Poor marketing behaviours by the developers

Thank you David for your feedback. I can see that this topic is close to your heart, as you also spoke at WCEU about related topics as plugins’ notifications on the WP Admin Dashboard. Therefore, I assume that our chances to convince you otherwise in this forum are slim. However, if the plugin team ever reaches out to us about this, we’ll clearly state our views. Those will include that positions such as yours take even the slightest incentive for plugin creators to create great plugins for free (our plugin has over 200k installs, people love it, and unfortunately hardly ever upgrade to premium because we put too many features into the free plugin; we also contribute A LOT of value with our other products to the WP Community). The feature you mention is especially loved by people. Now being purely opt-in, where people themselves can decide, I wonder what the justification would be to take them their right to decide if they want to use it. No harm is done. Otherwise, they’d lose, we’d lose, it would be bad for everybody. If you don’t like this aspect, you’re free to not use our plugins.

Hi Nick,

Thanks for responding.

Yes, you’re right, this is a topic I’m passionate about, which is why I saw the discussion about this on Twitter. I had it installed on one of my sites and checked it out to see if it was true.

What you are doing is hooking in and adding a promotional feature on top of all plugins listed in WP Admin (search and recommended lists). Plugins are just able to get away with promoting THEIR products first in these lists, but that’s by not touching others.

Let’s imagine a scenario. Another developer has a plugin that does the same thing – i.e. a competitor. You come along and add your button on top of their plugin listing. Does that sound right? It’s no different to placing a banner ad on another plugin’s settings screen (something another developer did and soon found out that’s not acceptable).

The fact that users like this is moot, just is how much time you put into your free product. I’m sure there are lots of features you could add that would break guidelines and be generally horrible but some people would like – that’s not the point at all. If it’s that well received, spin it off to its own plugin – why this is in a plugin about duplicating posts, I have no idea. However, I suspect if you did, it wouldn’t be accepted for the reasons I’ve given above.

positions such as yours take even the slightest incentive for plugin creators to create great plugins for free?

In that case I know you didn’t attend it, because I addressed this very point. I’m not wanting plugins to stop promoting their premium products, but to be considerate. I don’t believe this is so are calling it out.

This is my only reply on this, as my review isn’t changing, but I’m happy that you didn’t ignore it and put your case forward. I hope you’ll reconsider this feature.

At the end of the day, it comes down to how much value is contributed, and how much harm done. If such a feature was disallowed, then real harm is done to both us and other plugin creators (considerably reducing the incentive to create free plugins) as well as end users (again, they love it). This has to be acknowledged. I have the feeling that this is often overlooked e.g., by law makers who want to prohibit everything, focusing only on preventing possible little drawbacks, while completely overlooking the benefits they kill at the same time.

Now, this creation of harm could be justified if it is required to prevent even larger harm. But what could that be? You mention other plugin developers may not like it. Two points about that:

1) The feature is about trying out the respective plugin on a demo server. It’s not about pushing our plugins instead of competitors (it sounded like that in your reply above). And for that, the feedback we got (from plugin creators) was overwhelmingly positive. Many plugin creators use our service to allow the spin-up of their plugins on our demo server. And it makes sense – people are much more willing to try out plugins on a demo site before installing them on their main site. It benefits everybody.

2) With all due respect to everyone involved: At the end of the day, it’s the user of the WordPress site who decides. Basically, you would be saying “No, I don’t allow you to opt-in into a feature that allows you to try out plugins on a demo server”. I’m not sure how this could be justified. The owner of the WordPress site should get the power to decide what’s happening there.