If you are getting here through a search on Popup Blockers or for Pop-Up Blocker or Pop Up Blocker Internet Explorer, please do not buy from pop-upblocker dot org They are spammers and unethical. ADB Popup Blocker and ANB Pop Up Blocker are from the same company and you should not buy their product. Any SEO people want to help me get this post up on top on the SEs?

If you link about this, make sure that you also include links like I have above. This will help to bump up the Spam Payback article as a result when people search for Popup Blockers.

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1. Spam: Kill it at the root
2. Follow you, follow me
3. SpamValve update

The articles hosted content thing was just a short-term experiment, an interesting idea (original and relevant Wikipedia-type content on the site) that was badly implemented. As an experiment it could have been conducted much better than it was. The content should have been more topical to WP issue, I should have kept up with the content that was going up, the links should have never had the overflow CSS, and I should have discussed it with more people. Each was a mistake and they combined badly — I’m very sorry. Originally I wanted to do a poll about it but I never got around to adding a polling add-on to bbPress and thus the poll never happened. In my mind there were more important things to spend time on (the 1.5 release, the plugin and theme directories, etc.) but I don’t offer that as an excuse. I didn’t give the ads much thought after the very beginning until about two weeks ago when I got a few emails about them. I did not know they had mesowhatever/asbestos content on them until Andy Baio messaged me.

Okay, as cooler heads have already noted, a mistake was made, there’s no conspiracies going on, and the whole thing was blown way out of proportion. Can we all just go back to tweaking our software and fighting the real spammers now? Yes? Thank you.

Related posts:

1. WordPress Scandal Update
2. Photomatt @ CNET
3. WordPress 1.5 “Strayhorn” released

I have close to a thousand emails and countless blog posts and comments to go through, but I’ll try to synthesize everything and respond ASAP, I think it’s important because some people seem to be spinning things quite maliciously. If you have a specific question please send me an email and I’ll do my best to respond personally or on the blog, even if you’ve already decided I’m the scum of the earth.

– Back Online

What a way to spend your vacation, eh?

In the meantime, the offending hidden links have been removed from the WordPress.org website, the HotNacho articles are gone, and Google has restored the site’s pagerank.

Update: Andy at waxy.or has another update which includes a statement from HotNacho.

Chad Jones, the creator of Hot Nacho, contacted me and asked me to post this statement. Several parts of his story were contradicted by Matt himself, and I don’t believe it myself, but I’m happy to reproduce it in full below.

I’m not sure what Andy meant about contradictions. I didn’t see anything that really contradicted anything that Matt had said. (But then again, I’m functioning on about 3 hours of sleep, so I could have missed something)

Related posts:

1. WordPress Scandal: Photomatt Responds
2. WordPress Security Update
3. Update on WordPress blog APIs

Disclaimer. I’m hesitant to even write about this, knowing the web’s fondness for angry mob justice, but I feel like it’s an important issue that needs to be addressed. My one request: please be calm and rational. WordPress is a great project, and Matt is a good guy. Think before piling on the hatemail and flames.

I originally started this as a comment over on Jonas Luster‘s site. But as it grew longer, I figured it warranted a posting on my own site. Basically, if you ask me, this is much ado about nothing (well, okay, not ‘nothing’ — perhaps ‘mountain out of a molehill’ would be a better analogy). But it’s too late to put out the fire now. We’ll just have to wait for it to burn out on its own.

As far as I can tell, this was just a case of Matt making one bad judgement call. I haven’t met him in person yet, but we’ve had many phone and net conversations, and I feel like I know what his level of dedication is to projects like WordPress. Matt has said time and time again that what makes a project great is its community, and the project’s responsiveness to that community. The perception that he has done anything to harm this community will cut him to the quick.

A project like WP (and his collaboration with me on Ping-O-Matic) has enormous resource needs. Enormous. This is not your average 1000-hits-per-day blog with pictures of kittens and rants about high school homework. This is a project that garnered over 100,000 downloads in just a few weeks. This is a project with around 150,000 posts in its support forums. And that doesn’t even include the 3500+ pages in the Codex, with over a million page views. And don’t even get me started on the storage requirements for all the data that Ping-O-Matic has accumulated across the 79,000,000+ pings that it has served.

You can’t support those kinds of loads out of a $20/month shared web hosting account. And it’s hard to pay the kind of money that it does take out of your own pocket to support something which is, essentially, a hobby (at least in the sense that it’s not a paying job). Personally, I would love to be able to spend more time working on WordPress and adding whizbang new features to Ping-O-Matic. But I can’t. Why not? Because I can’t afford it.

My money is almost completely monopolized by my mortgage, food for my family, car payments, gas for the cars, and all the other usual things. And my time is almost completely monopolized by my day job (which provides the aforementioned money), and my family. WordPress has never bought me lunch. Ping-O-Matic has never paid for my family to go to a Saturday matinee. Not one user of WordPress, Ping-O-Matic, or any other open project that I’ve participated in has ever utilized my Donation Page to send me money or a wishlist item.

I’ve gotten a few “thank you” notes here and there. I’ve seen a few “attaboys”. And those are great, and well appreciated. They make my paltry efforts worthwhile. But they don’t put bread on the table. So I can understand why Matt felt motivated to try an “experiment” which brought in a little revenue without being highly visible. Unforunately, the source of this financing walks the shady edge of what is and is not acceptible to our community. Personally, until Matt returns from his vacation and gives his side of the story, I’m not assuming anything.

But if you’re in the camp of people crying “foul”, consider this: Matt could have put out announcements asking for donations. He could have plastered flashing advertisements all over the WordPress sites. He could have used every available opportunity to “pass the cup”. Instead he chose an avenue which was out-of-sight. And instead of perceiving this as “polite”, people have chosen to view it as “sneaky”. “Et tu, Brutè?”

Update: There are now responses from Matt and HotNacho, the hidden links and content are gone, and Google has restored the PageRank for wordpress.org.