Yoast Remove

Well Bill, this is a doubtful honor. Ever seen the “screen options” tab in the upper right corner of your install? Click it ?? Now disable the checkbox in front of “Latest news from Yoast”: done. That’s a lot easier than installing a plugin.

Though I understand you don’t want my newsfeed in your dashboard, which I don’t mind, don’t take away the marketing methods from plugin authors who wish to market themselves and their websites. These plugins are given away free of charge, with many many many hours of work put into them, if stuff like this makes it impossible for me to keep doing that, I’ll have to stop supporting those free plugins.

Using screen options only removes it from my dashboard. The issue is the feed is placed on all of the user’s dashboards. Most of my users are non-technical, don’t run a web site, and have no interest in, or use for this feed.

If you had given people a way to disable the feed site wide there would have been no need for this plugin to be written. Face it man you blew the ethical coder test and got smacked for it. So yes indeed the honor is all yours.

I have no problems with you placing your feed on your plugin settings page such as the NextGen gallery does. I have no problems with you including a donation option, or even giving props to your donors. But forcing your feed on every one of my users dashboard is as bad as theme authors including hidden, paid or sponsored links in their themes, afterall they gotta make a living too.

It’s not allowed for themes, and should not be allowed for plugins.

Bill every other person would have emailed me with the request to be able to disable the widget sitewide. I’ve seen no such email from you. Had you emailed me I might have moved it into the plugin itself, as your reasoning is sound. I will consider adding that option into the next version of my plugins.

What bothers me most though is that you have “no problem” with me adding those options, yet you’ve never donated either (AFAIK, I might be wrong there, I hope?). So you’re saying you have users, you’re making money off of this, and yet, you release a plugin like this? Now that’s brutal.

Yep sure is, but as a GPL plugin I could just as easily have forked it, and released my own version without the widget. We could have competed against each other for market share. That my friend would have been brutal. Instead I simply created an option for myself and others to remove an unwanted widget from the dashboards of themselves and their users.

I have had emails from several of your users who thanked me for giving them this option. I don’t dislike you or your plugins, I just wanted it to be a little less annoying. For example when you had two yoast plugins installed you could have had more than one Yoast tweaking websites on your dashboard, Tisk tisk.

I would imagine you have made more money from this than I have, and for that I commend you.

I would like to know why this plugin was removed from the extend site?

There are only a few restrictions:

1. Your plugin must be GPL Compatible.
2. It can’t do anything illegal, or be morally offensive (that’s subjective, we know).
3. You have to actually use the subversion repository we give you in order for your plugin to show up on this site. The WordPress Plugins Directory is a hosting site, not a listing site.

What specifically did my plugin do that violated any of those three restrictions.

Ok, basically someone thought that Mr. Joost de Valk’s name was actually Yoast, and that I named my plugin using his name. I explained things and WordPress restored the plugin to the extend site.

I have added a disclaimer to the description as follows.

This plugin is not associated nor affiliated with “Joost de Valk” nor the “Yoast – Tweaking Websites” website. While this plugin removes his widget from the dashboard of your web site, I encourage each of you to send Mr de Valk a cash donation if you use his plugins.

Also so that Mr de Valk does not think that I am trying to profit off giving people a way of removing his widget from their dashboard, I changed the donation link from www.ads-software.com to his donation page on paypal.

I hope this removes any bad feelings related to my plugin.

Good God, a Yoast Toast plugin!

This might have been useful back before WP offered screen options to easily (and non-technically, I might add) turn such feeds off. Now it just comes across as a needless dig. I hope that Mr. de Valk doesn’t get too upset about this and stop offering his plugins for free.

I doubt that you could ever offer a “competing” plugin considering the sheer time required to not only keep it up to date constantly but deal with the incredible volume of support issues. That’s exactly why I don’t release my plugins or themes. I could never be nearly as diplomatic as he is.

Bill I understand you want to do no harm, but “Yoast” is my main brand, and you ARE harming it, that’s why I requested the plugin be removed. This plugin would very easily start ranking for the term Yoast, which I did not want to happen.

The functionality you want is for a use case I had not considered (to be able to remove it for all users at once), and I WILL add to my base class and all my plugins. I wish you had just emailed me with that request, than we’d not have had this ordeal.

No hard feelings on my side, hope the same goes for you ??

is Yoast trademarked?

/me runs off to look.

Nope.

This plugin would very easily start ranking for the term Yoast, which I did not want to happen. Thats why …

Thats pretty ballsy of you to admit — I wonder how hard it would be to googlebomb that term — that would really dilute your branding. How many people could create a page named Yoast, …

Im saying that as someone who knows better than to air my deepest concerns in a public forum — lest I give someone ideas.

Just saying ..

I’m open like that, do unto others as you would, etc. ??

heh, im way too “not open” to ever .. you know. ??

its like saying, “i hope no-one rips my theme”. with my luck, 2 weeks later, my theme would be up in the themes directory. lol

Well these plugins are GPL anyway… If someone wanted to run with them they’d be free, within the restrictions of the license, to do so…

Tell you what Joost if you put in a switch on the options page of your plugins to disable the feed site wide, feed I will remove my plugin.

Done, in all my plugins, not in the options page of the plugins but on the widget itself, with its own setting, so you only have to do it once and not once for each plugin of mine you have installed.

I’m of two minds on this.

The first is you have admire Joost for finding one more way to promote himself and his services. That’s the kind of thinking that makes people wealthy. I check the Yoast blog out times a week without being reminded by an advisory panel, so the Yoast promo is singing to the choir. Joost has great information and if you haven’t checked it out you might want to every once in a while.

On the other hand the practice could be used by others for nefarious purposes. Think about all those ‘helpful‘ toolbars that out there rewriting affiliate cookies, adding pop-ups and click-bots. It would wise of WordPress to monitor how and by who the dashboard used. When Microsoft allowed developers to throw plug-ins into Outlook it turned one of their best programs (in my opinion)into spam infested billboard.