Architecture is part of the algorithm.
The core team of WordPress are adding a feature… they said, maybe it will change… that adds open ‘/random’ urls to the site. By default.
When I write ‘by default’, it means you have to add code to turn it off. If you have to add code to fix something, it’s a bug.
If you can toggle it on and off in the administration of the site, it’s a feature.
A poorly configurable feature is a bug.
So, in my mind, WordPress is inserting a bug and calling it a feature.
I can easily work around that so that bots don’t go hammering the random link. At the server level, I can just block requests matching these paths:
/random
/random/*But why should I have to? That’s just one more annoyance to remember when it could just be an option to turn on.
Why am I inheriting this issue? Why do they think the user should have to deal with this? Why not make it an option you can turn on?
I cannot work around the maintainers’ approach to making decisions. I can only keep compensating for the consequences, and if the philosophy is to just pile on more for the user to deal with…
I recall that I had started thinking of getting out of WordPress the same way I got out of Drupal years ago, for similar reasons. Maintainers who only care about certain user demographics or just doing stuff because they think it’s cool.
Doing cool things is why many people write code, and doing it for small personal projects is fun.
WordPress is not a small project anymore. It has not been for over a decade.
With all the vulnerabilities that have been popping up lately as the large frontier models try to flex why they’re worth data centers, there have been plenty of upgrades happening around the internet.
I don’t want yet another thing to manage through code, or to have to configure blocks on URLs.
That’s just crappy philosophy.
I was not going to comment on their blog post, but this morning I figured, “Why not?” and headed over to do so. I’m not registered on the site, so I started the registration process.
After identifying enough buses to move a government department, I identified enough fire hydrants that I might as well have been walking a dog. Then, I identified enough cars to qualify as a fledgling Flock camera.
And then, it says, “Your account is pending approval.”, and that an email will be sent when it is approved.
Apparently that process is slower than a bus or a car, and about as fast as a fire hydrant because I have written all of this without an email. And I’ll check before I publish.
After over 2 decades with KnowProSE.com and dealing with content management system drama, I might just go to something like Publii, at least temporarily. But in thinking through all of this, I have some things to consider.
I don’t make big decisions without a plan. And that landed me on addressing changes in my own constraints in the evolving architecture of the Internet.
So it won’t happen tomorrow. But if WordPress is going to pass off bugs as features, there’s no good reason to stay. In fact, I can think of quite a few reasons, but we’ll get into that in another post.
Yup. Checked again. No email. As fast as a fire hydrant.
