Is Wordpress.com getting spamier?
06/05/2008
WordPress is a great program. We rebuilt our whole website with WordPress last summer and less than a year later, we have almost two thousand posts and our rankings are definitely growing. But like all good companies, sometimes the lawyers get too much power. They tend to create stronger and stronger policies until their policies wind up becoming more important than the customer. They’ve raised the bar to reporting issues higher and higher until in the end, they wind up encouraging spammers and the whole product starts to take on more and more water.
This isn’t scientific, but I’ve found a lot of the spammers that some of the other businesses in my industry have used are all using wordpress.com blogs. It’s gotten to the point that all I have to do is search on wordpress.com and their results seem to be mostly spam. That’s how I found the spammy promo pages I wrote about in How not to promote your business.
What really upset me was the attitude of the WordPress technician when I pointed out the most blatant site with only two posts, both of which were pure copies of popular posts on our site, including photos, our internal links, and even comments. It was so obvious that a 5 year old could tell it was pure duplicate spam in less than 15 seconds. Yet the technician insisted that I had to file a formal complaint including all kinds of documentation and affidavits, essentially doing 10 times as much work to complain as they did to copy and post it.
It’s kind of like if someone required you to include your social security number on their contact form in order to prove that you are who you say you are. Their lawyers might be able to justify it if they’ve been burned but it’s also essentially telling you not to contact them, pretty loud and clear. When I told them I was going to spend my time writing this instead of wasting time making legal complaints, the content was suddenly taken down. So I do appreciate that.
I love WordPress and it’s been awesome for our site. But sometimes in a big company the lawyers get too much power and the job of most people shifts covering their butt and caring more about policies than doing their job or help anyone. Unfortunately this happens even to overall good companies like WordPress.
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Lloyd Budd (2 comments.) says:
June 5, 2008 at 1:41 pm
Hi Bill,
Your post makes some assumptions that aren’t true. Reading the internal discussion, there were missed opportunities on both sides, but Alex’s response was not because of lawyers having too much power, but because we want to have a fair, consisten process. A DMCA notice is a simple and consistent industry standard process for dealing with copyright infringement.
I tend to get quickly upset about copyright infringement and spam, and find many commercial blogs offensive, but I’m thankful that my colleagues have the dispositions to be cautious and give people the benefit of the doubt.
We are very thankfully that you took the time to report this issue, and hope you will report issues to us in the future. Our relationships with people that report issues are very important to us, and with consistent reporting, we quickly gain confidence in those people’s reports.
Thank you!
Bill Quimby (203 comments.) says:
June 5, 2008 at 2:10 pm
Lloyd,
You can justify running a large business by policy. But my point wasn’t whether or not the policies were justified or not. It was just that their policies raise the bar so high that it becomes more work to stop spammers than it is for them to spam. You can justify requiring someone’s SSN in order to contact you but that doesn’t change the fact that this will make fewer people want to contact you, which was my point.
The secondary point was that when a company gets so big that they have to live by policies, and de-humanize the employees until they sound like robots sending out canned instructions just to comply with the policies without even looking into the issue, even a good company starts to head south.
Lloyd Budd (2 comments.) says:
June 5, 2008 at 6:31 pm
I’m not sure what leads you to make these generalizations after one interaction. I assure you that each scenario is reviewed by caring people. Maybe, you are mistaking human error with “complying with the policies”. But there are are so many shades of biz blogging and spam, and I think we benefit from a cautious approach, giving people the benefit of the doubt.
Our DMCA process at http://automattic.com/dmca
I don’t see how this policy requires unreasonable effort on copyright holders.
What do SSN have to do any of this?
Our small team spends a ton of time and resources dealing with spam, and we can relate to your frustration. Spammers win when we don’t work together.
Bill Quimby (203 comments.) says:
June 5, 2008 at 10:54 pm
I guess you don’t get it because you don’t want to get it. You don’t want to because then you’d have to admit how this appears from the customers perspective.
I don’t care if you don’t get it really though. But just because a company person doesn’t understand how the company looks to the public doesn’t mean it doesn’t look that way.
Unlike you, I don’t have any axe to grind and I don’t have any financial need to see the situation one way or the other. You can pretend that I’m an idiot and being ridiculous if you want, while you’re being impartial. But one of us gets a paycheck from Wordpress and one of us doesn’t. My blog uses WP and I like it. So I’m not saying this to blast you. It’s just the way your policy and the response came across and I felt strongly enough about it to write about it here.
If you want to justify your policy and stick your head in the sand while you act like I’m some hot head being ridiculous you certainly can. But the visitors on my blog/site know that’s not the case and that attitude only insures that you nothing improves or changes.
By the way, your justification of and focus on the policy as well as your denial of any non-company perspective actually helps make my point about de-humanized employees that sound like robots sending out canned instructions. Ironic, huh?
Bill Quimby (203 comments.) says:
June 27, 2008 at 2:59 pm
I should point out and give some credit to wordpress. They did clean up several splogs related to toll free numbers after this post. I know it’s not possible to really stop spam, but they made an effort and responded which is alot these days! So THANKS!! I’m still a big fan.
Bill