This post is likely to be of interest mostly to those who are hosting a blog on Wordpress.com.
Looking at Fire Fly’s blog, I noticed that she’s discovered that a new feature on her hosted-by-Wordpress.com blog. It turned up without direct notification, and is opt-out, not opt-in. … » Problem No.1 (She’s disabled it, and you should too if you blog on wordpress.com - see below for instructions)
This new feature generates a list of “Possibly Related Posts” at the foot of your own posts, and it searches through a database of all other Wordpress.com blogs to do so. Now, just consider the variety of attitudes people have to the words “feminism” and “racism” for instance, and can you guess where this is going? Oh yes it did - the list of “possibly related posts” on Fire Fly’s feminist blog included links to posts written by white supremacists and anti-feminists (often in the same link) - fanfuckingtastic, eh? So your readers might well think that these posts are being recommended by you, instead of automatically, and what does that do to a poster’s credibility? …. » Problem No.2
Did I mention that these “possibly related post” links are not visible or able to be edited when you are writing your post? … » Problem No.3
Not only that, by having this feature enabled on your blog, it also means that posts from your blog are being included in the list generated by this “feature” on other people’s blogs, which for Fire Fly included those self-same white supremacists and anti-feminists, thus sending their readers to her blog. This is why she titled her post thusly: Warning! The new WordPress feature is utter trollbait. … » Problem No.4
I was very grateful for her post, because it enabled me to immediately disable this “feature” on Finally, A Feminism 101 Blog - can you imagine the imminent descent of the trolls if I hadn’t realised?
engtech from Internet Duct Tape lists these and further problems with the new feature, shows exactly how to disable it, and offers other advice on “fixing it”. He also links to the always-worth-reading Lorelle, who is also very much not a fan, and who points out:
Since the beginning of WordPress.com, one of the most requested features has been the ability to showcase related posts from our own blogs. WordPress.com has activated this ability, but the links link to WordPress.com blogs, not our own.
Lorelle also explains how to disable the feature:
To turn off the new related post feature on WordPress.com blogs:
1. Go to the Administration Panels > Design > Extras.
2. Check Hide Related Links.
3. Click Update.
Why has Wordpress.com implemented this feature instead of giving users what they actually asked for? This new feature has nothing to do with what users actually wanted, which was to point readers to further reading of their own blog (like the “similar posts” feature that I have on Hoyden, which I have because I host this blog on my own server and can customise it). Lacking any control over which other blogs your own blog links to is really a very unattractive option.
The proposed solution, after a flurry of complaints, doesn’t really address the core problem:
In the next few days we’ll have an update that allows you to block specific blogs from showing up, and eventually that setting will also apply to the tag surfer, blog surfer, and top blogs so when you block a blog you should never see it again.
Both engtech and Lorelle point out just how much work this involves for users when Wordpress.com is hosting over a million blogs. Again, why not an opt-in system so that users could choose a select whitelist of other blogs to link to rather than having to create a comprehensive blacklist? Why not make it an option automatically to only link to to posts from the blogs in their own blogroll? Why not make it an option to do what the users wanted in the first place - only link to posts from their own blog?
This lack of control that is a continuing irritation when using Wordpress.com is why I haven’t moved Hoyden there, even though I’m generally a fan of Wordpress software as a CMS. I like having the extra control that being able to customise my own Wordpress.org installation on my own server gives me. I certainly didn’t like suddenly having to learn a whole new admin interface on Wordpress.com all of a sudden last month, because as engtech points out, there was no carrot offered to users to compensate for them moving our friggin’ cheese. That’s why I have resisted upgrading to the latest version of Wordpress here at Hoyden - where’s my carrot? (and stop sending me nagging messages on my current admin interface - stop using my server’s bandwidth to check whether I’ve got the latest update or not, OK?)
crossposted from Hoyden About Town
Thanks for the post alerting us, tigtog & LP.
Alternatively: don’t use wordpress.com if you can’t tell the difference between an open-source application and a proprietary service.
“No carrot”? Apart from them supplying a domain, effectively unlimited bandwidth and a chopped-down CMS for nothing?
I don’t get the outrage.
We’ve just moved our blog from there but I don’t want to delete the old one just yet. So thanks for the heads-up.
It’s a pretty badly thought out feature, but I’m basically with Liam. Incompetent, but not worth more reaction than a long-suffering forehead-slap.
Did you read engtech’s post? He explained himself pretty well, I thought. He was discussing the general phenomenon of people’s resistance to change, from the perspective of a software developer, using the particular instance of an un-notified upgrade in a widely known application as the specific example.
In turn, I riffed off that for an explanation of certain things I don’t like about the nagging I’m getting to upgrade my own wordpress.org installation (which I run on my own domain for which I pay and on my webhost’s server, for which I also pay). Each new upgrade contains more and more packaged features which bloat the server-space required and bandwidth usage. I see no carrot for me in upgrading further.
Back to the outrage: it’s mostly directed at the combination of
1. the feature throwing up a high proportion of inappropriate posts purely if you look at keywords, let alone opposing ideologies.
2. yet again it’s implemented as an opt-out rather than an opt-in
Just as engtech describes people being resistant to change, they’re also resistant to having changes made which are beyond their control without so much as a direct notification.
Yes, I did read engtech.
Yes. It is.
Yes. He should be.
What a terrible thing, to have a few annoying functionality-constraints on a massively useful service provided as a gratuity to any and all applicants. How dare they?
And on upgrades to WP as an installed app, isn’t the ‘carrot’ in the latest 2.5 round that of public and private good of not being vulnerable to attacks on security loopholes? Pretty chunky vegetable if you ask me.
Those quotes are from the first post that I linked by engtech.
The line about the carrot comes from the second post of his that I linked, which was about the new admin interface rather than the related posts feature. The whole final paragraph of my post is about the new admin interface. I was attempting to show that this is not the only time that new features have suddenly appeared without warning.
Yes, I’m following perfectly well where each quote is coming from, but why should expect carrots in the first place? It’s free software, there’s no profit incentive to please a user base. If you don’t like WP, migrate to a paid service like Moveable Type or Expression Engine, learn how to use another free CMS like Drupal, or code your own up.
WP isn’t the only or even the best software for running single or multi-user blogs.
There’s two issues here.
One - a new feature that lots of people weren’t aware of and a sizable proportion of users don’t much care for once they find it’s there. I posted to let people know how to disable it.
Two - is it generally a good idea for providers to give their users what the providers want them to have instead of what the users have repeatedly asked for? Many of their users do pay for at least the ability to tweak their CSS, and as soon as someone posts a CSS workaround for this new feature, they find that the code is changed so that their workaround doesn’t work anymore?
If there’s no profit incentive in the WP business plan to please their user base, there surely must be even less incentive to actively piss them off? (and I’m presuming that there is actually a profit incentive for them to have more users rather than fewer, even if I haven’t analysed their business model) I guess if WP actively wants people to move to other blogging platforms and CMSes (which, as you say, are at least as good and some are better) then they’re going the right way about it.
As for the upgrade for my selfhosted WP installation, the major security issues were sorted in the last upgrade before this one, AFAIK.
Fight, nerds, fight!
Yes it wasn’t a good idea, and badly announced. The image uploading has also been a diaster with the new version on .com
It’s always the balance you have to work out. Unlimited bandwidth, hosted on multiple servers etc .com or more customisation but have to sort out the technicals yourself .org.
I really want to radically change my design (since The Worst of Perth is teh design), but I see so many of the self hosted blogs falling over all the time. A hard choice.
Precisely, Worst of Perth. There’s clearly a demand for free, no-strings, no-ads blog hosting with infinite tweakability, rock-solid reliability, a shallow learning curve and idiot-proof ease of use. And, of course, the proverbial pony.
Tigtog, I commend Drupal to you.
FDB, sounds like you need the vicarious pleasure of running your own hobby-blog.
The vicarious I have already Liam, and the actual must wait until my dream of becoming a kept man is realised.
The little lady just scored a 2-level promotion in the Vic DSE, so the dream lives on…
I see FDB. What you want is open-source tenancy and board, without unwanted features such as chores, cleaning and maintenance work, with a provider who is keenly responsive to users’ needs.
/banal sarcasm
I’ll give WP one very important prop as an application: for users with relatively low demands, it’s pretty bombproof and *very* difficult to install/configure wrong. For someone starting up a site, it’s pretty hard to go past.
“What you want is open-source tenancy and board, without unwanted features such as chores, cleaning and maintenance work, with a provider who is keenly responsive to users’ needs.”
Precisely. Although I look great in a maid’s outfit.
GIF!!!!1!11!
Yes indeed. Without a picture captioned in 24 point Impact, that mental image is worthless, FDB.
Thanks. I had noticed that it was putting links at the end of my post and was wondering a) why it was happening and b) why they weren’t really all that related to what I was writing about.
There’s always blogger..
Friends don’t let friends use Drupal. And although Wordpress has tempted me now and again with its file-system based theme engine and user interface designed by the great Zeldman himself, I keep going back to my favoured old workhorse, Textpattern.
I had a look at my blog and there were no added links, so perhaps some themes don’t lend themselves to the service either.
So far it has provided some interesting links, so I am leaving it for now, but thanks for the advice on how to disable it if required.
Not if WP or textpattern or blogger serve their needs, no. But if you actually want to have a multi-user site with more content than just blog-entries-dated-and-tagged, you’ve got to look a bit further afield for a decent CMS.
[whistles] I’m your pusher man…
Your last post was published before the feature was rolled out. The PRP feature will put links to other blogs at the bottom of your next post unless you disable it.
Another issue is that its algorithm for assigning relatedness seems to be kinda fubared. People are reporting only about 1 in 4 truly relevant linked posts on average. At least part of that is probably that most people don’t use tags properly, but in that case they need to give less weight to tags and more weight to categories, which most people are pretty careful about.
Hmm - I posted this already but it disappeared and I can’t find it in the spaminator. Double Hm. (edited to add - and now it’s reappeared. Triple Hm)
It was only activated on late Friday our time, so that would have been after you published your last post. It only activates as you are using the edit-mode, so while you are drafting a new post or updating an older one then PRP will add the links to the foot of your post.
Hah, but Textpattern IS a multi-user general-purpose CMS! The basic install doesn’t have a huge amount of functionality but that means it’s got an excellent security profile.
For anything harder-core than it or its plugins can do, you’re better off with a custom app framework like Django or Ruby on Rails.
1. It seems like they just had one of their usual amateur-hour PHP coder moments and did simple word comparisons across the database. Which is OK for *within* a single blog, but as it turns out, retarded across many blogs.
2. I’m actually launching a hosted service myself and was musing about a similar optional feature, but based on the Amazon approach of “see also”. Essentially “people who read this post also read …” for each post. I figure it could be done by log analysis rather than relying on simplistic word-matching. An example of ‘collective intelligence’, to borrow a current buzzword.
3. Installing the Wordpress Mu software helped me to rekindle my loathing and detestation for the coders of that software. For instance, Wordpress.com don’t share the one piece of code I really wanted — proper domain name mapping. The WPMU.org variant is retarded in that respect.
4. Which is why I’m going to be writing my own blogging platform in good ol’ Common Lisp. Naturally I have dubbed the effort Project Wordpreth.
The results were made opt-out because it didn’t make sense to launch it with 0 posts in the system and based on feedback we’ve gotten from users it seemed like something the vast majority of WP bloggers would enjoy. (And based on the opt-out numbers, that’s true.)
There are certainly problems where a computer can’t tell if you’re for feminism or against feminism and could connect you with someplace you don’t want to be connected to, but across the millions of posts on WP.com I can count the reports like Fire Fly’s on one hand. As you’ve said, we’re also introducing a blog filter so people can customize the results.
This isn’t really any additional work other than reading your own blog, which we all do quite frequently.
If it seems like too much trouble, we provide an easy checkbox to turn the whole thing off.
Jacquess, the feature is actually powered by Sphere.com which does pretty sophisticated document analysis, is on over a billion pages across the web, used by most major media sites, and just sold to AOL for tens of millions of dollars. Nothing is perfect though, and we’ll be actively tweaking it based on feedback and clickstream data.
Jacques Chester wrote:
Jeez Jacques, why not Forth or Smalltalk? If you have to use a dead language, at least use one that somebody else can read the source
Matt;
Great to hear from you. Sphere.com’s analysis is, going by results, a failure. I’m running a piddly little service but wordpress.com has millions of blogs. Why aren’t you doing visit analysis a la Amazon?
David;
I don’t know Forth. And Smalltalk already has a mature blogging system
Oh, and most CL implementations compile to fast native code.
Anyway, does the implementation language matter to you as a user? I think PHP is the delayed result of a dog’s breakfast but millions of people use Wordpress et al.
I’ll be interested to see what you come up with, Jacques.
I’ve seen very similar responses from Matt all over the shop and my response is along the oft-quoted line of Christine Keeler. I’m amazed he isn’t dizzy from the spin.
Of course the opt-out percentages are low if he includes the two out of three blogs on WP.com which are inactive as part of his dataset (so the people who originally started them have no idea this feature has happened). How about accounting for the people who post less than once a week and thus haven’t discovered the feature is part of their blog now yet? Accounting for the people who haven’t yet had it serve up an unexpected porn link and thus don’t yet hate it as much as they soon will? etc etc Let’s see what the opt-out figures are a month down the line, and only include the active blogs.
Complaints about PRP are the most frequently started thread from n00bs currently on the WP.com support forums. A lot of even n00bier WP.com bloggers probably have no idea the forums even exist or how to use them despite the link in their Dashboard. More than one blogger thought that their site had been hacked when these strange links to other blogs showed up.
The idea is fantastic. The implementation not so much.