wordpress popular post plugin blacklisted by godaddy

Thanks for the notice, maciekl. I wasn’t aware of this. I wish they had contacted me first, though.

About alternatives, the only one I could recommend at the time is the Jetpack plugin. I don’t believe they offer the same features as WPP when it comes to customizing the popular list, but it should do the job for the time being.

I’ll try to get in touch with GoDaddy and see if we can get things sorted out.

Thanks, let me know if they agree to unblock the plugin

regards

Maciek

I wish they had notified me too. I woke up this morning to find a hole where your plugin use to be. BTW, loved your plugin, it was working great before the blacklist. Here’s a copy of the Godaddy email and notification in case you haven’t seen it yet.

~~~~~
Your Managed WordPress account, xxxxxx.com, is under constant monitoring to make sure it remains secure and performs exceptionally well. Because of that, we’re emailing to let you know that on November 11, 2014 we removed the following plugins from your account:

wordpress-popular-posts 3.0.3
wordpress-popular-posts 3.0.3

These plugins are on our blacklist (available here) for causing severe issues with either security or performance. Unfortunately, we have permanently backlisted all of these plugins, so you will not be able to use any of them on your Managed WordPress account. You’re better off without them, though – we promise. Everything’s already been taken care of, so there’s nothing you need to do, but we hope you can rest easier knowing we’re looking out for you.

Thanks,
The GoDaddy Managed WordPress Team
~~~~~
Related Posts

These plugins increase database load by using inefficient queries, poor caching, or poor scaling on large sites.
?wordpress-popular-posts

~~~~~
Hope you get this back up and running for Godaddy.

Thanks for sharing the message, @sunshineblaze. That’s very kind of you.

Just sent them a message:

Hi there,

I’m the lead developer of the WordPress Popular Posts plugin. Today, a couple of users have reported that GoDaddy blacklisted it for “causing severe issues with either security or performance”. Since it’s of my interest to provide a solution that works everywhere and for everyone, I’m writing back to ask you guys about the exact details that led to have WPP banned from your service. Hope we can work together to solve this situation as soon as possible.

According to the e-mail I got from GoDaddy, I should expect a response from then within the next 72 hours.

Hi Hector,

I’m also subject to GoDaddy’s ‘BigBrother’ tactics… any word from them at all? Any upside to this do you think? I’m happy to help out with costs in your coding modifications.

Your plugin has been great for me over past couple of years.

Regards
Marty

Hi guys,

The 72 hours deadline passed with no response from them. I sent another message around 24+ hours ago and I’m still waiting for a reply.

Hi Hector. I work at GoDaddy. Let me look into it for you. If you can send me a copy of the email you originally sent in, I’ll have folks take a look. Email is ccarfi [at] godaddy [dot] com.

@marty, what “Big Brother” tactics? How can I help?

Hi @ccarfi,

The original message is posted just two comments above yours, but I’ll resend it to your e-mail anyways.

Thank you in advance for your assistance!

Edit: e-mail sent.

@ccarfi

Fantastic that you are here participating in this forum!

My reference to ‘BigBrother’ was to the way in which GoDaddy went about unilaterally disabling this plugin.

I purchased the GD Managed WP package after proactively checking the GD ‘blacklist’ to determine if any of the plugins I used or proposed to use were on it.

It was not so I went ahead and laid down my money.

GoDaddy could have also made an effort to act proactively by reaching out right here at www.ads-software.com to contact the ‘author’ of whatever plugin is deemed to be ‘troublesome’ (troublesome to GoDaddy it should be made clear and NOT their hosting customers).

I was told not more than 4 hours ago by a GoDaddy CSR, that their was nothing I could do to change the decision about blacklisting this plugin NOR was I allowed to know the reasons or see the evidence supporting said decision.

I clearly understand the philosophy behind GoDaddy’s decisions to lock-out certain plugins but the attitude that seems to entail at GoDaddy is one of inconveniencing their customers first and then seeing what happens… with maybe an apology made in retrospect if deemed necessary.

Anyway rant over! Your assistance in helping Hector keep his followers and your customers happy is now greatly appreciated.

Marty, feedback heard loudly and clearly. Thank you for sharing. We’re always trying to improve and appreciate your candor.

Hector, I received your email and I’ve reached out to our devs to see what I can find out.

More soon…

Hector, it looks like Kurt from GoDaddy (who, incidentally, also developed the P3 performance profiling plugin) reached out via GitHub here back in September: https://github.com/cabrerahector/wordpress-popular-posts/issues/41

Were you able to follow up on that?

Yep, actually I’ve been reading a bit about it although honestly I haven’t had much time to try his suggestion due to the work load I have now (that’s the reason why the issue is still marked as open). Please, tell Kurt I haven’t forgotten about that. I do plan to experiment on it and possibly implement the functionality soon too.

On a kind of related note, the thing about WordPress’ admin-ajax.php (WordPress way to handle AJAX requests for themes and plugins) is that this single file loads the entire WordPress core on each AJAX request, making these calls awfully heavy (specially for large sites). There’s the SHORTINIT alternative, but I read somewhere that’s going to be deprecated on the near future (can’t recall where I read that, though).

Because of that, yesterday I started experimenting with WordPress’ upcoming JSON REST API hoping that it’ll use less resources than WordPress’ admin-ajax.php. Once I’m done building the class that’ll handle it, I’m going to run some performance tests between the current AJAX implementation and the JSON REST API and pick the winning choice.

I was also thinking of dropping the AJAX update method altogether and go back to the old update method (via PHP, using the template_redirect action hook) but that’d break compatibility with caching plugins. It’s a tough call.

Anyways, thanks for the follow-up Christopher. I’m guessing the reason WPP got banned was because of admin-ajax.php then?

P.S.: thanks for the tip about the P3 performance profiling plugin. I’ll take a look into it!

Hi Hector – In talking to our team, the issue our Managed WordPress team noticed in September was that a high traffic site was over-utilizing database resources and was not performing to expectations. Upon further inspection, the frequent database writes and locking caused by the plugin as it’s currently implemented were a contributing factor. I know Kurt reached out with a suggestion on how to address the issue via sampling (the GitHub link above), and it sounds like that fix is still is in your queue. If the sampling algorithm is implemented with solid default values, the plugin can be removed from the blacklist. Woot!

I’ll drop you an email and you can connect up with our team for more information how this plugin is used in our environment so we can get this resolved. Sound reasonable?

Sounds good to me. I’m sure everyone will appreciate that, too ??

Thanks again for your kind help!

You’re very welcome.