7 ms·

Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress injects Black Friday adverts without permission

189 points by jonny383 7y ago

tuananh 7y ago
i haven't used wp in a long time. does it come with permission settings for plugins now?
- creshal 7y ago
  The plugin exists to inject seo-relevant tags into your page, so I don't see how a permission system would help to prevent them from injecting other tags into your page. And no, there's no real capability system for plugins in Wordpress. Plugins can define their own user permissions that hooks into WP's system to determine what user can use what feature, but that's entirely opt in on the plugins' part.
hjek 7y ago
That's an incredible number of people they've managed to piss off with that ad! This sounds like a plausible theory: > Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was an advertising stunt to create a viral situation for additional exposure.[0] [0]: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/spammy-black-friday-on-every-admin-page/ https://wordpress.org/support/topic/spammy-black-friday-on-e...
- jonny383 7y ago
  Seems like a pretty risky move, but the owner has historically been controversial so wouldn't be too surprised. https://wptavern.com/yoastcon-overshadowed-by-twitter-storm-joost-de-valk-seo-industry-leaders-called-out-for-objectifying-women https://wptavern.com/yoastcon-overshadowed-by-twitter-storm-...
  - yc_2345 7y ago
    Actually the comments indicate that the "controversy" seems to be imagined by many people. By the way, I don't know anything about Joost, so he may not be innocent. But the article is an excellent example of an inability to distinguish between consensual but obnoxious stuff and clearly non-consensual behavior. Also read the comment by Jenny Halasz, it seems very telling: "I had the audacity to start a thread on twitter where I suggested that perhaps we should ask the women involved if they were being harassed before we leveled accusations at the supposed harasser. For my trouble, I got called a woman hater, an enabler, and plenty of other terrible things (now conveniently deleted by the people who said those awful things: Cohen, Rayner, a handle by the name of callis1987, and Forden)"
    - jonny383 7y ago
      You literally just described the circumstances of a controversy. Did you create this account just to do that?
      - yc_2345 7y ago
        >>Did you create this account just to do that? Yes I did, because I don't have any other account to use on HN. I am not sure what you are implying here.
- puranjay 7y ago
  I can't see how Yoast needs any more exposure. They're the equivalent of Coca-Cola in the WordPress world - everyone's heard of them, most use them already.
marpstar 7y ago
glad I'm not the only one who was annoyed by this. it's not a huge deal, but it made me "WTF?"
- jonny383 7y ago
  I disagree - to me, it _is_ a huge deal. It's an overstep of a boundary that definitely should not have been crossed. Yoast has always been borderline spammy with their upgrade nags, but at least historically they followed the WordPress guidelines and kept them inside of the Yoast pages. But flat-out injecting ads into every admin page with not much context is a step too far in my opinion. As far as I'm concerned, automattic should revoke their wordpress.org plugin hosting until this has been addressed (as this clearly violates their hosting guidelines) and a public apology is issued.
  - dvko 7y ago
    It has been addressed and their CEO offered hundreds of apologies on Twitter. It is definitely not okay and I would still not use them as there are better plugins out there, but they (now) say they made a mistake and owned it.
    - that_guy1 7y ago
      which SEO plugins would you recommend?
      - dvko 7y ago
        The SEO framework (slug: autodescription) is great and performs about 30x as good as Yoast SEO in terms of processing time. They’re also pretty strict about sticking to WordPress’ native styles.
  - kreykjalin 7y ago
    >As far as I'm concerned, automattic should revoke their wordpress.org plugin hosting until this has been addressed Unfortunately Automattic only contributes to WordPress.org [0]. Automattic actually owns WordPress.com [1] which is a separate-ish entity, and does not have any authority over plugins hosted on WordPress.org. [0] https://automattic.com/ https://automattic.com/ [1] https://en.support.wordpress.com/com-vs-org/ https://en.support.wordpress.com/com-vs-org/
folkhack 7y ago
When people rip on WordPress development this is the sorta crap they're talking about. In many ecosystems this would warrant the plugin getting pulled from the ecosystem but WP just lets it fly.
- ponsin 7y ago
  A lot of people complain how apple app store removes apps that Apple doesn't like. Or how Firefox no longer allows users to provide add-ons that are not through the Firefox store. That and other walled gardens make the the new tech world much less free and much more dependent on tech giants. I personally would prefer WordPress to allow whoever wants to make an app and give the users the responsibility to choose what to add and what not
  - folkhack 7y ago
    I agree and disagree all at the same time ha... > I personally would prefer WordPress to allow whoever wants to make an app and give the users the responsibility to choose what to add and what not I'm totally with you but that assumes that WP devs have the responsibility to make responsible decisions. The range of skill for a typical WP dev is outstanding, where on one end you have people who can't write a for loop adopting the "dev" title, and on the other end you have skilled engineers. I've seen WAY too many people call themselves "devs" when all they do is try to install plugins to piece together a website. In relation to Apple and FF - average users are not savvy at all and have been shielded from the nuts-and-bolts decisions that we make on a daily basis. Trusting them with the responsibility to make good decisions is precarious.
- sodosopa 7y ago
  I think a lot of the rip is from Wordpress generally being insecure. You can have it locally and treat it like Jekyll and have your json sent to git and published to something like Netify.
  - folkhack 7y ago
    > I think a lot of the rip is from WordPress generally being insecure. That too - I put adware on my wp-admin pages in the same boat. I've seen the JSON publishing route and I'm not 100% impressed with how it operates. In most WP situations you want to give people who are non-devs the capability to manage content which local setups like this don't accommodate well.
withinrafael 7y ago
The Yoast CEO Marieke van de Rakt responded on Twitter: > That BlackFridayBanner was not the best idea. We’re truly sorry for the annoyance and difficulties it may have caused. We did not think this through properly. If you want, you can update to a new version of our plugin without that banner. #blackfriday #neveragain #apologies"[1] > I OK'd this. I am the CEO. And I made a big mistake. I am sorry. [2] [1] https://twitter.com/MariekeRakt/status/1200077958700044290 https://twitter.com/MariekeRakt/status/1200077958700044290 [2] https://twitter.com/MariekeRakt/status/1200077958700044290 https://twitter.com/MariekeRakt/status/1200077958700044290
- sleavey 7y ago
  > "Truly sorry" I'd prefer it if CEOs would rather say "we got too greedy and clearly the market didn't like it" rather than disingenuous apologies.
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 7y ago
    I have a lot more respect for a response that contains the words "sorry" and a statement that the entity admits that they made a mistake, vs. the usual corporate statement that contains neither.
    - momokoko 7y ago
      The apology is basically the modern version of that corporate statement.
  - rchaud 7y ago
    An "I'm sorry" and "it was my call" are much more honest than the usual legal-approved CEO-speak that doesn't admit any fault, or justifies it with an un-provable statement like "many users have asked for this feature"
- dazc 7y ago
  Hardly the first time Yoast have been forced into an embarrassing climb-down. In the early days of mass Wordpress adoption they got a lot of traction by offering a plug-in that made few basic seo improvements and that early success went to their heads. Every iteration since has been a bloated mess of features, most of which are entirely unnecessary.
rambojazz 7y ago
Did this happen on their GPL version, or their "premium" version, or both?
- brylie 7y ago
  GPL version it seems: https://github.com/Yoast/wordpress-seo/issues/13961 https://github.com/Yoast/wordpress-seo/issues/13961
- johnward 7y ago
  The premium version is GPL also. This happened in the free version.
JacobSeated 7y ago
Well, people need to learn not to depend on redundant Wordpress plugins. The plugin-landscape in Wordpress is plagued by bugs and ads, some spamming you to update or pay for a premium version. That is not something you would accept for professional CMS solutions. If you consider yourself knowledgeable in SEO, then learn to walk the talk and stop relying on phony third-party plugins! SEO is such a small part of owning a website, and ideally, any technical SEO that is needed should be integrated in the core CMS by developers and not fiddled with at random by clueless bloggers or SEO gurus. Since Wordpress is such "crapware" out-of-the-box, you can easily create a Yoast replacement plugin to handle what is really needed. The rest is just useless bloat and clutter. I would not touch Yoast in my wildest dream. It is totally redundant for people who can code themselves.
- dazc 7y ago
  'Since Wordpress is such "crapware" out-of-the-box, you can easily create a Yoast replacement plugin ...' The cynic in me wonders why such basics are not already included by now?
  - steve19 7y ago
    It is because a lot of functionality is now bundled as part of the Automattic Jet Pack plugin. I guess the plugin is technically open source (due to the GPL) , but a lot of functionality depends on Automattic's server and requires a subscription.
  - LordAtlas 7y ago
    Because of Matt Mullenweg's strange philosophy of keeping only barebones features in "core" Wordpress and having all other functionality be delivered by plugins. This means that even to have a basic site, you just have to install various plugins to deliver key features, which leads to the bloat, instability and security problems that Wordpress is infamous for.
    - Angostura 7y ago
      > strange philosophy He likes to avoid bloat and keep things modular. That's not a 'strange' philosophy
diminish 7y ago
this was the worst spam of all my wordpress experience. a yoast banner on every admin page - yoast must have gone crazy. I took screenshots of this shameful moment. wordpress plugin as well as mobile app stores are reminiscent of the ugly pc shareware and freewares of past 30 decades.
- cally 7y ago
  I don't use wordpress/yoast so am probably wrong. But I don't think splashscreens on shareware is 'ugly', I think it's fair enough. In some instances - such as Sublime Text - I am amazed at how discreet it is.
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 7y ago
    I suspect Sublime realizes that they have three classes of customers: 1. Companies 2. Private individuals who are happy to pay for software 3. Private individuals who aren't going to pay for software The discreet notification is enough to get 1+2 to pay. Group 3 isn't going to pay anyways, and making the notification more annoying will just make it more likely that they crack it and never see it again. Most importantly, when people from group 3 start working at a company, they may get the company to buy a license (which is now a subscription, i.e. makes them a lot more money than a personal license). A more annoying notification would likely win them very little, and lose them a lot (from people who use a different editor instead).
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
sleavey 7y ago
I'm a big fan of vanilla WordPress, especially the new block editor, but the plugin ecosystem is a total mess. Almost all popular plugins come with a free version that spams you to upgrade to "pro". They add menu items to the admin panel with different colours so you find it harder to ignore them. They add messages to the dashboard. The look and feel of their settings pages don't match WordPress core. And, even if you pay for an upgrade, that usually means removing the plugin provided and automatically updated by WordPress.org and replacing it with a manually uploaded zip. Crazy. The garbage user experience with most plugins led me to collect together a bunch of ideas from plugins I used and rewrite almost all of them entirely into one spam-free plugin. I did it for my own sanity as a user of my own plugin but I'd like to see more " old fashioned" plugins that are providing high quality code for everyone's free benefit.
- nsomaru 7y ago
  Have you released this plugin?
  - faeyanpiraat 7y ago
    Making a functional plugin for one’s own purposes is one thing, releasing it to the public requires quite a lot more work.
  - sleavey 7y ago
    Kind of. It's on GitHub, but not yet in the WordPress plugin archive (I want to test it more with my organisation and some friends first). https://github.com/Academic-Labbook https://github.com/Academic-Labbook
- levosmetalo 7y ago
  > I'm a big fan of vanilla WordPress, especially the new block editor, but the plugin ecosystem is a total mess. Well, the root cause why the plugin ecosystem is a mess is the way plugins management and monetization is implemented in the vanilla wp. As oposed to, e.g. Atlassian Jira plugins, WP doesn't really help plugin developers to seamlessly integrate with the core product.
_Codemonkeyism 7y ago
Innocence once lost can never be regained.
skrebbel 7y ago
For those not deep into the WP community reading this headline: Yoast injected an ad into the WP admin pages (every admin page), not into public WP sites. The headline sounds much worse than it is - this is just an annoyance for editors, not Yoast abusing its reach to target billions of worldwide website readers. Naturally that doesn't excuse the spam.
asadkn 7y ago
Let's get a few things right since the link is misleading. - It was an upsell to the Pro version of free plugin. Not some random ad spam. - The ad was an admin notice - which appear in WordPress on top of every page in the backend Admin Area in what's generally the notification area. - It's free, GPL, and open source - you know, "No Warranties" and all that. Grayhat, and not something you should ever do. But not as nefarious as everyone is making it sound like. WP.org is about freedom, so they're unlikely to restrict it either unless malicious: https://github.com/WordPress/wporg-plugin-guidelines/pull/69#issuecomment-560011084 https://github.com/WordPress/wporg-plugin-guidelines/pull/69... Being very involved in the WordPress industry, what I find funny is the majority of angry reviews masquerading as victims are from entitled pseudo devs who sell WordPress sites to clients and now they were made to look bad because they had automatic updates enabled while charging their customers for a retainer package with "plugin & themes updates". How about buying premium version in the first place just as you charged your client for it.
- jonny383 7y ago
  1. It goes directly against the WordPress Detailed Plugin Guidelines to both upsell, and to hijack the admin dashboard [0]. 2. If the ad was an admin notice, it didn't look like one. It's a banner image with an outbound tracking link [1]. [0] https://developer.wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-org/detailed-plugin-guidelines/ https://developer.wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-org/detail... [1] https://imgur.com/a/oN7ZFRU https://imgur.com/a/oN7ZFRU
  - asadkn 7y ago
    I believe they played with the semantics here to perhaps get a pass on it not counting as an exact violation of wp.org repository guidelines. There's a proposal to have strict policies and disallow any sort of global ads now but it seems dismissed [1]. It was a dismissable admin notice that looked like an ad and wasn't exactly a tracking link (in the wp.org classifications at least), but a generic marketing campaign link [2]. [1] https://github.com/WordPress/wporg-plugin-guidelines/pull/69#issuecomment-560011084 https://github.com/WordPress/wporg-plugin-guidelines/pull/69... [2] https://github.com/Yoast/wordpress-seo/blob/12.6.1/admin/class-admin-banner.php#L39 https://github.com/Yoast/wordpress-seo/blob/12.6.1/admin/cla...
huxflux 7y ago
Perhaps Yoast thought they were cleaver. I hope someone reads this who works there. Because of "this", and as a precaution for further abuse one of my agencies removed Yoast SEO from over 2000 Wordpress-sites last week. Update: Just found out that Yoast CEO is a woman and apologize with GIF:s on Twitter. Awaiting my ban and #forevershame.
- arkitaip 7y ago
  Which SEO plugin did your agency go with?
chakintosh 7y ago
You have come the very thing you swore to destroy.
buboard 7y ago
if only people here held their FANG bosses to the same standard they hold wordpress plugin developers ... there would be less complaining
mtgx 7y ago
Rank Math is much better than Yoast anyway.
lettergram 7y ago
I noticed that! Actually pushed me to remove it from my site...
stevenicr 7y ago
article thread is a dupe of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21661075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21661075 (?) could / should (?) be merged. as for all the doom and gloom, I think the main thing that makes this so bad is that the ad was hard to close - the X was not very visible / easy to click, some said clicking it still brought you to ad site... to me the bad thing was that the ad was moving / not static. Might be time for a checkbox, 'allow plugins to show disounts / partners / third party ads' - some of them are helpful / wanted. when a plugin hijacks your next screen, like wp-statistics does after an update sometimes (others too, eg all-in-one-seo sometimes )- I hate that even more than what this yoast ad did.

189 points by jonny383 7y ago

tuananh 7y ago

i haven't used wp in a long time. does it come with permission settings for plugins now?

creshal 7y ago
The plugin exists to inject seo-relevant tags into your page, so I don't see how a permission system would help to prevent them from injecting other tags into your page. And no, there's no real capability system for plugins in Wordpress. Plugins can define their own user permissions that hooks into WP's system to determine what user can use what feature, but that's entirely opt in on the plugins' part.

hjek 7y ago

That's an incredible number of people they've managed to piss off with that ad! This sounds like a plausible theory: > Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was an advertising stunt to create a viral situation for additional exposure.[0] [0]: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/spammy-black-friday-on-every-admin-page/ https://wordpress.org/support/topic/spammy-black-friday-on-e...

jonny383 7y ago
Seems like a pretty risky move, but the owner has historically been controversial so wouldn't be too surprised. https://wptavern.com/yoastcon-overshadowed-by-twitter-storm-joost-de-valk-seo-industry-leaders-called-out-for-objectifying-women https://wptavern.com/yoastcon-overshadowed-by-twitter-storm-...
- yc_2345 7y ago
  Actually the comments indicate that the "controversy" seems to be imagined by many people. By the way, I don't know anything about Joost, so he may not be innocent. But the article is an excellent example of an inability to distinguish between consensual but obnoxious stuff and clearly non-consensual behavior. Also read the comment by Jenny Halasz, it seems very telling: "I had the audacity to start a thread on twitter where I suggested that perhaps we should ask the women involved if they were being harassed before we leveled accusations at the supposed harasser. For my trouble, I got called a woman hater, an enabler, and plenty of other terrible things (now conveniently deleted by the people who said those awful things: Cohen, Rayner, a handle by the name of callis1987, and Forden)"
  - jonny383 7y ago
    You literally just described the circumstances of a controversy. Did you create this account just to do that?
    - yc_2345 7y ago
      >>Did you create this account just to do that? Yes I did, because I don't have any other account to use on HN. I am not sure what you are implying here.
puranjay 7y ago
I can't see how Yoast needs any more exposure. They're the equivalent of Coca-Cola in the WordPress world - everyone's heard of them, most use them already.

marpstar 7y ago

glad I'm not the only one who was annoyed by this. it's not a huge deal, but it made me "WTF?"

jonny383 7y ago
I disagree - to me, it _is_ a huge deal. It's an overstep of a boundary that definitely should not have been crossed. Yoast has always been borderline spammy with their upgrade nags, but at least historically they followed the WordPress guidelines and kept them inside of the Yoast pages. But flat-out injecting ads into every admin page with not much context is a step too far in my opinion. As far as I'm concerned, automattic should revoke their wordpress.org plugin hosting until this has been addressed (as this clearly violates their hosting guidelines) and a public apology is issued.
- dvko 7y ago
  It has been addressed and their CEO offered hundreds of apologies on Twitter. It is definitely not okay and I would still not use them as there are better plugins out there, but they (now) say they made a mistake and owned it.
  - that_guy1 7y ago
    which SEO plugins would you recommend?
    - dvko 7y ago
      The SEO framework (slug: autodescription) is great and performs about 30x as good as Yoast SEO in terms of processing time. They’re also pretty strict about sticking to WordPress’ native styles.
- kreykjalin 7y ago
  >As far as I'm concerned, automattic should revoke their wordpress.org plugin hosting until this has been addressed Unfortunately Automattic only contributes to WordPress.org [0]. Automattic actually owns WordPress.com [1] which is a separate-ish entity, and does not have any authority over plugins hosted on WordPress.org. [0] https://automattic.com/ https://automattic.com/ [1] https://en.support.wordpress.com/com-vs-org/ https://en.support.wordpress.com/com-vs-org/

folkhack 7y ago

When people rip on WordPress development this is the sorta crap they're talking about. In many ecosystems this would warrant the plugin getting pulled from the ecosystem but WP just lets it fly.

ponsin 7y ago
A lot of people complain how apple app store removes apps that Apple doesn't like. Or how Firefox no longer allows users to provide add-ons that are not through the Firefox store. That and other walled gardens make the the new tech world much less free and much more dependent on tech giants. I personally would prefer WordPress to allow whoever wants to make an app and give the users the responsibility to choose what to add and what not
- folkhack 7y ago
  I agree and disagree all at the same time ha... > I personally would prefer WordPress to allow whoever wants to make an app and give the users the responsibility to choose what to add and what not I'm totally with you but that assumes that WP devs have the responsibility to make responsible decisions. The range of skill for a typical WP dev is outstanding, where on one end you have people who can't write a for loop adopting the "dev" title, and on the other end you have skilled engineers. I've seen WAY too many people call themselves "devs" when all they do is try to install plugins to piece together a website. In relation to Apple and FF - average users are not savvy at all and have been shielded from the nuts-and-bolts decisions that we make on a daily basis. Trusting them with the responsibility to make good decisions is precarious.
sodosopa 7y ago
I think a lot of the rip is from Wordpress generally being insecure. You can have it locally and treat it like Jekyll and have your json sent to git and published to something like Netify.
- folkhack 7y ago
  > I think a lot of the rip is from WordPress generally being insecure. That too - I put adware on my wp-admin pages in the same boat. I've seen the JSON publishing route and I'm not 100% impressed with how it operates. In most WP situations you want to give people who are non-devs the capability to manage content which local setups like this don't accommodate well.

withinrafael 7y ago

The Yoast CEO Marieke van de Rakt responded on Twitter: > That BlackFridayBanner was not the best idea. We’re truly sorry for the annoyance and difficulties it may have caused. We did not think this through properly. If you want, you can update to a new version of our plugin without that banner. #blackfriday #neveragain #apologies"[1] > I OK'd this. I am the CEO. And I made a big mistake. I am sorry. [2] [1] https://twitter.com/MariekeRakt/status/1200077958700044290 https://twitter.com/MariekeRakt/status/1200077958700044290 [2] https://twitter.com/MariekeRakt/status/1200077958700044290 https://twitter.com/MariekeRakt/status/1200077958700044290

sleavey 7y ago
> "Truly sorry" I'd prefer it if CEOs would rather say "we got too greedy and clearly the market didn't like it" rather than disingenuous apologies.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 7y ago
  I have a lot more respect for a response that contains the words "sorry" and a statement that the entity admits that they made a mistake, vs. the usual corporate statement that contains neither.
  - momokoko 7y ago
    The apology is basically the modern version of that corporate statement.
- rchaud 7y ago
  An "I'm sorry" and "it was my call" are much more honest than the usual legal-approved CEO-speak that doesn't admit any fault, or justifies it with an un-provable statement like "many users have asked for this feature"
dazc 7y ago
Hardly the first time Yoast have been forced into an embarrassing climb-down. In the early days of mass Wordpress adoption they got a lot of traction by offering a plug-in that made few basic seo improvements and that early success went to their heads. Every iteration since has been a bloated mess of features, most of which are entirely unnecessary.

rambojazz 7y ago

Did this happen on their GPL version, or their "premium" version, or both?

brylie 7y ago
GPL version it seems: https://github.com/Yoast/wordpress-seo/issues/13961 https://github.com/Yoast/wordpress-seo/issues/13961
johnward 7y ago
The premium version is GPL also. This happened in the free version.

JacobSeated 7y ago

Well, people need to learn not to depend on redundant Wordpress plugins. The plugin-landscape in Wordpress is plagued by bugs and ads, some spamming you to update or pay for a premium version. That is not something you would accept for professional CMS solutions. If you consider yourself knowledgeable in SEO, then learn to walk the talk and stop relying on phony third-party plugins! SEO is such a small part of owning a website, and ideally, any technical SEO that is needed should be integrated in the core CMS by developers and not fiddled with at random by clueless bloggers or SEO gurus. Since Wordpress is such "crapware" out-of-the-box, you can easily create a Yoast replacement plugin to handle what is really needed. The rest is just useless bloat and clutter. I would not touch Yoast in my wildest dream. It is totally redundant for people who can code themselves.

dazc 7y ago
'Since Wordpress is such "crapware" out-of-the-box, you can easily create a Yoast replacement plugin ...' The cynic in me wonders why such basics are not already included by now?
- steve19 7y ago
  It is because a lot of functionality is now bundled as part of the Automattic Jet Pack plugin. I guess the plugin is technically open source (due to the GPL) , but a lot of functionality depends on Automattic's server and requires a subscription.
- LordAtlas 7y ago
  Because of Matt Mullenweg's strange philosophy of keeping only barebones features in "core" Wordpress and having all other functionality be delivered by plugins. This means that even to have a basic site, you just have to install various plugins to deliver key features, which leads to the bloat, instability and security problems that Wordpress is infamous for.
  - Angostura 7y ago
    > strange philosophy He likes to avoid bloat and keep things modular. That's not a 'strange' philosophy

diminish 7y ago

this was the worst spam of all my wordpress experience. a yoast banner on every admin page - yoast must have gone crazy. I took screenshots of this shameful moment. wordpress plugin as well as mobile app stores are reminiscent of the ugly pc shareware and freewares of past 30 decades.

cally 7y ago
I don't use wordpress/yoast so am probably wrong. But I don't think splashscreens on shareware is 'ugly', I think it's fair enough. In some instances - such as Sublime Text - I am amazed at how discreet it is.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 7y ago
  I suspect Sublime realizes that they have three classes of customers: 1. Companies 2. Private individuals who are happy to pay for software 3. Private individuals who aren't going to pay for software The discreet notification is enough to get 1+2 to pay. Group 3 isn't going to pay anyways, and making the notification more annoying will just make it more likely that they crack it and never see it again. Most importantly, when people from group 3 start working at a company, they may get the company to buy a license (which is now a subscription, i.e. makes them a lot more money than a personal license). A more annoying notification would likely win them very little, and lose them a lot (from people who use a different editor instead).

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

sleavey 7y ago

I'm a big fan of vanilla WordPress, especially the new block editor, but the plugin ecosystem is a total mess. Almost all popular plugins come with a free version that spams you to upgrade to "pro". They add menu items to the admin panel with different colours so you find it harder to ignore them. They add messages to the dashboard. The look and feel of their settings pages don't match WordPress core. And, even if you pay for an upgrade, that usually means removing the plugin provided and automatically updated by WordPress.org and replacing it with a manually uploaded zip. Crazy. The garbage user experience with most plugins led me to collect together a bunch of ideas from plugins I used and rewrite almost all of them entirely into one spam-free plugin. I did it for my own sanity as a user of my own plugin but I'd like to see more " old fashioned" plugins that are providing high quality code for everyone's free benefit.

nsomaru 7y ago
Have you released this plugin?
- faeyanpiraat 7y ago
  Making a functional plugin for one’s own purposes is one thing, releasing it to the public requires quite a lot more work.
- sleavey 7y ago
  Kind of. It's on GitHub, but not yet in the WordPress plugin archive (I want to test it more with my organisation and some friends first). https://github.com/Academic-Labbook https://github.com/Academic-Labbook
levosmetalo 7y ago
> I'm a big fan of vanilla WordPress, especially the new block editor, but the plugin ecosystem is a total mess. Well, the root cause why the plugin ecosystem is a mess is the way plugins management and monetization is implemented in the vanilla wp. As oposed to, e.g. Atlassian Jira plugins, WP doesn't really help plugin developers to seamlessly integrate with the core product.

_Codemonkeyism 7y ago

Innocence once lost can never be regained.

skrebbel 7y ago

For those not deep into the WP community reading this headline: Yoast injected an ad into the WP admin pages (every admin page), not into public WP sites. The headline sounds much worse than it is - this is just an annoyance for editors, not Yoast abusing its reach to target billions of worldwide website readers. Naturally that doesn't excuse the spam.

asadkn 7y ago

Let's get a few things right since the link is misleading. - It was an upsell to the Pro version of free plugin. Not some random ad spam. - The ad was an admin notice - which appear in WordPress on top of every page in the backend Admin Area in what's generally the notification area. - It's free, GPL, and open source - you know, "No Warranties" and all that. Grayhat, and not something you should ever do. But not as nefarious as everyone is making it sound like. WP.org is about freedom, so they're unlikely to restrict it either unless malicious: https://github.com/WordPress/wporg-plugin-guidelines/pull/69#issuecomment-560011084 https://github.com/WordPress/wporg-plugin-guidelines/pull/69... Being very involved in the WordPress industry, what I find funny is the majority of angry reviews masquerading as victims are from entitled pseudo devs who sell WordPress sites to clients and now they were made to look bad because they had automatic updates enabled while charging their customers for a retainer package with "plugin & themes updates". How about buying premium version in the first place just as you charged your client for it.

jonny383 7y ago
1. It goes directly against the WordPress Detailed Plugin Guidelines to both upsell, and to hijack the admin dashboard [0]. 2. If the ad was an admin notice, it didn't look like one. It's a banner image with an outbound tracking link [1]. [0] https://developer.wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-org/detailed-plugin-guidelines/ https://developer.wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-org/detail... [1] https://imgur.com/a/oN7ZFRU https://imgur.com/a/oN7ZFRU
- asadkn 7y ago
  I believe they played with the semantics here to perhaps get a pass on it not counting as an exact violation of wp.org repository guidelines. There's a proposal to have strict policies and disallow any sort of global ads now but it seems dismissed [1]. It was a dismissable admin notice that looked like an ad and wasn't exactly a tracking link (in the wp.org classifications at least), but a generic marketing campaign link [2]. [1] https://github.com/WordPress/wporg-plugin-guidelines/pull/69#issuecomment-560011084 https://github.com/WordPress/wporg-plugin-guidelines/pull/69... [2] https://github.com/Yoast/wordpress-seo/blob/12.6.1/admin/class-admin-banner.php#L39 https://github.com/Yoast/wordpress-seo/blob/12.6.1/admin/cla...

huxflux 7y ago

Perhaps Yoast thought they were cleaver. I hope someone reads this who works there. Because of "this", and as a precaution for further abuse one of my agencies removed Yoast SEO from over 2000 Wordpress-sites last week. Update: Just found out that Yoast CEO is a woman and apologize with GIF:s on Twitter. Awaiting my ban and #forevershame.

arkitaip 7y ago
Which SEO plugin did your agency go with?

chakintosh 7y ago

You have come the very thing you swore to destroy.

buboard 7y ago

if only people here held their FANG bosses to the same standard they hold wordpress plugin developers ... there would be less complaining

mtgx 7y ago

Rank Math is much better than Yoast anyway.

lettergram 7y ago

I noticed that! Actually pushed me to remove it from my site...

stevenicr 7y ago

article thread is a dupe of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21661075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21661075 (?) could / should (?) be merged. as for all the doom and gloom, I think the main thing that makes this so bad is that the ad was hard to close - the X was not very visible / easy to click, some said clicking it still brought you to ad site... to me the bad thing was that the ad was moving / not static. Might be time for a checkbox, 'allow plugins to show disounts / partners / third party ads' - some of them are helpful / wanted. when a plugin hijacks your next screen, like wp-statistics does after an update sometimes (others too, eg all-in-one-seo sometimes )- I hate that even more than what this yoast ad did.