Look down there, it’s a shark

Wordfence was useful back when Live Traffic wasn’t a hidden option that they keep trying to dissuade an admin from using.

Now they are in monetising mode, so they have hidden Live Traffic by default and keep poking admins to turn it off after updates. Live Traffic was its original compelling feature, but it’s obviously costly for them to run.

But not enough people are buying so they have introduced a new purposefully lame annoyance; the Rules “don’t update” and the warning across the top of the admin screen will not go away for long, every page load in the Admin section and it pops back up unless one digs through the Wordfence Options and finds the semi-hidden button and clicks it.

And of course there’s no handy link in the pointless and persistent message to the button that needs to be clicked, nope; go find it, we dare you, and then when you do you get a message about how this little problem could go away with a paid subscription.

Which means that it’s now targeted toward a kind of person that isn’t like me, the kind of person who still makes excess money right now and is impatient, technically incompetent, and gullible.

And of course that scenario says something about the kind of people that run Wordfence these days, working on introducing irritating gouging and reducing features when lots of folks are homeless, being evicted, unemployed, etc.

But y’know, no one has to run it. Someone sufficiently annoyed can merely go to the Plugins page and Disable Wordfence and notice that their site doesn’t actually fall apart because they did that. Like other securoty plugins which have come and gone. I’ve been using Wordfence for a long time, like a certain TV show about a diner was on for a long time, but then ran its course and got ridiculous at the end.

That’s what’s now being done on my sites when the nag about finding the hidden button comes up. No problem for Wordfence, at least right now, they don’t need my cheapskate attitude now that they’ve gathered data from my sites for years to help build their product.

I’m sure that WF still works well enough, but I really don’t want to be emailed about trivialities despite turning that feature off, locked out of admin occasionally for no reason (again, paying would help fix dis little problem, y’see?), and don’t care for another round of “find the button” and then click away the dire warning about paying protection so my rules update on their own, something that used to happen on its own.

If those warnings are laughably bad, how good is the security?

Good luck water-skiing out there in your leather jacket, Wordfence. Meanwhile, looks like WordPress itself is out there driving the boat with some dufus named Gutenberg navigating.

I’m on terra firma over here, looking for a platform written in something better than PHP (so I don’t need the likes of Wordfence) and not turning itself into a chiseling machine.