Metaplanar Babel

So apparently last week/weekend, there was a big thing with Wordpress and Google and accusations of spamming flying left and right. I wasn’t really paying much attention this weekend so I missed it, but here’s the “official” response. You may want to read this first for a little background.

I’m generally inclined to cut the guy some slack, given that I’m currently posting from his rather excellently developed blog client that I downloaded from his site for free. As numerous others have said in their comments on both of the aforementioned sites, this seems to be mostly a case of bad timing and a nasty mistake on Matt’s part. I can’t honestly say that it wouldn’t have happened to me, so I don’t feel I have any right to judge. Hopefully there are enough other WP users who feel the same way that the software won’t just belly-up from the bad rep. I don’t expect the negative buzz to last long though, and honestly, this might end up being to WP’s advantage overall. There are more than a few posts there from people who were compelled to donate to the WP group after all of this came to light. Seems like a good thing to me; the suspicious part of my mind that played too much Shadowrun is whispering, “maybe that was the whole point of it all…” but it seems too random and had too much potential to go really bad for me to really believe the voice at this point.

Anyway, I’m mostly just repeating what other people have said, so go read those two sites if you’re actually interested.

Edit: found another blog with some commentary

Edit the second: I’m not sure it was ever really explained exactly what the Hot Nacho stuff was supposed to do. Apparently, the program is supposed to go through articles for web and replace certain words with synonyms that score higher on web searches. The articles on wordpress.org were supposedly for the purpose of testing this program. Such content is generally against Google’s policy, so wordpress.org’s site ranking was revoked until the problem articles were removed. Anyway, that’s the meat of what caused the problem, as best I can find. There’s a slightly more thorough explanation in this article. What a mess.