I’m about to create a website on wordpress. My website is an escort website. It is adult oriented. The new website would look exactly like my current website […] and I’m considering to build a new website on wp.
Since my friend’s website is built on wp and is escort oriented, plus it was banned by wp, now I’m worried about it all.
Is it allowed to build an escort website on wp?
Yes.
I’ve mentioned it before, that you can use WP for porn because the freedoms of the GPL allow it. More specifically, WordPress states that you can use it for anything you want.
So what’s Zara talking about when she says ‘it was banned by wp’ if that’s true? We’re talking about a couple things here, one is WordPress.org and the other is WordPress.com and yes, it’s a headache.
WordPress.org is the home of the software. WordPress.com is a hosting service that runs nothing but a locked down, managed, WordPress Multisite instance that you can use for free (or pay for add-ons). As a hosting company, WordPress.com has specific rules and bylaws that they restrict their users to. This is, in no way shape or form, a violation of your GPL permissions. They’re not restricting WordPress usage, they’re restricting your usage of their servers and their system.
So yes, Zara, you can use the WordPress software for your escort website, but you need to find a web host who will give you permission to host it. My advice to you is to make sure what you’re doing is legal where you live. Also, make sure it’s legal for your webhost. At DreamHost, I know we allow any website that’s legal in the state of California, which means we host a lot of sites I personally disagree with but will defend their right to publish with my dying breath. Not every website has the same rules, so just ask them if they allow escort sites. They should be able to answer, or pass you on to legal for confirmation.
also i’d like you to either never submit pull requests again or at least try to not put harmful code in them
That was what a developer said when I made a derp pull request, adding in a check for 0 that should have been better as a check for not -1.
Regardless of the fact that he and I fundamentally disagree on the usefulness of the code (and frankly, that’s why I assumed he’d be punting my pull request), his reply is something I’m very glad I got now and not 10 years ago.
Like pretty much everyone on the planet, I have moments where I wonder if you’re all going to figure out that I don’t know a damn thing and I’ve been faking it all these years. It’s Imposter Syndrome, and we all suffer from it to a degree. And it’s comments like that developer made that reinforce it.
Now, I know this guy’s history. And I know at first glance his reply may seem terse but not all that bad. Sadly, this is probably the nicest I’ve ever seem him tell someone they sucked. He’s not nice. At all. His support forums are filled with him calling people demeaning names, or saying they’re stupid for not understanding his code, and frankly on the list of humans I would willingly interact with for fun, he’s not there. He’s not even on the reserves. But I still respect his code (though not his documentation, inline or otherwise) and I use it every day. I won’t be contributing to it anymore because I don’t have any need to be in an abusive relationship.
“Curse your sudden, but inevitable, betrayal!”
And that’s what this is! He’s abusive and behavior I don’t care for and wether he means it or not, he’s being mean. It feels silly and petty to put it that way, but that’s what it is. He’s a mean person. I don’t care that he’s mean, and it didn’t actually hurt my feelings though it did make me momentarily angry at him, but I do care that meanness like that will convince someone to stop and never get better at things. Did it hurt my feelings? Yes, it did. It sucks to be told your code sucks, but it sucks more to be told in a way that makes you feel like you’ll never be good enough in any way, which is precisely what many people will read from that comment.
When you ask me “Where does Imposter Syndrome come from?” I say “People like that.” People who reinforce the belief that you’re not good enough, that you’re crap and don’t deserve their time to learn better, and you can go eff yourself.
Is he required to be nice and handhold me through the code and explain why? Hell no! But he made an open source product which he opened to the public, put on GitHub, and allowed for pull requests. He’s naive to think everyone will come to his product knowing everything, and I suspect part of his attitude issue is because he doesn’t want to help people. Which again, is fine. Obviously I don’t feel the same way, but I also don’t think everyone can be good at support. I do think that if you’ve got all this in the open, you’re going to get people who are far less experienced than you are. How you treat them will set the standard for what kind of help you get from your community in the future.
Let’s contrast this. I was talking to people about a change in some laws recently and fiddling with an add on to code I use because of it. When I reached a point at which the code worked, I put it on Github and said “Pull requests and fixes welcome!” I knew the code wasn’t good enough. I knew I wasn’t sanitizing everything yet, some of it was terribly inefficient, and some of it was bad code. I knew this. I knew it wasn’t perfect at all, but I put it up and then pinged a developer for the product I was using. His reply?
mind if I fork that and we distribute it either on [our] site or in (pending yet another round of core team discussion) in core?
Boom. He knew it wasn’t perfect. He saw the value in the attempt and proof of concept, and he ran with it. Naturally I told him to use and enjoy, because I’d licensed it GPL. He also said he’d try and do a pull request to make it so when you used the code, it stopped you from picking the wrong thing. That was something I’ve yet to sort out, even though I’ve been playing with the code some more. I’m learning something new. I’ve never written for that code project before (except a typo fix). This is all new for me.
The difference is pretty bold. One guy pretty much insulted me, one encouraged. The insult, justified or not, discouraged me from wanting to pitch other suggestions or improvements. The encouragement is making me think about an offer they made a while ago more seriously. It also inspired me to sit and study the code, read what it did and why (seriously awesome inline documentation there), and be able to go from zero to add-on in 4 hours while prepping for a holiday dinner.
How you represent yourself, as a developer, creates your community. How you treat others can help or hinder their entire lives. You may not think about your words as having that much power because you’re just someone who helps in a support forum, or you wrote a simple two line plugin, or you translated a file, but they do. Your words matter a lot.
As for the people reading this who don’t code well either, don’t be afraid to code badly. You can’t know it all from the beginning and don’t let people get you down about that. Tell them you’re learning, that you’re trying to be bold and step out, and you won’t get any better in a vacuum. Some of us have to learn by doing, after all. We can’t all read the code and know the answers, and that’s okay.
By the way, yes I’m still using the code from the other guy. I’ve forked it (and now I get to learn about syncing your fork back with master changes) and I’m keeping my one change in there. I’m sure there’s another fix, with a filter perhaps, but given the lack of documentation and assistance, I’ll be stuck with this for a while yet. But you know what? That’s actually okay.
I honestly have no hard feelings on a personal level. I’m not obligated to like him or agree with his choices. He’s not obligated to agree with mine. That’s why open source is great. I can fork it and go. But what won’t happen is that I won’t be afraid to make changes, to get things wrong, and to keep learning.
I’m probably starting a wildstorm here, but I want to put this out there. I don’t always use 100% GPL products on my sites, and that’s okay.
Please put down your pitchforks!
I am a happy Open Source person. If you give me a choice between two equally good products, one being Open Source and the other not, I’ll pick Open Source any day of the week. But. There’s a reason I use Apple Pages and not Open Office. Pages works for me. It fits my workflow, it fits my brain, and it makes me write more easily. Since I’m often sprawled on the couch writing with my thumbs on my iPad Mini, it makes perfect sense to use Pages and iCloud.
But there’s another place I don’t worry too much about GPL or Open Source, and that’s when I’m coding something that is only ever going to be for me.
I was working on a new site and we were looking for icons to properly represent how we felt. We needed a toaster. We didn’t have one in Font Awesome or Genericons, so I pulled up Symbolicons! The catch? It’s not GPL. But the thing was, we knew we’d never be distributing these icons. It was for one website, so why did it matter?
And the fact is that for this use case, it did not matter at all!
Understanding what I’m doing, who it’s for, and where it’s going to be used is highly important. And understanding what I want to support and maintain is equally important. For the most part, open source doesn’t come with Apple Care or companies like OWC who specialize in bailing people out or helping them extend things. WordPress doesn’t come with that, for good or not, it’s really a ‘figure it out as you go’ sort of product.
There are use cases to consider. Who’s going to use the computer? What do they know? Is it worth teaching them Linux or can they keep using their Mac? Much like I do when I’m mentoring someone, I don’t try to push my ideals on someone, or assume my way and my solution is the only solution. When I look at GPL, yes, it’s my default. I always start there. But I don’t stop there and I don’t let it blind me to what things need to be, because the best solution may not be open source, it may not be GPL, and it may not be WordPress.
So long as you’re not violating a license, use what suits your needs. But do pay attention to those licenses.
Wednesday is the Great Internet Slowdown where websites all over the world are going to protest the cable conglomerates getting together to tell us how fast our internet can be to specific sites, when they want it to be fast or not.
I’m going to do this one simply. You know how you can dial anyone on your phone, and it’s your responsibility to not dial up sex numbers if that offends you? The phone company doesn’t limit your ability to do that. It doesn’t stop you from sexting your ex at 2am when you’re drunk and that was a really bad idea, wasn’t it? They don’t tell you, as you dial a psychic, that you should dial this other one instead. No, they let you shoot yourself in the foot.
Well that’s not how they want it to work on the Internet.
Cable companies are spending billions to gut the heart right out of net neutrality and create fast lanes and slow lanes on the Internet. A company that pays them more will get their site loading faster. A company that doesn’t, even if it has superior products, would be slower.
This isn’t about how quickly our cat videos load, it’s about the future of our ability to communicate, to learn, to create, and to rebel. It’s about the future of humanity.
I know that sounds a little heavy handed, but it’s true. The ability to use the Internet for communication is massively important. I work with people all around the globe, I fix websites all over the place and I talk constantly with people everywhere. I need to be able to do this to succeed at my job. If cable companies get their way, it might make it impossible for products like WordPress to develop as quickly as it does today.
It’s already hard enough, with nations putting up firewalls and blocks preventing China from reaching Google for fonts, to get things done. But now we’re letting companies you and I might not even use decide they know what’s right?
Come on! Let me decide if I want to go to that site and talk to those people! It’s just like the phone, after all.
If you’re on WordPress, grab the Cat Signal Plugin. You can install it and leave it on, it’ll turn itself on when needed.
One morning I awoke to see that one of the lead developers on an open source product was leaving because of ‘creative differences.’ Those are my words. His were a little more angry and frustrated, because it was clear these differences were in the direction of the product. He felt stifled and restrained, saying that the grip the original developer had on the product was at odds with allowing the community to develop it going forward, and he was tired of the fight.
So he forked it and moved on.
Regardless of what product this is (and really it doesn’t matter), the decision on my end is whom should I follow?
On the one hand, this is the lead dev who has applied most (if not all) of the patches I’ve submitted. On the other, the original dev has been working on this for over a decade. Then again, the jump to making this a product I wanted to use happened when the new devs, including the forker, came on board. And the original dev is clearly facing a case of founderitis, where there’s his way or the highway, and not accepting the fact that open source products develop in their own life.
Taking a deep breath, I do not mean to trivialize the issues here. When angry-making things happen, they happen for more reasons than we can see, and we know that there are always, always, two sides to the issues. At the same time I am not a part of the angry and it’s not my business to delve deep into it, save to come to a place where I can make my educated, thoughtful decision.
I do have to worry about the stability of both products. How much was this one dev (or these few devs) the cornerstone of the product? Of the features added, whose do I use and like more? Of the ongoing philosophies, which do I more align with? How easy will it be to support the separate version? Do I think this guy is up for it?
None of this is easy! It’s a jump of who do I trust more, and much of it is a gut feeling. I review the code, I match the changes, and I base my choices on what makes me feel better. But … what about when I’m not a coder? It’s even harder. I have to wait and see which is better, which devs jump with, which users I respect join forks, and even then I know if I wait too long, it’ll be hard to move.
I moved my photo gallery from a home grown site to Gallery2 to ZenPhoto. I know the pain of hating the changes in a product. I know the pain of forking. But even so, I still can’t tell you how to make that call because even I don’t know.
While I’m a huge proponent of ‘Give it away’ (see all my ebooks), I also retain copyright on my creations for a reason, and it’s curiously the same reason why Brian (and Leo Babuta) don’t. Let me quote Leo:
I’m not a big fan of copyright laws, especially as they’re being applied by corporations, used to crack down on the little guys so they can continue their large profits.
I’m not the big guy. I’m the little guy. I want to protect what I created not for miles of profit, but because attribution is critical to my end goal of “obscurity.” That is to say the rationale behind my ebook philosophy of “Pay what you want” is that if people don’t know about a thing, they won’t buy/use a thing. Where as if people do know, and can find, a thing, they will use it.
As I said, and as Cory Doctrow says: People don’t not buy a book because it was free, they don’t buy a book because they don’t know about the book.
So if I remove copyright, and no one has to credit me, then no one knows about me and they can’t come back and get WordPress Multisite 110, or WordPress Bookstore and learn more. They can’t find this blog and get even more, free, tidbits about WordPress and computers and business and whatever else they use this site for. In short, without attribution, people can’t learn any more from me because they don’t know about me.
As confusing as this can be, I’m okay with you taking my stuff and giving it away for free. But I do want you to say “I got this from halfelf.org” so that you pass on not just the information to the next guy, but the ability for them to find more information. The knowledge, not just the information, is key here. Taking my work and presenting it as your own gives information, but it does not teach knowledge, nor does it enable anyone to learn and go forward because you’re throttling their resources.
Copyright isn’t about protecting the bug guy for me, it’s about protecting you from the big guy. It’s about making sure you know, and the next person knows where the information came from and how to resource it. Encyclopedias give away information, but the reason they’re amazing is that they give you the ability to gain knowledge from the information.
Copyright is my encyclopedia. It’s forcing you to keep credit/attribution, which gives you information and the ability to gain further knowledge from it. It protects me, but that’s incidental in that it helps you. And if it can keep the big guys from stealing my stuff and presenting it as their own, then everyone wins.
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