WordPress Gives Zero Fs

Hiya,

The new editing experience has been under development for the past 2 years, with a public call for beta testing going out in August informing of the changes that are coming, and looking for testers to pick up on issues and compatibility issues that we could address.

The new editing experience it self is, like everything else on the web, never truly going to be “finished”, it’ll be an iterative process to improve and enhance as time goes on, and hopefully we’ll be able to address the shortcomings you feel it has today, in one of the future releases.

Speaking of, what interactions are you performing that makes it feel glitchy, as you described them?

Hi Marius,

I am not sure how well you guys know your users demographics and psychology, but I would assume that the vast majority of happy users did not read about or desire any such updates. I think the feedback and ratings you are seeing right now illustrates it better than anything I can say here.

There are so many unintuitive changes that overall the impression of everyone on our team can be described as: WHAT THE F…!?#!># WHY DID YOU DO THIS WP!?!?

A few that come to mind:
– I am looking at the backend of a blog post and everything I see tells me it has been published: Visibility – Published, Publish date in the past – displayed. But it is not visible to the visitors or in the incognito mode, and the post is in fact in the Draft mode. It used to be so easy to tell – it’s either Published, or Pending, or Draft. WHY would anyone remove that and leave us wondering, wasting our time on such little things?!

– Autosave kicks in what seems like every 30 seconds and messes things up. Yet, we make actual changes in a blog post only to discover they were not saved. And we keep wasting our time again and again, the resources that no small businesses have…

– Preview of a blog post takes FOREVER to load, who in today’s world has all this time to sit and wait for a minute for a blog post preview to load?

None of these things have ever happened before, why fix what wasn’t broken?!

I’m not going to claim I know the majority of the user demographic (because there’s just _too many_ to know), I will remark that out of tens of millions of sites, only a handful have expressed public dismay (at least here on www.ads-software.com, I am actively looking into how things are for other theme shops, hosts etc. though), so it’s actually been a very normal release in terms of user reactions. We’ll never be able to please everyone, so we aim for the majority, which of course means some users will not approve of every change, that being said, I do want to make sure those that do have feedback or bad experiences get addressed, and hopefully we’ll come to some sort of resolution, be that an agreement of future changes or an understanding of why things are as they are.

Wow, that paragraph was way longer than I had originally anticipated, moving along, and on to your remarks!

The previews being slow are a known limitation on large posts, WordPress 5.0.2 (unless something unexpected comes up) should be addressing a lot of performance bottlenecks users have been discovering after the release, it would’ve been nice to have had it fixed before, but unfortunately that wasn’t a possibility.

The really rapid autosaves kicking in have been identified as plugin compatibility issues in previous cases, I’m wondering if that might be the case for you as well, have you looked if it happens while following some of our recommended troubleshooting steps (just to rule out if it’s actually plugin/theme related, or WordPress it self acting weird) ?

The published state visibility, I’m not sure what your screen looks like (since it might not be the same as mine depending on plugins etc), but when I open a post the buttons at the top read “Publish” if it’s not published, and “Update” if it is published, are yo useeing soemthign else perhaps?

I’m not going to claim I know the majority of the user demographic (because there’s just _too many_ to know)

Who is your target user now? I can’t figure it out.

It is obvious that the core user demographic which made WordPress popular in the first place has been completely overlooked for … what? A half baked buggy page builder that solves no problems just before the holidays.

I can see a popular page builder leaving WP and taking millions of users with them. I know that is what I would be doing.

I am look for alternatives that are not going to actively screw up my business in the new year, and in the meantime I am recommending that no one updates.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 11 months ago by jonshannow.

Thank you Marius,

Our company has a software product, so I completely understand what you mean by not being able to (and not trying to) please everyone. I also feel bad feeling so angry at how difficult everything has become with this update, because WordPress is a free platform – at least we don’t pay you guys for using it – so it feels like we really don’t have any rights to complain.

With all of this being said, I really hope we can have your guys support in addressing all of these issues. I looked through the 1-star reviews below mine and so many of them shared the same exact complaints, so we’re definitely not the only ones. I’ll have a meeting with our WP team tomorrow to figure out how to proceed with all of our websites – there are more issues that I mentioned above – and I’ll share your comments with them.

Either way, thank you for responding and I hope something good can come out of this in the end. Right now it only looks like a major time- and resource-suck, which always means losing money that small businesses don’t have.

@jonshannow

I can see a popular page builder leaving WP and taking millions of users with them. I know that is what I would be doing.

I think we’re thinking about the same page builder and I also hope they become a stand-alone software that doesn’t screw up its users’ businesses, especially right before holidays when most small businesses run sales and make the most money they can make in a whole year.

Now instead of pro-actively preparing for that we have to troubleshoot and try to figure out how to proceed from here.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 11 months ago by Juliamc.

We’re working through the feedback as fast as we can, unfortunately we’re also volunteers and there’s only a small handful of us as well (so small as to be low-double-digits around the world), while also covering our day jobs etc, so it’s not an easy task to overcome right now.

I do appreciate the feedback, and I would love to hear what other grievances you’ve encountered, so please don’t hesitate to let us know. I would note that many of the recurring items are things that have been addressed, or rehashes of things we’ve repeated so many times in official places (such as sticky support topics, blog posts and so forth) that it’s not unlikely that some may go unanswered.

I think we’re thinking about the same page builder and I also hope they become a stand-alone software that doesn’t screw up its users’ businesses, especially right before holidays when most small businesses run sales and make the most money they can make in a whole year.

Let’s hope so.

I am tempted to send a bill to Automattic for the extra hours worked because of this mess.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 11 months ago by Marius L. J.. Reason: Removed phrases that may be viewed as profanity

Hi Marius,

Thank you and here’s another comment from one of the team members I just spoke with:

“The main issue is the jumping around and inability to easily copy / paste / edit. I click on a paragraph to edit it, hit backspace, and I’ve somehow been jumped to a separate and unrelated block. So for BASIC text editing it’s a horrendous time waster.”

I’ll have more once I get a hold of everyone during the work week.

Hi @clorith and thanks for jumping in.

Many who contributed stopped posting here last week.

I will remark that out of tens of millions of sites, only a handful have expressed public dismay (at least here on www.ads-software.com

How many of those 10’s of millions know they can complain on this plugin page? How many have actually upgraded?

Have you checked how many are using the Classic Editor plugin? 1+ million and rising fast.
Disable Gutenberg is over 50k.
Don’t you think that says something about how the community feels?

If they aren’t complaining, they probably don’t know where to go, and it doesn’t mean they’re happy.

Where is the official place to vent concerns that you’re checking? When this was a plugin, did you see the horrible reviews it had then?
It’s at 2.1 and falling.

Again, nothing personal Marius. You seem very nice. But if you guys think people are happy, you’re simply not looking in the right place.

@vegaswill This is more a remark on my response to this review, and to not devalue the original posters thread I’d be happy to discuss this further in a different topic if you’d be so kind?

@juliamc There’s enhancements for those prepared for WordPress 5.0.2 as well (I’m afraid I’ll be saying that a lot this week), the backspace thing I’ve not seen much about, if I could get some details on what kind of blocks they’re working with and what browser/computer setup is being used (with versions preferably) that would help in looking into that bit.

@clorith
Sure. Not sure how you want me to handle it. If you’d like, you can speak about it on my review.

Completely agree with Julia on this

Totally agree with Julia. Marius’ response proves her original statement, WordPress gives zero Fs– even with 3 one-star reviews for every 5-star review, still, he (and seemingly everyone at WordPress) insists that this disastrous rollout is going well. What are they putting in the eggnog at WordPress to cause this madness?

Gutenberg reminds me of Dreamweaver and other overly complex, publisher-oriented tools which deal with blocks and page layout more than content.

I am more a writer, and being able to edit and layout text like you do in texr-processing tools (like Word) is far more practical than arranging blocks.

In the traditional press, writing and publishing are two different jobs, with two different sets of skills and tools. If I had wanted a publisher tool, I would not have used WordPress in the first place. Maybe that’s just me.