation, and the access to everything I may need to make my site damned awesome.

    But What About Big Changes?

    The game is a little different with plugins. See, a theme actually rarely changes. Once you’ve made a theme, it stays roughly the same except for library updates and security issues. A plugin though, they can add new features. So instead, let’s take a page from the Apple. The Apple App Store does not charge you for updates. They charge you for mini-transactions which, love ’em or hate ’em, actually work. If you need to charge for an update, you make a new version.

    Think about that for a second. In the App Store, version 4.1 is a minor release, but version 5.0 is a major release. This is not the same as WordPress’ semantic versions where 4.1 and 5.0 are both major releases, but 4.1.2 is not. When someone has a major release on the App Store, they retire their existing app and add a new one. The upgrade process mostly works. There’s always a weird period of time where things are odd.

    When we look at plugins, it’s a heck of a lot easier but you would have to use a license check to restrict updates. Using your licenses and the plugin headers, you can check “If someone’s on version 4.1 and I have released 5.0 and their license is active, push the update.” That’s the easy check. The fun check would be “If someone’s on version 4.1 and I’ve released both 5.0 and 4.2, but the license is not active, update them to 4.2 only.”

    Hold the phone. Why am I saying this? Because now you’re pushing security updates to your 4.x branch while not giving someone the new 5.x features. You win, because you’ve made the internet safer. The user wins, because they’re safer and possibly inclined to trust you more. Slip in a little alert to the top of the 4.x admin screens to say “There are new features in version 5.x. Upgrade now for 30% off!” and you’ll be converting sales!

    While someone could change their plugin headers to lie and say that their 4.x version is really a 5.x version, there’s no benefit to them to do this if you’re simultaneously requiring an active license.

    So What Does This Have to Do With GPL?

    Going back to what Andrea said, it makes it clear what your freedoms are.

    You can take code, install it where ever you want, and no one should actually give a damn. But by making updates easier, companies have to worry less about people wrangling, leaving them free to handle the egregious issues, like reselling.

    • The GPL allows me to take StudioPress themes and resell them if I want.
    • StudioPress has the right to delete my account and break my ability to update if I do that.

    Without touching on the hot-button topic of the ‘spirit’ of the GPL, we’re talking two separate things. The GPL allows me to do what I want with the code. The terms of use of StudioPress as a service, providing me with updates, is not bound by the GPL, nor should they be. But Andrea’s point, that our terms of use and licensing (billing) structure can confuse people with regards to our GPL freedoms, is totally valid.

    The onus is on the seller, not the buyer, to explain the difference between the GPL freedoms (do what you want, basically), with the Terms of Use freedoms. GPL doesn’t give you the freedom to defraud a company, for example. If they chose to cancel your account because you resold their product, that’s their right. Your freedom to resell is not impinged by the GPL. You can go for it. But they aren’t obligated to give you free updates anymore if that’s the case, and they can probably slap you with a c&d order.

    The point is the GPL and its freedoms can live side by side with making a profit. We just have to be honest about what we’re selling. We’re not selling the code at all, we’re selling the service.