Looks like I "offended" Matt Mullenweg a bit too much. Write a pair of posts describing how they have ignored a long list of splog reports and I now have my wordpress.com account suspended and my posts in the support forums edited without permission. But in addition to that, I've been blackballed by Akismet and it appears that my comments on wordpress.com are being trashed automatically. (A picture of that after the fold. Guess I won't be posting comments to your blog anymore, wank.)
What bothers me about all this is that it started on Matt's end when I suggested that since most of the support forum volunteers were not going to be able to attend the first WordCamp, that it would be a great idea if Automattic would drop each of them a tshirt into the mail. That way Matt and crew would show how thankful they were for the time and the work that they put in. This, of course, didn't fly over too well and since that point, many of us noticed a "cooling" of staff's attitudes towards those who helped out.
There, I said it. All this because of a lousy tshirt. A simple gesture that would have taken at most an hour or two and would have meant a lot of some people. Hell, the gallery folks sent me a tshirt for reporting an issue with their website. (I still need to blog about that. There's pictures here and here. Yes, it was 6:30 in the morning. It was early and I was tired and hadn't shaved.)
Since that time, I've had Matt and others from Automattic lie about me, post insults, make light of my physical handicaps, and make light of my former relationship with my ex fiancee. While he goes on and on about how approachable he is, he has refused numerous times to discuss how his company has acted towards me and has refused to follow up on the questions that I raised.
All this does prove three things though. Wordpress.com is not pro free speech, not pro customer service and fully believes in censorship. Can't wait for the next time Matt gets up on his soap box shouting out to the whole world how they support it so much.
What bothers me about all this is that it started on Matt's end when I suggested that since most of the support forum volunteers were not going to be able to attend the first WordCamp, that it would be a great idea if Automattic would drop each of them a tshirt into the mail. That way Matt and crew would show how thankful they were for the time and the work that they put in. This, of course, didn't fly over too well and since that point, many of us noticed a "cooling" of staff's attitudes towards those who helped out.
There, I said it. All this because of a lousy tshirt. A simple gesture that would have taken at most an hour or two and would have meant a lot of some people. Hell, the gallery folks sent me a tshirt for reporting an issue with their website. (I still need to blog about that. There's pictures here and here. Yes, it was 6:30 in the morning. It was early and I was tired and hadn't shaved.)
Since that time, I've had Matt and others from Automattic lie about me, post insults, make light of my physical handicaps, and make light of my former relationship with my ex fiancee. While he goes on and on about how approachable he is, he has refused numerous times to discuss how his company has acted towards me and has refused to follow up on the questions that I raised.
All this does prove three things though. Wordpress.com is not pro free speech, not pro customer service and fully believes in censorship. Can't wait for the next time Matt gets up on his soap box shouting out to the whole world how they support it so much.
But you knew that before, right?
I wondered where your avatar had gone and why you were set back to Inactive. You'd think they'd have better things to do. They got the sock puppet too, didn't they?
At WordcampVancouver I noticed some people with hoodies, etc gratis; it looks like those never go to people who help with support, they just go to developers. You want swag, contribute code, not fixes for when the code screws up. Mind you, I got a free upgrade but god only knows why.
raincoaster | June 12, 2008 10:15 AM | Reply to this comment
Oh, it's even worse than that. Your trackback from this post shows up in my admin panel but not in my recent comments widget. I'm going to make a 'censored comments' widget and list them manually. If you want to comment in future you are of course welcome to email your comments; I'll post them and link them from the 'censored comments' widget.
Meanwhile I will be contacting Automattic and asking them not to control who gets to post on MY blog. There is no excuse for this. Even spam gets run past us for possible approval. When I asked for the ability to whitelist regular commenters, Mark told me you weren't in Akismet. I said that in that case wordpress.com should stop sending you to the Akismet queue as it was sort of misleading, and I haven't heard anything since.
[goes to make a backup, sensing her days around there may be numbered. potential buyers to hide me from, you know?]
that girl again | June 16, 2008 4:50 PM | Reply to this comment
Hey, I want a t-shirt too! Nobody's asked for an address to send it to though. Perhaps a self-made one is in order? How about:
I've reported dozens of spam blogs and volunteered in the WP.com forums for ages and I never even got a lousy t-shirt.
ian in hamburg | June 17, 2008 8:48 AM | Reply to this comment