This was written without any special insider knowledge. I’ve simply watched, paid attention, and kept track for the last two years. Often when I report a plugin, Mark and Otto are nice enough to explain things to me, and I’ve listened.
Occasionally a plugin vanishes from the WordPress repository. As a forum mod I tend to see people freak about this more often than not, and the question that inevitably comes up is ‘Why doesn’t WordPress publicize these things?’
Let’s go down the list for why a plugin is removed first. This list is very short, and boils down to three:
- It breaks the rules
- It has a security exploit
- The author asks for it to be removed
That’s pretty much it. The rules cover a lot, though Otto and I have been known to sum it up with ‘Don’t be a spamming dick.’ I actually had the chance to talk to folks about this before the ‘expanded guidelines’ went live, and I think I have a pretty good understanding of what the rules are. The majority of plugins, that I see removed, are done so for the most obvious reasons:
- Phoning home (i.e. sending the author data about you without your permission)
- Forward facing links (i.e. opt OUT links on the front of your site when you use the plugin)
- Affiliate links (i.e. the author gets revenue from the plugin without disclosure)
- Obfuscated code
None of those are security reasons, and most of them are ‘fixed’ by us reporting the plugin, the plugin repo mods contacting the author, the author making the fix, and all is well. When the author doesn’t reply, or in the case of a ‘phone home’, often the plugin is yanked from the repo pending review. So where are these ‘security reasons’ to yank a plugin, and why should WordPress disclose them. Phoning home is, sometimes, a security reason, depending on what’s actually being transmitted.Usually it’s a vulnerability or an outright backdoor that would be a reason to pull a plugin.
There’s an argument that ‘Trust requires transparency’ when it comes to security (see Verisign’s recent rigmarole) and that would mean WordPress needs to publish things like ‘This month, these plugins were removed for this reason.’ Except WordPress doesn’t, and in fact, if you look, rarely do companies do this until they have a fix. The ‘problem’ with WordPress is they don’t do the fix, the plugin devs do, and a surprisingly high amount of times, the plugin author fucks off like a monkey.
On the other side of this argument is FUD(Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) which is something you never want to feed. Look at the plugin “ToolsPack,” helpfully shown up on Sucuri. Now that was never hosted on WordPress.org, but if it had been, it would have been removed for exploitation. But once the offending plugin is removed, should WP go ahead
In October of 2010, WordPress.org ‘introduced’ a kill switch for plugins. Not really, but kind of. BlogPress SEO was spam. Yoast, one of the few true ‘SEO experts’ I know of, caught it and decided to fix it the best way he knew how. See, this plugin was never on the WordPress repository and so WP could do little about it. Yoast registered a plugin with the same name, gave it a newer version of the plugin, and everyone saw that as an ‘update’ and thus were saved. Sort of. Now, even Yoast admits this is abuse of the system, and I’ll leave the coulda/woulda/shoulda to someone else.
The reason I bring it up is this shows there is a way to handle bad plugins. But it’s not very efficient, it’s not very friendly, and it doesn’t promise that it will work. First off, not enough people run updates, and secondly it’s putting a lot of work on a very small group of people. While the theme reviewers have a lot of folks helping out, the plugins do not. Should they? Yes, but the number of people who understand all the code that could be in a plugin is far smaller than for a theme. I suppose it’s saying ‘plugins are harder than themes.’ I may be wrong, but it’s how I feel.
To fix all this, you’d need to basically reboot the plugins directory, turn them all off, review each of the 18,000+ plugins, and turn them back on. Then you need an Otto or Nacin going through each one to make sure every check in is okay, every update and every change isn’t spamming. Oh yes, that’s what happens to theme devs, didn’t you know? All releases are approved before they go live. Can you see the plugin developers agreeing to that? That’s a nonsense complaint of mine, actually. If tomorrow the rules changed, maybe half the plugins in the repo would vanish and never come back, but most of the rest would be fine. Of course, we would need a dedicated team of people to do nothing but review and approve plugins to keep up with the traffic.
So accepting what we have today, the wild west, why isn’t there a running list of all plugins yanked from the repo, and why? The list itself isn’t a bad idea. Having a list to say ‘This plugin was disabled on this date’ would be nice for a lot of us, and more so, having the plugin page show ‘This was disabled.’ would be nice. I can even think of a couple code ways to do it, but all of them need a full time person to go through the ‘removals’ and put up a splash page with ‘If you used this plugin, please consider alternatives: .’ and ‘If you wrote this plugin, please contact plugin support.’ Also, this would increase emails to the plugins support account, not from the authors, but from people who want to know why a plugin was removed. And what about a day when a plugin is removed because of a bad thing, but the authors fix it? Did we create a false feeling of doubt in a plugin that had a typo?
On paper, it all sounds like we should be keeping a public list for this still, though. Put it all up there for the public, disclose everything.
Every time I write that sentence, I wince.
It sounds nice on paper, and all I can think is about the people who will cry foul, complain, and want to know more. “Why was this plugin removed and not that one?” Well, most of the time it’s because no one mentioned that plugin. Right now, the plugins that get yanked are ones people stumble across or report.
But why worry about a simple list of removed plugins? Because the first thing I would do, if I was a nefarious hacker, would be to script a pull from that list and scan the web looking for sites that use the plugins, thus implementing a vector for attack. See, we already know people don’t update plugins as often as they should (which is why Yoast’s ‘fix’ isn’t as good an idea as we’d hope), but now not only are we leaving people at risk, we’re opening them to even more risk. If we email them to tell them the plugin’s risky, we have the same problem.
There’s no safe way to inform people without putting anyone who’s not up to date at risk. Given that the most dangerous day to have an unpatched system is the day of disclosure, the only way WordPress, or anyone, could keep a list like that would be if, like Chrome, WP auto-pushed updates right away, forcing anyone who opened the site to upgrade. And that’s fraught with it’s own issues.
Until then, I can’t advocate anyone keeping a list of removed plugins. It’s too risky.