Requires signup to a commercial service?

BTW, I LOVE to click on plugin developers’ paypal and wishlist links

I do, too! And did it many times.
The difference is (and this is crucial!) that in those cases it is your choice and my choice to do it. Nobody forced us by shady tactics…

(I even ordered custom plugin, paid for it and agreed to be released under GPL to the general public, if that matters)

The download Otto42 linked to above worked. But there has been an update of the plugin for WP 2.5 so that it now requires registration even to work (not just to download). The Settings page displays the following message:

“Please register the plugin to activate it. (Registration is free)
In addition you’ll receive complimentary subscription to MaxBlogPress Newsletter which will give you many tips and tricks to attract lots of visitors to your blog.”

What I don’t like is that this condition is not mentioned anywhere. Not on the WP Plugins page, not on the download page of the MBP website itself. I find that bordering on the misleading.

Interesting bit of conversation on the concepts of what constitutes free or not…

But I have a bigger Question…How well does this Plug-in work?

Thanks for any positive feed back

It works very well, if you agree to activate it by registering.

Find this line in the main PHP file:
add_option('mpo_activate', 0);

Change it to this:
add_option('mpo_activate', 2);

No more registration requirement. This change must be made before you activate the plugin. You can deactivate it and reactivate it though.

However, after looking closely at this plugin, I fail to see what it does that’s in any way useful… Most of the major claims on his page are incorrect, and nothing the plugin actually does seems to be particularly useful in the long run. If you leave the default pinging service set to pingomatic, then his claims are totally wrong, as the pingomatic won’t overping the ping services no matter what you do.

As far as pinging on edit goes, you would actually want to ping when editing a post. That’s sort of the whole point of pinging, to notify of changes. WordPress will indeed ping on editing a post, and that’s a good thing. The pinging on future posts problem was fixed a long time ago, and the pinging on new posts is normal.

The plugin just seems rather useless to me.

Edit: Actually, the plugin seems rather dangerous to me. It doesn’t use nonces or any proper security measures, and it’s passing GET parameters around directly without any sanitizing. While it might be safe, it’s useless and uncertain enough that I’d classify it as a security risk.

In reply to Otto42’s last posts about the plugin not being usefull:

That may have been true when you posted, but now the plugin has reporting built in that shows you useful info like whether or not each ping service worked when pinged, in a nice and clear color coded way. Personally with so many services/urls not working any more, i find the plugin worth while just for this.

In regards to the registration:

I’ve already mentioned this before, but in short, i have no problem with it, there plugins are more than worth it (especially some of there other plugins) and if you don’t want to stay subscribed you can just unsubscribe, it really isn’t difficult ??

In fact I’d go as far to say that i’m glad they do it, because this helps them build their business and so they can spend more time making and supporting good quality plugins that i can use. They have to make a living and if their plugins don’t make money for them, there’s only so much free time they can spend on their support and development! A free plugin that also allows the publisher to make money is really the best of both worlds for a pluging user in my mind ?? But well that’s just the way my mind works ?? ??

Also in regards to Spam:

For starters if you agree to someone’s newsletter, than what they sand you is not Spam PERIOD.

Secondly, they don’t send out all that many emails and quite often when they do it’s about updates to there free plugins. Yes they do promote there paid plugins and sometimes other peoples software and services/products, but so far from what i’ve seen it’s been good stuff if you’re interested in that kind of stuff. But seriously you can just unsubscribe if you decide there emails don’t have nay value to you, i personally haven’t been sent anything from them yet that has made me want to unsubscribe, but that’s just me.

Also in regards to the concern over them giving your email address to other people, i really don’t think they’d do that, it just wouldn’t be worth it for the bad name they’d eventually end up with because of it, their newsletter is worth money to them and their not going to do any thing to hurt that, plus i’ve seen no evidence of it since i’ve been subscribed.

Sorry for the long post, i never meant to write this much ??

Oh and sorry about the use of so many smileys, it’s just my style lol

Jayen

Also in regards to the concern over them giving your email address to other people, i really don’t think they’d do that, it just wouldn’t be worth it for the bad name they’d eventually end up with because of it, their newsletter is worth money to them and their not going to do any thing to hurt that, plus i’ve seen no evidence of it since i’ve been subscribed.

and you have no way of knowing whether or not any of that is TRUE. Thats all speculation, and worthless opinion-based crap, frankly.

whooami no i can’t say 100% for sure, but like i said i’ve seen no evidence of it, the email i currently use with them was getting no spam before i signed up and it has continued to get no spam.

All i can tell you is what i do know, they’ve helped me out when i had problems and continued to support their plugins making them better with each upgrade while continuing to develop new ones.

Yes at the end of the day what i said is my opinion, but that opinion is based on my expirience so far of them, take it for what it’s worth.

Jayen