Despite the self-congratulatory tone in today’s announcement from WordPress.com News, I’m inclined to think WP caved to user outrage. They’ve installed an option for users to opt out of those spammy automatic comment follow-up emails, or rather, to set the default to what it was before (not receiving follow-ups). See their amended support page “Following Comments” and its link to Email Delivery Settings. The hitch, of course, is you must have a WordPress account to do this. Personally I don’t think continuing to spam non-WPers is going to win any new accounts.
Well whaddya know? Banging them over the head repeatedly works! 😆
They’ll never admit it, of course. But it feels like a victory to me. 😀
I’m still not sure what the ginormous deal was, the box is highly visible and its meaning is pretty clear (I just unchecked the comment notification box on your blog), but yes, the yelling worked and now it’s an optional feature. Which is as it should have been.
There might be something to setting up a 10% club on WordPress, where WP gets 10% of its users to join a Beta testing club. The new features go through a test phase via the 10% before it gets released into the general population. That way everyone has some idea what the reaction is going to be, and maybe make the changes before the schnitzel hits the fire.
Good idea. You should suggest it. You know how responsive WP usually is … 😉
Cool, thanks!