Amazing that an anti-spam plugin author would spam in the #WordPress forums. #irony "If you do it, it's spam; if I do it, it's promotion."

— Professor O (@iswpw) May 27, 2013

You can read about it in the WordPress forum here.

Kind of ironic that someone who is promoting an anti-spam plugin would resort to spamming to promote it. Of course, you could argue that he didn’t realize he was spamming in the first place, in which case, I don’t know if you really want to buy an anti-spam plugin from him.

I love WordPress, which is why I take umbrage at things like this, which runs counter to the open-source culture that a platform like WordPress both engenders and is dependent on.

I have no problem with people making money off WordPress. If you want to provide WordPress support and development and charge for it, go for it. (Hey, some people just don’t have the time or desire to learn HTML and CSS.) If you want to create, sell, and most importantly, support, a plugin or theme for WordPress, go for it. (Ditto for PHP.)

But if you view WordPress as just a cash cow to do with as you like, then please go away. Please don’t create a crippled version of your plugin that you can promote through the WordPress forums, just so you can try to convince people to buy your expensive ($US57 for the silver edition, $US97 for the platinum edition) paid version. Please don’t use a site hacked from the WordPress 2012 theme that is just plain ugly and reflects no thought or effort. (Really, am I supposed to be impressed by a picture of equations, a fairly meaningless line graph, and a picture of a trophy?)

Most importantly, please don’t insult my intelligence by including blurbs that say things like this:

Here’s the thing: most people put their entire stock into free plugins and are offended by the idea that they might actually have to pay for a little bit of security. I am happy to have paid for a quality product and I would happily do so again.

I use Akismet for spam protection; it’s free for personal use.

I have seen too many instances when people who are new to WordPress (and a few who have been around it for some time) have spent large chunks of money on themes and plugins they didn’t need to spend, because there were free themes and plugins that accomplished much the same thing. Never spend money up front on anything in WordPress. Often, a thorough search of the theme or plugin repositories will turn up something that will work.

And if you do decide to spend some money, do your homework first. There are too many unscrupulous people who simply want to separate you from your money. I’d rather give $100 to a college student to hack something together for me than spend $57 on a product whose producer doesn’t know the difference between spam and promotion.

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