Wordpress Followup

"Wordpress stuns supporters with unexpected fund raising practices" - Ars Technica
"Wordpress Banned by Google for Spamming" -Slashdot
"Blog star 'fesses up to payola spam scam" - The Register
"Don't game the Google" - MSNBC
"WordPress Under Fire for Search-Engine Spamming" - eWeek
"SCANDAL!!! Wordpress caught with Spam and Hot Nacho! Blogosphere Cheesed! (Waxy investigates)" - Meta Filter

Sensationalism, Hype, Bias and Mudslinging.

Now compare all that to Matt's Record, his humility, and the fact that this article shouldn’t have been released until he got home from vacation. It makes him a sitting duck. You should have pulled it as soon as you found out he wasn’t home. Fairly underhanded yourself Waxy, if you really meant what you said " I'm hesitant to even write about this" then u should have waited till he was able to give defense. (But I'm sure you're loving the hits and the attention this is all getting being that its still a one sided story.)

Angry mob justice is just what you got and it seems like it’s what you wanted... Why didn’t you pull it when you found out he wasn’t home?

It’s sad how instantaneous judgment on the web is. I’m giving WP the benefit of the doubt and Matt a chance to defend himself. I’m behind him all the way. Google has restored WP's pagerank, and most WP users seem to be seeing this as hypersensitivity to spam/google/adwords and a cheap shot to a good project.

http://wordpress.org/support/topic.php?id=29388

Now compare all that to Matt's Record, his humility, and the fact that this article shouldn't have been released until he got home from vacation.

Yeah. Unless Matt has access to some kind of publishing platform that works from any Internet-connected computer in the world, we should wait to give him a chance to respond.

So... this HotNacho guy is just writing a link-spam text editor and wanted some place to test it?

Yeah, I'm doubting that. Even if it were true it's still unbelievably sleazy.

The response from The Nacho seems reasonable. I like the informal tone. A bit unbelieveable (why wordpress.org?) but reasonable nonetheless.

re: brian's comments

meh. I think Andy did the right thing posting about this, and I think he closed it at the appropriate time. I also think he covered all sides of the story adequately, and gave Matt fair warning about this post. Meanwhile, I do support Matt and feel he made a honest mistake (albeit a bad one). In the end, it hurts him far more than any of us... so I don't think we've anything to bitch about.

Andy Baio. The next Matt Drudge? ;) (go get waxyreport.com, quick!)

Take a look at this HotNacho.Com page, which was the home page for the site a year ago according to the Internet Archive. The idea that this is an innocent test of keyword-minded writing tools is far-fetched to say the least.

Brian, you say: "u [Andy] should have waited till he was able to give defense"

But Andy wrote: "For what it's worth, I mentioned to him in our chat on Thursday that I was going to write an entry, so he could have taken preemptive action if he wanted to"

So unless Andy is lying, it turns out Matt had the chance to defend himself. In fact, Matt admitted it would take more than a single person to get him to stop his practice; according to Andy, he said "If it turns a lot of people off I definitely don't want it." So now there were a lot of people.

Rogers: OK -- Now that's funny! Haha!

meh, maybe I didnt get it. I guess we dont know the details of the conversation. Plus Im sure matt didnt know exactly what it would be about otherwise he wouldnt have been so suprised like he said in his blog that 'his heart sunk' when he heard all the news and reports and how it had circulated so quickly. Im not saying andy is lying, but I would have been able to respect the article a lot more had it been pulled while he waited for Matts return. Not that I dont respect waxy.org, Its all good stuff so far accept the timing of this article.

Pulling the article once Andy realised Matt was on holiday would have done no good at all - the story was already out, and pulling it would just look strange given the circumstances. Here's hoping Matt puts out a nice, clear statement/apology/whatever he sees fit and then goes back to enjoying Florence.

Great, now he's going to have to switch to "saxmatt03".

Gotta agree with Simon.

By the time anyone realized Matt was away, Kottke alone had sent about 1000 eyes this-a-way.

If Andy removed the story it would have just made the whole thing look even more scandalous. The appropriate thing to do was close the comments once the mob assembled, which Andy did -- promptly.

In some way the damage has been done - no matter what our Code Poet Matt or Mr. Nacho have to say. Bad press and a bad reputation simply won't go away - even if you really did no evil.

This should prove as a valueable lesson to all OS projects - that any funding initiative should be made with the community in mind. And such initiatives should be announced to your community/public. If there would have been a public announcement like 'we put some links on our site to make some bucks to support WP' some people would have complained anyway - but nobody would have been shocked.

The biggest damage was done by the U-Boot tactic used by this initiative.

The inner WP team should take this unhappy event to make some changes. Maybe split the operation into a commercial section (who provide services) and a non-profit part (which holds the rights etc.). Other projects have done this before.

Also spread the responsibility - it just is strange that a huge community is unable to respond to such a thing because the head honcho is on vacation.

An a great scale it shows that any cool coding project changes in nature and focus once it gets succesful and a pillar of the blogosphere. Suddenly code and design are not the most important thing - public relations, commerce and support become equally important.

Blogging is a very personal and emotional thing - so any company/project dealing in that area should always consider people's emotional attachment to their software as well. Especially when it comes to even more loaded topics like link-spamming.

As for Matt - I really hope he will recover after this nasty spin in the blogosphere centrifuge. I am sure he has learned his lesson (whatever it may be).

WordPress will have to live with a bit strange aftertaste to its name.

Andy did let me know he was working on the article, I was open and answered all his questions however I'd prefer if our AIM conversation wasn't quoted more just because I don't have access to it myself and I'm not terribly articulate on IM. It didn't occur to me that the article would be finished while I was gone and there would be so much feedback. I'm back online and going to be posting a response shortly.

A worthwhile lesson from this is that WordPress hasn't had enough benevolent financial support. Has anybody else here decided to donate to WordPress as a result?

I havent yet, but Its been something on my mind lately considering how much time I have been using wordpress and how good of a product it is. Now seems like a good time for me to put my money where my mouth is and I think I will.

Andy just emailed me the entire transcript. I'm happy to vouch for anything in it, just ask me, I'm just hesitant to have chatspeak directly quoted because reading over it I was pretty tired at the time and some sentences don't even make sense.

"Yeah. Unless Matt has access to some kind of publishing platform that works from any Internet-connected computer in the world, we should wait to give him a chance to respond."

Yes, right, Europe - in particular Italy (Matts destination) and Spain - are well known for their open wifi and numerous internet hotspots, especially over the Easter week when most people are on holidays... ;-)

"some kind of publishing platform that works from any Internet-connected computer in the world"

that'd be sweet!

So how much did you make Matt?

I have read Matt's reply and he is clearly spinning the core issue. He doesn't address the fact that this is spamming. He claims it is just an advertisement. No Matt, it is not. It is a malicious way to cheat search engines and more importantly web users like all of us here.

The fact that some people exagarate the attacks do not mean Matt is right. I am more disgusted with Matt's answers. It is as if he really does not care about spamming problem on the net and he doesn't see any problem with spamming. It is just an advertisement to him. I think it is time to fork wordpress and do something about the problem.

I'm trying to give the HotNacho guy the benefit of the doubt, but I can't figure out how putting ads out offering to pay people to write keyword-rich articles fits into his explanation.

I wish he'd just stay out of this, he's making it seem much more unseemly with his excuses and doublespeak.

This is the worst april fools joke yet