jrivett

Leaving aside the issue of selling data for the purpose of training LLMs, I have additional questions:

1. I’ve been using Jetpack on sites I manage for years. I had no idea the Enhanced Distribution setting even existed until Alexander S. Kunz mentioned it above. I’d like confirmation that data from those sites was gathered (without my approval) for the purpose of selling that data.
2. I would also like to know how long that’s been going on. When did this surreptitious content farming start?
3. Is there any way to know to whom said farmed data was sold?

Yes, I’m aware that operating a publicly-accessible web site means that the site’s content will be indexed, scraped, and may be used in various ways. The difference is that you’re selling it.

Thanks for that. I had never seen the Modules settings before, cleverly hidden in plain sight in a tny link at the bottom of the Jetpack dashboard.

And sure enough, all my sites have Enhanced Distribution enabled, which means their posts have been sold by Automattic for years. I’m disabling Enhanced Distribution on all sites, and I’m going to remove Jetpack completely once I find alternatives to the functions I was using.

Even if they claim they don’t sell data from self-hosted sites to AI companies, I’m sure that was the plan, given that they were already selling it to anyone else who was willing to pay them for it.

People have been warning me about Jetpack for years. I should have listened.

Ditto. Automattic needs to answer questions about whether and how data from self-hosted WordPress sites using Jetpack is being collected and sold. If no answers are provided — and soon — I will stop using Jetpack on all my sites, recommend ceasing its use on all my client sites, and publish my own findings about this.

I can’t really disable all the plugins on the production site, for security reasons. However, I enabled all the plugins on the development site that are enabled on the production site, and the problem did not show up on the development site. I’ll keep working on it, but it doesn’t look promising.

I just realized that a security plugin I’m already using has 2FA support: Wordfence. It doesn’t claim to be compatible with Duo, but it works perfectly in my testing. I no longer require the Duo Two-Factor Authentication plugin.

@ginaw: nothing specific. Just a cynical presumption based on how mergers and acquisitions usually play out. Half of Cisco’s business is acquisitions, and there’s only one reason to be in that line of work. Once acquired, a company and its products and services may be extinguished by various means. Or it may survive intact, but that’s far less common. My least favourite scenario is where a great company making great products is bought, and nothing seems to change initially, but there’s a gradual reduction in quality, then the employees start to bail, and so on. Blecch.

But, like, sorry if my gloominess caused any panic.

Yikes. I hadn’t noticed that the Duo plugin was so out of date. I’ll stop bugging you guys and direct my attention to the Duo plugin developers.

By disabling other plugins, I discovered that there appears to be an incompatibility of some kind between SmartCrawl and the Duo Two-Factor Authentication plugin.

I’m able to reliably reproduce the logout problem if both SmartCrawl and the Duo plugin are enabled, and I save a Post as a Draft.

I need to use the Duo plugin, so I’ve re-enabled that one and disabled SmartCrawl for now.

I’m hoping that I’ve provided enough information that you can reproduce the problem at your end now, and fix the problem if possible.

Should I report this to the Duo developers as well? The source of the problem could be in Duo or SmartCrawl, or even both.

@james-feaver – interesting. I agree completely that using WordPress functionality rather than plugins is a laudable goal, but sadly (for me, anyway), the block editor is an abomination and I avoid it as much as possible. I mean, I certainly understand why a block editor is useful, but in its current state it causes more problems that it solves. I occasionally use it as a quick way to prototype a page, then convert it to HTML and continue with that.

I switched to the HTML summary/details tags and I’m happy with the results. See https://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_summary.asp.

It was necessary to add some style to the summary tag. In the example below, I’m using inline style, but a CSS class could also be used.

<details>
<summary style="cursor: pointer; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.25; color: #333; font-weight: 700;">QUESTION</summary>
ANSWER
</details>

Thanks for the reminder about logged-in admins. I tested it without being logged in and it’s working.

It might be helpful if the plugin added a small comment to pages even when the user is logged in as an admin, saying that the plugin is active and working but no code is being added because the current user is a logged-in admin.

Minimum PHP version for Jetpack still shows as PHP 5.3.

It’s a conflict with Jetpack. Disabling Jetpack fixes the problem. Some of Jetpack’s components are available as separate (‘JP’) add-ons, which may be helpful for some sites.

I’m also getting the warning from Wordfence. Although it’s unlikely that this means the plugin is a security risk, I’d be more comfortable running it if it was tested with the latest WordPress.

Okay, cool. I actually wasn’t planning to use the scan feature right away, so as long as the other BPS features work, I’m good. Anyway, thanks for the help!