[wp-hackers] Re: Advertising on plugin pages

[Ajay D'Souza]

Hi,

It's been a nice lively discussion. I guess we don't need to be reminded 
about the entire sponsored themes issue that cropped up about a year or 
so back. When they were allowed to thrive, they were soon misused and 
even today there are a lot of them released and used by unsuspecting users.

Because of these, the entire theme validation process on WP Extend has 
become a several day issue, simply because every line of code needs to 
be checked to ensure it fits all the guidelines.

Aren't we inviting the same problem by enabling ads in themes. I'm sure 
a majority of us plugin developers would definitely stick to the 
guidelines and definitely not to anything to compromise the security of 
blogs of our users.

However, what's stopping others from releasing plugins only for the sake 
of displaying ads? The policing of the WP Plugins Repository would begin 
on a much larger aspect and today's updates which take 15 minutes will 
become a few day process. And if these are urgent security related 
updates.... well, you're putting a lot of blogs at risk.



Regards,
Ajay D'Souza
http://ajaydsouza.com/


wp-hackers-request at lists.automattic.com wrote:
> Date: Sun, 1 Mar 2009 17:12:00 -0600 (CST)
> From: Mike Schinkel<mikeschinkel at newclarity.net>
> Subject: Re: [wp-hackers] Advertising on plugin pages
> To: wp-hackers at lists.automattic.com
> Message-ID:<EMEWEMEW2_DELIMl20HC01a6100709835e4f6bbdf84,
> 	mikeschinkel at newclarity.net, 6745637.1301235949114732.J>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
>
> "Heiko Rabe"<heiko.rabe at code-styling.de>  wrote:
>    
>> You will run into the fact that developers will disassemble
>> the entire plugin code to be sure, nothing unwanted will be
>> transmitted. Such time wasting effort would force me to drop
>> such a plugin and search for an ad free solution or to rewrite
>> it without ads.
>>      
>
> ANY plugin could do something unsavory. All the things you mention could be done by a plugin that is not advertising-related, and also a plugin that is advertising-related could avoid all those things so as to be a good citizen. Do you code review every plugin you use (which is probably a good idea, but tangential to the discussion?)  How does this make plugins that serve advertising different?
>
> -Mike Schinkel
> http://mikeschinkel.com/
>    
>