Random Advertisement in dashboard….

  • Resolved Phil Johnston

    (@johnstonphilip)


    8 years, 5 months ago

    Today when I updated the WP Maintenance Mode plugin, an advertisement for a completely unrelated website appeared as a WordPress notice at the top of every dashboard page. It took me a while to track down where the ad was coming from since it didn’t include any text letting me know why the ad was showing.

    After thinking I had been hacked somehow and de-activating all my plugins one-by-one, I finally found the problem plugin was WP Maintenance Mode.

    Developers, DON’T DO THIS. It is extremely poor in taste and the only reason I am not rating this plugin 1 star is to give you (the developers of it) the chance to learn from this and rectify the problem quickly. Unrelated advertisements are not allowed in plugins on the WordPress repo and it is extremely poor form to do so – especially without letting the user know WHO put the advertisement there.

    There are other ways of advertising – this is not one of them. I recommend releasing an update which fixes this ASAP before more low star ratings come in or your plugin is removed from the repo altogether.

    For others wondering, the advertisement reads like this:

    “Announcement: Introducing Codepad.co!

    Codepad is a new developers community who like to share/save code snippets and get/give feedback.
    The website was featured on Product Hunt, Codrops, Designmodo, Speckyboy, Webdesigner Depot, eWebDesign and more!

    You always can follow the best developers on the Codepad developers page.

    Follow the Codepad blog on Medium.”

    Forcing this ad into an unrelated plugin like this does nothing but give this website – and your own plugin – a bad, untrustworthy name. For your own good, please remove this from your plugin immediately.

    I won’t be running this plugin anymore as I can no longer trust your development practices.

    https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/wp-maintenance-mode/

Viewing 16 replies (of 16 total)
  • Moderator Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

    (@ipstenu)

    ?????? Advisor and Activist

    Hi, I’m the rep for the Plugin Review Team.

    Just to be clear, using the update notifications like that is spamming. It’s abusing the system, as it’s totally not related to your product’s update.

    Put a notice on ONLY your admin page, we’ll let it go but (as you can tell) people hate it.

    Make a site-wide useless notice like that and we will close your plugin. Repeating warnings will result in plugin removal.

    Don’t do it.

    People hate ad-spam.

Viewing 16 replies (of 16 total)
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