thank you for your comment.

I agree entirely that there is a New Marketing imperative for companies to *be* responsive regardless of who they are and what they produce.

In a life-replicating-art sort of irony, I am proposing something very similar to GetSatisfaction to Matt even as we speak. I will email you a copy of the proposal for your ideas as we seem to be on exactly the same wavelength here.

Best regards, Andrew

Matt runs a multimillion dollar company. It’s very much in his interests to actually *be responsive*. Ultimately, we the users can go somewhere other than WordPress for our blogging tools (there’s at least one obvious alternative) and write uncomplimentary material about the tools and community that have the power to drive potential and current users away.

The negative experience you’ve had with WordPress 2.5 both in terms of the software and the hostile community when you tried to raise issues are things that Matt should be addressing personally. He should be handing out penalty time to the aggressive responders in the dev community - reducing their standing and putting filters against their contributions to the code base so they have to re-establish their standing. He should also be strictly setting rules for community interaction - a tightly defined minimum behavior standard, testing quality - in depth and breadth, and time for responses to issues.

I’d personally suggest that WordPress use something like Get Satisfaction (www.getsatisfaction.com), which already has a community of people discussing their product, but no involvement from insiders.

I will be in touch to discuss the idea of a WordPress feedback clearing house that I raised on onblogging.com.au - it may be that the appearance of responsiveness will silence many of the critics (including me)
Best regards, Andrew

http://ma.tt/

And on other places on WP.org, feel free to write me anytime.

thank you for your well-considered comment.

The whole “does FOSS equal users helping users or is it just one more way to produce software/systems?” discussion has been going on for a very long time - like yourself, I want to see a good user experience for Free/Open Software users. I think that ALL software manufacturers should be more responsive to human needs.

Best regards, Andrew

I took part in a lengthy discussion on the “Feedback and Requests” forum on Wordpress.org. Many users were expressing frustration at some of the backward functionality of 2.5, such as the flawed Write screen and the frankly un-usable widget interface.

It was reasonable to assume that this was the place to, you know, offer feedback or make requests, but eventually a moderator said “Stop complaining about it here. These are support forums, for people with actual problems… This is really not the proper place to vent opinions or to suggest changes to WordPress.”

In addition, when I challenged this, the same moderator said “The best way to get it fixed is to fix it yourself and then submit a patch”.

I understand that open-source relies on user contributions. But this moderators view is simply wrong. If you’re a good company who cares about your products, you will actively seek feedback from your customers but you don’t expect them to fix the problems too!

Further discussion led to all sorts of nonsense and it was hard not to get angry about some of it (though it did result in some useful hacks that make 2.5 a bit more like 2.3). The whole experience left a very bad taste in my mouth though.

For a company that prides itself on creating software that gives people a voice, it’s ironic and sad that Wordpress seem to be more interested in hiding and defending themselves than being open and listening to those voices.

PS: If you’re interested in the feedback thread in question, it’s here and long — only read if you have a lot of time! I’m gambit37 over there.

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/164414

thank you for your comment.

Unfortunately, Matt Mullenweg’s email address is not commonly available - there is a contact form on his not-WordPress blog that would be intrusive to use I feel.

WordPress users have two options that I’ve been able to find for discussing bugs:
- report it to the forums, and get abused, or,
- join the developers mailing list.

Because of the abuse, I am not game to join the developers mailing list.

I have no doubt that they will fix the bugs in time, but because of the abuse, I have no interest in contributing to WordPress as a project. I’m actively seeking alternatives to WordPress even though the thought of migrating dozens of blogs is painful. But when they aren’t keeping their end of the social contract, there is no alternative but bailing out. I will not be the first to do it, nor I suspect the last.

Cheers, Andrew

I’ve followed the links you’ve published here and at On Blogging, and I’m not seeing any of the problems you and others are experiencing, either in technical or usability terms. For me, everything works and the new interface seems very intuitive.

Now, let it be stipulated, I’m probably best classed as an expert user - good with interfaces and pretty capable when it comes to dealing with technical glitches. As such, you’d probably be justified in expecting me to cope okay with any issues.

I’ve not looked under the hood at the way the code generates, so I can’t comment on the standards issues. I will agree, at least in part, with the widget controls. They are a little odd, but not terrible to my mind. I’ve certainly seen worse UI decisions.

Overall, it must be very environment dependent, which bugs me as it suggests that testing by the folks at Automattic is done on a limited range of environments and may be subject to some questionable QA.

Why don’t you contact Matt Mullenweg directly and see if he’s responsive?