Tag: mailbag

Mailbag: Why Won’t You Help Me From Myself?

I won’t name names here but I suspect people know who I’m talking about it. Please note, any comments naming names will be deleted. They deserve a chance to redeem their name and exactly who they are is not the issue.

We never received any advice when we asked. Only warnings.

A company made a new plugin, released it on WordPress.org, and then emailed a lot of people about it.

It was brought to my attention first as a potential plugin violation. Was someone culling emails of the plugin install and using that to send email? A quick check of the code showed that was not the case and I informed the reporters as such.

But then people said “I don’t even use this plugin and I got emailed.”

At this point, I dropped them a note and explained that sending out spam email like that was going to piss people off. Lo and behold, their plugin was filled with one-star reviews.

In the end, the asked the plugin to be deleted because they felt they could never recover. And I had not helped them, only warned them. This was true. I had not offered to help them make peace. I’d told them what was about to happen. And it did.

Why didn’t I help them? Simply, I’m not their marketing department.

As I said. Who they are doesn’t matter. They aren’t the first person to have this problem and they won’t be the last. And the question they’re really asking is two fold.

First, why won’t I delete bad reviews based on people not liking getting spam. Second, why won’t I fix the problem.

For the first, it’s because the experience of your plugin begins with how someone is introduced to it. If the first experience I have with a product is a racist or sexist ad, I will not use it. If it’s a product I was considering using, I might leave a comment or review saying “I would have used this but…” That was my experience. It doesn’t matter than I never used the product if my experience with it beforehand was strong enough to inspire me to leave a review.

For the second, I can’t fix your problem. You did this to yourself. You had a poorly conceived of ad campaign and it shot you in the foot. You aren’t the first person to have this problem and you won’t be the last. You’re just someone else who screwed up and was hit by the social monster.

And you know what? It sucks, and it’s not fair, but it’s something you did to yourself. Yes, you did it by accident, but covering it up doesn’t make it go away.

We all screw up. We all have to apologize. If it was me? I’d reply to every single one star review and tell them I was sorry, it was a bad idea, I won’t do it again. And then I’d donate money in WordPress’ name to the EFF, explaining that while I can’t compensate them for the plugin without it approaching bribery, I can endorse the protection of our online privacy, which I flagrantly disrespected.

It won’t be perfect, but it gets you started.

20 November, 2015
Mailbag: But You Can’t Post Mobile!
This has been marked as the biggest downside to using Jekyll. Once I started telling people I was moving the Wiki to Jekyll, a great many of them were cautionary about this issue.

How do you post from your phone or iPad?

The answer is that I don’t.

I won’t lie. Mobile posting is a pain. Since I don’t have Jekyll running on my server, I can’t edit a file there and regenerate. If I had that it would all be a lot easy. In my case, since I’m using it as a non-blog it’s never the place I need to post mission critical things. Besides, if you’ve ever tried to keep your pretty formatted WordPress site updated when you want a custom crafted excerpt and a featured image, from your iPad, I gotta tell you … it sucks.

And that’s WordPress, something that has a dedicated, usable, app for iOS. WordPress is also pretty okay in mobile. People like Ryan Boren spends a great deal of time caring about mobile usage. WordPress has gotten slower on the admin side in the last decade, but it’s gotten more responsive and agile at the same time.

MediaWiki not so much. Editing should be a lot easier, seeing as there’s no ‘admin’ back end to mess with things, but for whatever reason MediaWiki was always terrible on my iPad. It was next to unusable on my iPhone. Even with their default themes (remember, with MediaWiki you see the front end theme on page edits) it was dodgy.

Furthermore, what did I need to post? This is a wiki-type documentation site. It is rarely, if ever, updated on the fly. It houses long form news articles. There are recaps of TV episodes, explanations of humanitarian events, and reports of events. There is no live blogging. There is no quick off the cuff journaling. It’s storytelling.

So here’s my ‘mobile’ workflow.
1. Write the content in something, probably Byword
2. Email it to myself
3. Probably rewrite the whole thing in longer form, with design and fancy things
4. Post
I could probably streamline that better if I saved from Byword to Dropbox and had that automatically copy over (suggestions welcome), but I don’t really write from my iPad that much. I usually send myself an email with six or seven links and a note to ‘Import these things…’
6 November, 2015
Mailbag: Why Jekyll?

Why didn’t you convert your site to WordPress? You said you had to import it from Mediawiki to WordPress already.

I had this conversation with my wife, too.

WordPress is awesome at being a dynamic website. To be a static ‘wiki’ style website, it sucks. It’s not meant to be static like that. It’s not intended to be static. Even if you turn off comments on your site, you mean for WordPress to generate index pages and categories and the like.

With WordPress, all that work is done on the server. When you visit a page, it’s generated for the first time. I may have a cache that lets reader number 2 see that page, but always the page, the HTML, is being dynamically built on-demand. MediaWiki works the same way. In contrast, Jekyll is dynamically built on my laptop and deployed as an in-situ static site. Each HTML page is a real HTML page on the server. No extra work has to happen. It’s small, it’s light, and it’s fast, because all that processing was done by me on my laptop before putting it on the server.

And that actually illustrates the problem with WordPress, and why we struggle with things like Varnish and nginx and caching. We want our sites to do more and be faster. We need flexibility and posting to Twitter and dynamic page generation when we make an edit, because we’re constantly making changes.

Except I didn’t. I don’t. Not the particular site I was working on, anyway. The site has about 1000 pages (probably closer to 600 once I decided not to import some of the things) and they’re pretty static. At most I updated them once a week for half the year. WordPress would be overkill. Hell, the Wiki was overkill and the only reason I kept using it was technological debt. I didn’t want to add to the debt. I didn’t want to make things even weirder and harder to use. I didn’t want to put a site more at risk with software I didn’t want to upkeep (MediaWiki, not WordPress).

So it was clearly time to dig myself out with a little sweat equity and decide what I really wanted. I made a list of what I needed, what I wanted, and what I could live without. When I did that, Jekyll started looking more and more like a viable option. I would have spent as much time removing the aspects of WordPress I don’t need as I would have learning a new theme system and language.

Also in the end I didn’t use the WordPress import. I manually copy/pasted content. The content was what I wanted, and I needed it text only, and MediaWiki made that damn hard to get at. Of course the Jekyll exporter for WordPress was pretty freaking cool. If I was pure WordPress to Jekyll, I’d be fine. I guess there just aren’t a lot of people doing MediaWiki exports.

23 October, 2015
Mailbag: Delete My Account, Please

Becuase I’m active in the support forums, people find me and ask all sorts of questions. Like Charlie.

I want to totally delete my word press account. I will PAY you to do this. Why? Because I worked for 15 minutes on the original word press website but found it too difficult for me and chose to go with a super easy Wix.com website, which is now published and works well. In searches I come up under wordpress only and my deleted wordpress website is still there. I want people to be able to find my wix site. I hope there is a way to TOTALLY delete my word press account. I will PAY you to do it.

Sorry, Charlie, no can do. I checked his email and his domain that he put in his email and it was on WordPress.com so I sent him the link on .com for How to delete your site.

I will note, I am sorry he wants to use Wix.com, but on some levels it is far simpler than WordPress (yes, I said it). It’s drag, drop, and done, and looks great on desktops. Mobile? That’s another story. But I had a paint-by-numbers GeoCities account back in the day, so I really don’t have room to talk about ugly first websites.

The story doesn’t end here. Charlie asked me to do it for him.

Even if he was a customer at my company, I would tell him no. I would send him directions on how to do it but I would not delete it for him. I don’t delete customer’s sites or data (unless the data is a Terms violation). Hell, even with hacked content, I back it up elsewhere first. Deleting someone’s data is an absolute, 100%, last resort. You should never ever do it. There’s no going back.

Then Charlie asked me again.

I suspect his issue was that he was really frustrated and wanted everything to die in a fire. Which I totally understand, but amidst all your anger, you need to take a deep breath and follow the directions. And, when someone tells you “I don’t work for that company, but I found out how to do it. Here you go!” perhaps you can say “Thank you.”

Just a thought.

16 October, 2015
Mailbag: An Appropriate Solution
Y’all know I don’t really like to answer these questions. I mean. Presumably you’ve noticed I don’t answer this a lot anymore?

I don’t care if you use Multisite. And I hate this question because you’re (innocently) asking me one of the most incredibly complicated questions possible.

I’m working with a college who wishes to create a portfolio system for their students. Basically, a student can create their own website – or multiple – to share with employers and others. I’m thinking WP Multisite may be a good option. I could have super admin access, the college’s admin can have super admin access, and each student will have admin access to their individual sites. Would you agree that WP Multisite would be an appropriate solution?

I agree it can be an appropriate solution.

I will never agree it’s the solution.

Read the post I linked to above, will you? The one that explains exactly why this is such a damned hard thing to answer.

Now. Ask yourself this:
1. Are those students the people who will be happy where they can’t install a plugin or a theme, or will they badger you endlessly to install them?
2. Will those students ever want to easily export/move their sites?
3. Will they ever need ‘more’ than WordPress and, thus, need shell or DB access?
4. What do you want them to be able to do when they’re done?
5. How much time do you have to fix their sites?
6. Are you able to review and ensure security for all plugins and themes they may want?
7. Do they already have webhosting? (Most universities give you some.)
Figure that out and you’ll know if it’s the most appropriate solution for them and you.
25 September, 2015
Mailbag: Curbing Comments By Count

Someone had a rant in my mailbox about my strong stance on comment moderation, which can be distilled to this question:

I noticed you really have strong opinions on comment moderation. Do you use anything other than bad words to flag for moderation or outright block?

Sure do!

I’m very careful about ‘bad words’ since ‘anal’ will also pick up ‘canal’ and I only moderate for for things that are generally only used as a pejorative. Example? Okay, I have ‘dyke’ and ‘kike’ in my mod list. The first one I get called a lot. Still. The second has fallen out of favor. But because people have a remarkable talent to say words with the sole intent to be hurtful, even under the veneer of “I was just being funny, stop being so sensitive!” I have cherry-picked the popular ones on my sites and tossed them into moderation.

The only thing I blacklist are people. People’s emails (and user names sometimes) go into the blacklist. That’s why I wrote Sitewide Comment Control, I’m able to blacklist people from the whole network easily. But I only use this for people. People should be blacklisted when they prove themselves to be untrainable.

That leaves one thing up in the air and that’s moderation. You have three choices with default WordPress: Moderate all, moderate un-approved, moderate none.

I have “moderate un-approved” which means I have to manually approve all first time comments. To add on to that, I use Comment Probation in order to restrict people I’m not entirely sure about.

And finally, I moderate by length.

I month ago, I mentioned on Twitter that I was playing with an idea to have my comments moderated by length. If a comment was over X words long, it should be flagged as needing approval before showing.

Caspar Hübinger, in the time it took me to get a cup of coffee, wrote Comment Moderation by Word Count. I made one, small, patch to it, and I’m using it now.

This simple WordPress plugin will send any comment that would otherwise be approved automatically by WordPress to the moderation queue if it contains more than a given number of words.

The theory I have is this: If your comment is over a certain length, you really may want to consider making it a rebuttal blog post of your own. My limit is currently set to 250 words here, which is half a page of content.

My one change was this:

If current_user_can( 'edit_posts' ) then they should be able to leave a comment of any length without moderation.

My theory here was that admins and editors are trusted users.

And now you know!

18 September, 2015