• WordPress is on Slashdot, courtesy of the above image.
• I've upgraded myself, although based on the number of offers for help installing Habari I landed myself with one comment on WW, I'm going to give Habari another shot in the near future.
• That thread made me realize that Habari is not a WordPress fork at all, but a WordPress clone. It's the same relationship that Pidgin (Gaim) has to AIM: most of the features, none of the crap, none of the code.
• My only reason for upgrading is to work on adding the tagging features to Disconnected and Dream in Infrared. Dream in Infrared will most certainly drop support for UTW, as well as any compatibility with 2.01 . Disconnected will be a bit more difficult, since I'll need to maintain UTW/2.0 support in parallel with 2.3's tagging.
• The above assumes, based on the announcement, that there were no security patches in 2.3. Like Anil says, though, things like that should be crystal fucking clear in the announcement. Then again, we are talking about matt, who needs public outcry to explain simple things like privacy policies.
• Further problems resulting from the Refusal To Explain Anything:
  as I was going through my list of plugins and upgrading them using SVN (it's even suggested in the announcement), i ran into more than a few plugins that are hosted on wordpress.org, but have to be updated the traditional way, because no one knows how to organize their repositories. The biggest offender is the Google Sitemap Generator, which has all of the translations in /trunk/. Subversion naturally balks at the encoding. Wget to the rescue.
• This is surprisingly not related to Matt or privacy, but I've switched to defensio anti-spam, because I'm a fickle sum-bitch, and easily enticed by betas. So far its false-positive ratio is about on par with Akismet, which has the usual social consequences (sorry Trent, Engtech). It does marry the excerpt concept from Akismet Auntie Spam with "Spaminess", which is vaguely similar to SK2's karma, giving it the best usability of the 3.

1. does this affect anyone? my information says no, please comment if it will.

• No inappropriate titles. Do we suppose this means that if you're posting about the really hot sex you had last night, you should make sure the title is "fluffy kittens for everyone"?
• No profanity or nudity. This means that my cuss-like-a-sailor-because-it-makes-people-respond-not-just-think-about-it tactic is definitely outlawed. I hate to think what it means for ICHC.
• No extraneous categories. I'm sure my 2.0 category was causing serious consternation. let alone "cult-of-matt". In fact, only the officially sanctioned categories are allowed. Anything else and you'll be relegated to the dustbin, because then you won't drive traffic to our ad-laden tag pages.
• And really, you should only post to one category at a time. nevermind that wordpress.com categories can't be used as categories, since the links lead out of your blog2. if you use categories as tags (meta information), you're definately going to be banned

Basically, if you're not an aspiring member of the web 2.0 a-list-aspiring echo chamber, you're not welcome on wordpress.com. fantastic. glad i left. now I'm off to find the 11 most relevant tags for this post.

1. taken to their logical extreme, with commentary
2. do I really need to explain what a horrific user experience it is to click on someone's category in post meta and find no posts at all?

One of the benefits of using open source software is supposed to be the freedom to modify it to meet you needs.  But by using SVN to upgrade, I can no longer hack core files without making upgrading far more painful.  All it takes to fix this is an option to not syndicate this crap.  Or even a hook, so that a plugin could disable it.

it bewilders me that this image is present on the header of Small Potato's recently added theme. Small Potato is a decent guy, and after it was pointed out that using the cover of a movie as a header image wasn't exactly following the letter of copyright law, he announced that people should change it, and modified the theme to remove it. The theme is beautiful in its own right, without the header. How, then, did it sneak past the wordpress.com admins' notice that the image shouldn't be installed here?

you might think that they were distracted or confused by the recent license change at wpdesigner, (despite neo-sapien having always been GPL), except that as i mentioned, the theme isn't available with that header anymore. given that matt doesn't really understand the concept of relicensing, or why the GPL is such a pain in the ass for designers, i guess i shouldn't be surprised.

then again, maybe i'm wrong. maybe matt did fork over some cash to Dreamworks to license their IP for all of us here on wordpress.com. personally, i'd think the money could be spent on something better, (like a lawyer) but i'm just a user.

does anyone else find this terribly ironic?  especially given the problem of his microformats not being an open standard, i find it odd that chris wouldn't hesitate to follow the party line.