Invasive Cross Plugin Spamming

  • You are SPAMMING this plugin onto sites by placing a banner for it at the top of pages in the backend of sites that it is NOT installed on…

    I figured you must be doing this through another plugin that I am using, and because it just started I figured it must be one I updated recently…

    I batch updated a lot of plugins on a bunch of sites via ManageWP in the last couple days, and so had to go into the plugins folder for the site I was exploring this with, via cPanel, to try to figure out via last modified dates where it was coming from… I was lucky, my first guess worked, a plugin that was updated just today, and that is installed on a bunch of my sites…

    When I deactivated the Enhanced Text Widget plugin the banner went away, when I reactivated it the banner returned…

    In my view this is not a very good thing to be doing (to say it very mildly), and it may also be against WordPress policies… I hope so… If it is not it sure should be, because beyond the intrusive and invasive nature of such behavior if it were wide spread amongst plugin developers it would result in a rather cluttered spammy mess just constantly appearing at the top of backend pages… Not good for developers, and way worse for their clients…

    I was curious and followed the banner’s link, which directly installed and activated this plugin and redirected to its settings page on the site I was exploring all this with…

    I found that on top of all the rest, this plugin freezes the scrolling of the admin menu when on its settings page…

    When I went to the Enhanced Text Widget plugin’s WP page I discovered that it had very recently been bought by an entity calling themselves Clever Widgets…

    I also see that there is a very new forum support user called @copydeleteposts who replied as plugin author to an earlier bad (WTF) review of this plugin 2-3 days ago…

    And to pile bad on bad, whatever had been done to the Enhanced Text Widget plugin to bring this spamming about had also made it so that though that plugin could be deactivated, it could NOT be deleted… Deleting hung, and a huge long error message appeared at the top of the plugins page saying so and why… So it became necessary to go in through the cPanel again, of many sites, to delete that plugin once it was deactivated…

    I still have some sites to do this on, after I replace more complex things I am doing with it on those sites, in some cases for some years now…

    And so beside causing me a huge lot of time you have also ruined a very useful Enhanced Text Widget plugin in the process, at least for me, because there is no way I could trust it again, under its new “Clever Widgets” ownership, people who apparently believe it is “clever” to spam sites in this manner…

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Author copydeleteposts

    (@copydeleteposts)

    Thank you for your feedback – this topic is currently being discussed here https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/invasive-cross-plugin-spamming/ (referencing there to avoid duplicate threads).

    Plugin Author copydeleteposts

    (@copydeleteposts)

    Ok, we responded now on the other thread regarding the banner (currently held for moderation). Let’s discuss here the other issues you mention inside the Copy Delete Posts plugin.

    Regarding “plugin freezes the scrolling of the admin menu”: I think we found the issue, we’ll release a new plugin version in the next minutes. Could you please update it then and check if that fixed it? Thank you!

    Plugin Author copydeleteposts

    (@copydeleteposts)

    Thanks @crzyhrse for your message on the other thread. We pinged you in the private slack channel, please have a look.

    The “plugin freezes the scrolling of the admin menu” issue has been fixed with the latest plugin release.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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