This is non-news. I have nothing new to report. Everything I have to say has been said by the people directly involved. I am repeating this only as a gesture of solidarity because I am so offended and disgusted by the actions of Automattic, inc.
Timethief is a wonderful person, who was one of the first people I met on the wordpress.com forums. Had it not been for Options, I would never have visited them in the first place. Timethief has amassed over 7,000 posts of wonderful support for the bloggers at wordpress.com. So I find it completely shocking that:
- Both of them were asked to leave the forum
- Shortly thereafter, their forum accounts were suspended
- Timethief's blog, WPBloggingTips (yes, it's a blog that archives the helpful advice she gives out on the forums, so that the google-inclined can help themselves) was marked as "mature"1 .
- Timethief's IP was blacklisted in Akismet's spam database2
I'm honestly not as surprised that wank and options were banned from the forums. Their blogs, like mine, focus on highlighting issues with wordpress (theirs more the .COM side). The idea that automattic would go out of its way to silence Timethief, who has always held the community as her highest priority, is nonsensical.
This is a warning to anyone considering the use of Automattic's services: They do not have your interests in mind, and if you are ever displeased with the service you receive, they will not hesitate to use those services as weapons against you. Even for people considering the use of just Akismet, it should be disconcerting that you are not subscribing to an anti-spam service, you are subscribing to automattic's vehicle of censorship.
For your own sake, use Defensio, use Vox, tumblr, or blogspot, but stay away from wordpress.com, akismet, and wordpress.com stats. They will violate your privacy, and they will revoke their services at signs of your dissatisfaction.
- The mature flag, if you're not aware, is the means by which blogs on wordpress.com are hidden from public view and denied the use of categories or tags. This, rather than the sensible solution of putting up an "Under 18" warning that blogspot employs. (back ↩)
- Since Automattic, Inc. does not follow up with ISP's (or bloghosts for the splogs that are advertising via spam), she has no recourse with Telus.net to get a new IP address. So much for automattic caring a wit for the health of the blogging community. (back ↩)
33 Comments
Don’t forget that I got the boot as well and the reasons are still unknown to me. Matt may state publicly that his email is open but that’s far from the truth. And they wonder why I’ve suggested an ethics policy.
I’d have to go digging for it but I came across a post that questioned how and why they were listing the non-wp.com page view counts on the wp.com blog.
I haven’t forgotten, although I wasn’t aware if your account had been rendered inactive, since I knew you’d posted since.
Side note: What are you using to generate the live preview? Would love to add it to our wpmu and wp installs as an option.
My posts with the drmike account get eaten and never appear on the forums. I’m still able to login though and I can see the posts that I make although no one else can. I think they did it that way as I’m still reporting splogs on their site as well as in their forums with modlooks. We (The 17 wpmu sites we host) get a lot of splogs who cross link over to their wp.com splogs and I’m still reporting these. I dislike spammers more, even with what has occured. Akismet has been removed completely from our servers though. We’ve been using a Spam Assassin solution for the last few months for all of our platforms.
I don’t think they can block my IP address as I rarely connect to the net from home as I’ve got 60 year copper lines in my apartment. I’m always using the IP addresses of local colleges where I have agreements and arrangements with.
Considering that Matt is now posting what I consider to be racist and bigoted comments directed towards me, still refuses to discuss the situation or reply to my emails and has since June, and has now forced out 2 more volunteers, it’s really gotten to be a joke over there.
I, for one, would love to see a response from Toni with Options comment from that thread though. Doubt we’ll ever get one. Pretty poor response from someone running for Best Startup CEO.
Can’t wait for the next time Matt brings up “Free Speech” somewhere.
the plugin is unsurprisingly named live comment preview. It hooks the comment form, so it doesn’t even need theme support.
sounds like your account has been bozoed, which is arguably worse.
when I first opened an account there, the existence of wank’s blog led me to believe that they supported free speech. I lost that delusion around the time of the udreamofJanie fiasco.
THAT’S THE ONE!
I was trying to remember which blog that was. Thanks.
They also seem to be closing more threads in the forums as well. While I hinted about the anal beads thread, Timethief”s one about her Akismet issue got closed and marked as resolved as well.
1. There is no way Timethief’s IP is blocked by Akismet because (1) Akismet doesn’t use IPs like that and (2) there is no record of timethief in the false positives reports. She may have had a comment get caught and it wasn’t reported, but that’s a far, far cry from saying her or her IP was blacklisted.
2. WPBloggingTips is not marked as Mature. However you are correct that it’s not showing up in Global Tags.
3. Drmike, I don’t have any unreplied emails from you. I’ve sent you 5 emails, three in July, two in September, to your Gmail account and none got responses. If email isn’t a good medium, maybe ping me on AIM or IRC?
4. We’re happy for people to say whatever they like on their own blogs, but our forums, our blogs, etc are our space for a specific purpose. No one was banned from WordPress.com, we just asked them to stop particpating in the forums where their presence caused more complaints than help.
There are at least two sides to every story.
1. there are a lot of people who helped timethief diagnose the problem. I find it improbable that all of them are lying. unless there’s some internet-bermuda-triangle between her computer and the akismet servers.
2. if there was some external list of mature blogs, that distinction might mean something. it’s broken usability that amounts to censorship. if you’d like a name for what her blog is, feel free to borrow the title of this post.
4. If global tags are “yours”, why is participation compulsory? especially for blogs like wpbloggingtips, who wind up with tags/categories that don’t even contain their own posts?
The answer is now clear as to why this has all happened. Wordpress hired “hanni” as our “happiness engineer”. She has been lurking on the forum with no “member” key master” or “staff” behind her name now for 4 days. Check this out http://wank.wordpress.com/2008/01/07/our-new-robotic-overlord/
As she is being paid to work full time on the forum, I don’t expect that the regular volunteers will be falling all over themselves to do her work but, stranger things have happened.
This is an update to let you know that I have deleted the controversial posts from my blog and why I did that. The blog at http://wpbloggingtips.wordpress.com is a beginner’s blog. It contains valuable information that I put together with good intentions.
Ironically I had already planned to back way off so I could fulfill my new commitment and I had arranged for that with raincoaster. It’s sad that the management and staff in wp lack the social skills that one would think are required of people in business.
I do not want the all the work I did on the forum and in that blog to be smeared with the taint of the crap that has gone down. I’m turning my backside to wordpress, breaking some wind and then I’m walking away.
1. Do you have links to help me track it down? Because it is highly unusual to have someone talking about a problem and no record of it in Akismet’s logs. Any time someone gets caught who’s not a spammer that’s a bug, and I’d like to fix the bug.
2. The mature blogs get enough traffic on their own to not need their own list, ranking, or tags.
4. I’d like to make global tags configurable, there’ll probably be a UI for it sometime in the next few months. It’s been on the list for a while, just kept getting bumped by some of the bigger projects.
While I’m thinking about it Matt. I’m sitting here looking at the answers that Hanni and Telly give folks. Here’s one for example. The answer is incorrect, shows that Hanni did not understand the question given, and I’ve got to question if she is even familiar with the software. I say that as this is not the first question she and Telly have given to be incorrect recently.
Please explain to me why you and Automattic feel that receiving an incorrect answer is acceptable and better than receiving a correct answer from a volunteer?
And would some please follow up on her incorrect answers?
@TT – I don’t doubt that these events and the hiring of Hanni are an attempt to change the basic culture of the forums. I don’t see sustainable value in a forum where the only answers come from paid employees, though. It defeats the purpose of a forum.
@Matt –
#1 goes to TT/anyone who uses akismet. #3 should solve #2, but given that it’s a low priority and that #2 has some heinous misconceptions, it’s worth taking on:
Your point makes the assumption that “mature” bloggers are second class bloggers who do not deserve basic usability and functionality in their software. Your point about traffic is highly suspect, since that we’re not just talking about porn bloggers, we’re talking about erotica writers, christian sex advice bloggers, and now, people who automattic decides are not a benefit to their service.
Whatever right you have to not serve these people, does not detract from the fact that every user on your service is in danger of falling out of your graces, and receiving less that what could be reasonably expected of a blog host.
@drmike – sorry to have to snip the stuff that’s off topic and/or personal, but you have excellent points that deserve to stand on their own, and I’d like the discussion to continue reasonably. It is disturbing that a company specializing in “services that scale well”, can’t manage to find any record of TT’s comments, or manage to deliver emails.
Excuse me, but nobody has ever asked me to stop participating in the forums in order to make way for paid staff, or because my presence was offending fellow users. Had they done so, I would have been happy to comply (bitching a lot and slamming the door on my way out, obviously). Instead, I logged in after a couple of days away to find my account was marked ‘inactive’ and I was no longer able to post. I wasn’t asked. I wasn’t warned. I wasn’t even told. I was simply banned from posting.
It’s not that I’m especially bitter, because I didn’t spend anything like the amount of time helping people that timethief or drmike did, and given my tendency towards snark I was always going to end up blocked one day. Just that normally you’re more careful to avoid telling outright lies; so when you do, I’m going to call you on it.
Ditto. I wasn’t asked. You blocked my forum account, Matt.
“Excuse me, but nobody has ever asked me to stop participating in the forums in order to make way for paid staff, or because my presence was offending fellow users. Had they done so, I would have been happy to comply (bitching a lot and slamming the door on my way out, obviously). Instead, I logged in after a couple of days away to find my account was marked ‘inactive’ and I was no longer able to post. I wasn’t asked. I wasn’t warned. I wasn’t even told. I was simply banned from posting.”
Diito. The exact same thing happened to me.
When they came for JanieBelle, I said nothing…
Wank was never asked, that is true. The only email I remember sending her was asking if she wanted to meet up when I was in England a few months ago.
drmike, you were sent emails from Mark and myself around when your mod status was removed, including an exchange on 7/18/2007, which actually included one of the early complaints you made about timethief, which I’m happy to quote here if you like, and then formally asked to leave on 9/14/2007.
timethief, the first email was on 2/18/2007, then after my break comment on the forums I sent you an email, and then when you didn’t respond or change the account was deactivated.
I don’t bear any ill will towards any of you, in fact I’d happily buy you a beer and hang out if we ever ran into each other or are in the same town. The forums are changing to (we hope) better serve users, who they were created for. More of those changes will be apparent later in the year, but the gears are turning. Think less like discussion forums, more like Yahoo Answers.
Funny how one blog that is currently in the Pingback was deleted by WP.com staff so soon after the author made a posting that linked here, is this another selfless act of suppression and censorship? Because it screams of it. Don’t get me started on the callous act of flogging off volunteers, how friggin rude is that?
That’s such a shame. I have always felt that Yahoo answers sucks. The volunteers you had in the forum were superb – friendly, willing and able to pass on the information required at a basic level that the non-nerds who are/were using your service could understand. I think you burnt some bridges there Matt. I can see what you were trying to do but the way you went about it was/is 180 degress arse about face. You’ve lost some decent people from those forums and I think that Hanni has her work cut out, as does Trent. How well does she know the software? I can’t imagine how steep her learning curve is.
The only reason I haven’t completely deleted my account is that until I can find an alternative solution, I need the Akismet licence.
@Matt – I’m sure that an answers-type forum will be much easier on those maintaining it (it sounds similar to what TT was trying to do with her copy/paste answers).
Nonetheless, it’s a shame that automattic seems to be competing against the community. There’s something similar about banning the best supporters of the forum, to make way for the answers-style forum, and the disabling of themes.wordpress.net to make way for the theme marketplace. It’s certainly your prerogative to try and make a better official version, but it sucks to delete, destroy, or break the community effort.
@Steven – TT deleted the blog of her own volition, because she wants nothing more to do with wp.com
@Collin – seriously, Defensio FTW.
Cheers Adam, missed the link in the original post.
Bye Bye Akismet, bye bye wordpress.com!
@Matt
I’m tempted to quote my uncle from North Carolina, “that dog don’t hunt.”
I personally despammed timethief dozens of times over a period of a week on my test blog http://opposablethumbz.wordpress.com and also on the self-hosted blog tied to my username and she was still being caught. We worked with all of her email addresses, which were all being caught. Since all of her email addessses were being caught, it points to an IP address block.
When I was logged out on both of my accounts and used her email address, name and URL, none of the comments I made were caught in Akismet on either of my blogs (.com and self-hosted). This would obviously lead one to believe that it was either a block on her specific IP address, or a block on a bunch of IP address that happened to contain hers. When I used her information and commented I was doing so from a different IP address. That was the only difference.
At the very least, this smells incredibly suspect.
I have deleted the 3 or so pages of test comments she made on my test blog, but you should have access and records to all of that. Feel free to take a look.
@Adam and Collin – I’ve switched to Defensio and I’m quite happy with it so far.
Thanks for the tip on Defensio. I’ll install it as soon as I get home.
thesacredpath, thank you. That’s all I needed. Just a reminder to anyone else, feel free to contact Akismet support any time. You can switch to another system like Defensio but if you’re being wrongly caught that’s not going to fix it on the millions and millions of websites that use Akismet.
The fundamental difference of opinion seems to be the quality of support people were getting on the forums. We think it was pretty bad, for some of the reasons TT and drmike have cited, like not having inside information about features or being able access people’s dashboards. (Note this isn’t a diss on the people who were helping out, just a structural issue, you can only help so much if you don’t have backend access to the systems. It’s just less efficient.)
Numerically it was also much smaller than the support we do via our helpdesk – 15.5k unique issues in 2007 vs 41.6k in the helpdesk system. (And that ratio will be higher when dashboard support becomes 24 hours again.) However that 1/4th of the support was causing 90%+ of the complaints we were getting from users. The other option that was discussed, and had several strong proponents, was eliminating the forums altogether, but at least for now we’re going to try to adapt them to see if we can get the user experience to be better. It’s unfortunate that some people’s feelings were hurt by being asked not to participate anymore, but already the changes have created a much better tone on the forums.
Matt, that’s just bullshit and I think you know it.
As several have said in these comments, they weren’t asked not to participate, they were banned summarily without warning or reason. Anyone who would raise a question about the effectiveness of staff, like when a disastrously incorrect answer is given (as happened the other day and still hasn’t been corrected) is gone because you quietly kicked them out. All that’s left are people who are afraid that they’re next to be banned, ripped from the global tags for no good reason, or summarily deleted if they question anything. That’s not a healthy atmosphere, and it certainly isn’t an improvement.
As I’ve said elsewhere, I really have no problem with a change in the forums, and I think a less forum-y format would probably be better, given that it’s the same five or so questions over and over. Frankly, I’d probably be one of those in favor of ditching the forums altogether and opening support 24 hours. (Real support, BTW, as opposed to the ‘I dunno’ variety that we currently have.)
The problem is that you chose mob tactics over those of a mature businessman. You chose to silence anyone who would question you instead of dealing with the issue at hand. Now you’re in cleanup mode, ignoring the fact that sacredpath showed that you were lying earlier in the hopes that no one will notice it.
Look, I’m nobody. On my little blog’s best day I get well under a hundred hits. I’m under no illusion that comment links from this dust up will create an internet sensation. I have nothing to gain from even commenting here except the hope that you’ll begin to understand that the problems people have are not as much with the decisions you’re making as with the manner in which you’re carrying them out. I want WordPress to be successful as it can be, but you’re the biggest impediment to its improvement.
My two pence.
I really don’t have time anymore to spend on this thread. People are more interested in conspiracy theories than truth. Hundreds of times on the forums TT has told people wrongly caught by Akismet to contact support, yet it happens to her a single time and she’s posting publicly about it and people scream censorship. She deletes her blog and people say we did, even after being corrected. If you’ve made up your mind, I’m not going to change it.
The thing that’s sadly funny is that the people in question have complained about each other in the past. This is not he first time there’s been a bad element purge in the 4+ year history of WP, and every time it’s been for the better, despite proclamations that everything was ruined and over. I’m really looking forward to 2008, but perhaps one of my resolutions should be to stop participating in these bash threads.
Matt, the whole “divide and conquer” thing is not going to work at this point. We are all human and we have had our differences with one another in the past, but the issue in question isn’t who likes who else: the issue is, does Wordpress.com treat its forum volunteers fairly and respond honestly to criticism.
I don’t see an adequate response to tsp’s highly-detailed post. Perhaps AKISMET didn’t IP blog Timethief…but perhaps there is another way to IP block?
Oh I see, smart choice. I wouldn’t bother with WP.com for many reasons, sorry Matt but for me personally, WP.com is very crippled and there are other blogging services that offer more than WP.com does.
Hopefully Matt & Co will change attitude and begin to reflect a more positive response, but now the way things are going, WP.com is doomed to fail.
You’ve looked at the fact that drmike and timethief both made enemies in the forums (fairly inevitable, given the amount of time they spent there) and used that as an excuse to label them ‘bad elements’. And you’ve decided that troublemaking was their only contribution because a) it serves your purposes to spin it that way, and b) you don’t get to hear from the people who found them helpful. Happy users don’t complain.
You could have said ‘look, this form of support isn’t working’ without ripping into the individuals who were doing it. You could have announced that the forums were being scaled down because most of the questions are of a technical or policy nature that have to be referred to staff anyway. You could have thanked people for their attempts to compensate for the fact that official support is closed a large percentage of the time, tell them that you’ve realised it was unacceptable and have hired new support staff. I’m not saying that people wouldn’t have been upset if you’d behaved in a more grown-up manner. They probably would. But they wouldn’t have been anything like as angry and insulted.
However, that would have been insufficiently dramatic for you. It’s far more exciting to ban and censor and insult people and watch them run around screaming on the blogs. You could have emailed options and timethief, but instead you chose to make a public forum post dismissing them, knowing perfectly well that it would get an equally public reaction. You post in these threads to defend yourself, yes, but also to keep the drama going by saying inflammatory things. ‘Bad elements’? Trying to stir up trouble by reminding everyone that timethief and drmike have had some pretty explosive disagreements themselves in the past (like we don’t already know)? Trying to provoke me by messing around in my moderation queue? Please. You’re as addicted to the drama as everyone else is. Ditto Mark posting cryptic little digs in the ‘what happened to timethief?’ thread. The drama-mongers and the drama-creators have a symbiotic relationship. Don’t think I’m not grateful for it.
Matt, you’ve asked me nothing. Heck, an example of this was how you dumped the position on me without asking. I’ve even pointed that out to you a number of times and yet again you never replied.
That’s interesting as I only ever received one complaint passed down to me that that was from Andy about not moving a single thread into the correct subforum. And he made that about 2 minutes after it was posted. Considering that I was doing it usually a dozen times a day, i just passed it off as he not having a clue as to what was going on. (And seeing his recent comments towards Rain, I think I was right.)
I’ve pointed this out to you a number of times as well but you’ve never responded. Kind of strange that you feel no ill will towards me but yet you couldn’t take 2 seconds to send me an email saying that there was an issue. (I think I’ve pointed that out to you as well in the past and you’ve blown that question off as well.)
May I also ask why there has never been any follow up with my complaints? I find it rather strange that you’ll bend over backwards for an enduser but yet could care less about those answering questions for you and covering your ass. (I think I’ve pointed that out as well and asked for a responce.)
That’s funny Matt as last time I saw, you were making raciest and bigoted comments towards me. Oh, and Toni, thanks for ignoring that complaint. So glad you feel comfortable with hatecrime.
By the way, how come everytime someone disagrees with you, it’s “bashing”? How about seeing both sides of the story as Mark recently suggested in the forums?
May I make some suggestions? How about working on stop lying? How about backing up and supporting your volunteers? How about answering emails? How about actually answering questions posed to you instead of spinning the topic? How about learning the words “please” and “thank you” How about watching the bigoted comments you recently made to me? How about actually listening to your end users like you say that you do?
I received a single email from Mark which i copied and pasted to the forums along with my reply. There was never any follow up and my questions went unanswered. I received a single email from you asking why I appeared to be in a bad mood which I answered by pointing you to the forum thread and noted that I still was in the dark as to why I was removed. That went unanswered as well. Additional emails and questions about the situation have done unanswered as well by you. My complaint with Toni from back in June about your rudeness towards me has also gone unanswered.
If that is correct, please explain to me how you feel comfortable with your employees getting answers wrong to questions posed in the forums. Please also explain why you feel comfortable with Andy’s recent rudeness as well.
And, of course, yet again I don’t get an answer. Why doesn’t that surprise me?
Please explain to me why i should take this up with those over your head? You’re not willing to deal with the complaint.
I agreed with you when you wrote that … ” the idea that automattic would go out of its way to silence Timethief, who has always held the community as her highest priority, is nonsensical.”
We all react differently to being dissed. I was so very shocked and hurt that I walked/ran away. Since then I have come to know that I have far to many supportive wp friends to distance myself completely from wp.
Although it’s unlikely that I will ever have the same level of respect for Matt and Mark that I previously had, I do want to share the information and links in my posts with wp beginner bloggers. That’s why it’s fitting for me to make the anchor comment here and update you with regard to what I have done.
I have established a new blog at http://onecoolsite.wordpress.com and have imported the posts into it from the former blog. I’ve also being writing new posts. The good news is that the posts in the new blog are making their way onto the global tag pages just as they should. Hopefully, this benefit that extends to all other bloggers, who do not have mature blog contents, will not disappear again.
Thank you Adam. And, thank you everyone else for supporting me through this awful time. I haven’t lost a single wp friend and that’s heart warming so I’m blogging on.
Illegitimi non carborundum!
I would like to know know how many *complaints* I caused before I was inactivated in absentia.
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