« Casualties in Iraq | Main | Orwell's tips » Wordpress.com: we don't permit adsI was surprised to learn, from one of my acquaintances on The WELL, that Wordpress.com (the Wordpress hosted service) doesn't allow her to post Amazon Associates links. They go so far as to filter those links and any other form of advertising. Someone evidently told her that there's some sort of security issue, but that doesn't seem to be the case. They just don't want users posting ads, unless they're VIPs. As much as I like Wordpress, this really rubs me the wrong way... I'm enough of a libertarian to see this as excessive control. It's also annoying that Wordpress uses the term "VIP," which is like saying the average Wordpress.com user isn't important enough to do whatever they want with their blog. I think I understand why they have (i.e. Matt has) adopted this policy. If you've ever seen a blogspot blog that was created just for link spam and ads, you'll get it. But I think preventing the average user from posting an Amazon associates text link is excessive control. jon posted this at 12:00 AM |
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Actually, it's rather refreshing to visit blogs without advertising. VERY refreshing.
There is something to be said about blogging for the sake of blogging and not money-making. If it's free to blog, and your only cost is time, what are you losing?
Yes, not featuring ads, javascripts, and other security threatening scripts is a form of control. With WordPressMU, what you do on your blog can impact everyone else on the system, so these are off for security reasons.
WordPress.com is still a testing site though very stable. It is the ground floor of all things WordPress and used to test the next versions. Control over what a user adds to the mix helps keep it stable.
With the lessons learned on WordPress.com, WordPress users benefit tremendously. Due to a lot of issues in the beginning with bloggers losing posts due to errors and novice bloggers messing up, the autosave feature was added. Users wanted more control over what was on the front page of their blog and which search engines were indexing their blogs. This was also added and incorporated in to the latest release of WordPress.
Allowing users to add ads has been considered from the very beginning, and is always possible in the future. Not every blog needs ads.
WordPress offers you three options to blog. Want ads, get your own site and use the free WordPress. Or get the free blog from WordPress and pay probably less than a domain name and host server and get the ability to add ads (and share a little of the wealth to keep WordPress.com running). Or, get the free WordPress full version and get your own domain and host and have total control over your own ads. Whichever way you choose, WordPress is still free.
Posted by: Lorelle | February 18, 2007 10:39 AM
"They go so far as to filter those links and any other form of advertising."
This isn't entirely accurate. We of course filter javascript an other potentially harmful code, but we're not going to rewrite an Amazon text link someone has in their post. Feel free to test this yourself.
Posted by: Matt | February 19, 2007 12:21 PM
Thanks for those comments; I passed 'em on to my acquaintance (and others in the conversation) on the WELL. Matt, note that she had the idea she couldn't post the Amazon text links after exchanges with Wordpress support. I was skeptical, but I picked up the same impression from the info at the site.
FYI I do think it's a Good Thing to provide incentives for people to give money to Wordpress.
Posted by: Jon Lebkowsky | February 19, 2007 12:53 PM