navienavnav

@syntaxerrorno

https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/my-dashboard-isnt-your-playground/

Case in point. The author’s response really ticked me off from “offering contributions” to the ecosystem. Admittedly, my initial post was very confrontational, yes, but I immediately restored the plugin rating and toned down my words as I deemed that much aggression from my end unnecessary. However, my points were still valid. Doubly, if plugin authors think they are giving us ungrateful users charity free plugins, they should just retire the free versions and release paid versions only.

@alanfuller Kindly tell me how your suggestion to contact the plugin author helped me here?

The current guidelines allow the use of notifications within reason -see https://developer.www.ads-software.com/plugins/wordpress-org/detailed-plugin-guidelines/#11-plugins-should-not-hijack-the-admin-dashboard

I don’t know in what universe asking people for review or advertising pro versions on the dashboard is “within reason.” Do it on your plugin’s setting page. Five plugins do this and you can’t even see the dashboard as everything is moved to the bottom. Not on the dashboard. And if these guidelines are so unenforceable then there is no point in having them. Might as well just allow everything. There are plugins that put entire paragraphs in the dashboard section like its their playground.

What is perhaps more effective is if you ask the plugin support of the ones that offend you to do something to reduce the notices, especially where you see confusion.

I did exactly that. Do you know what happened? The plugin author told me that I am making it a big deal and also suggested that I should not be “cheap” and buy the plugin and “it won’t happen then.” Funnily enough, I did have a license for his plugin and I’ve now abandoned it and actively deter all my client from using it.

Some people have written plugins to hide admin notices too which may help you.

So you’re suggesting that I should install another plugin to fix this? Seriously?

Where review of plugins happens (note it is NOT a good idea to ‘call out’ plugins in plublic places like slack – use teh email for that )

Why? Don’t you see that that is what we are forced to do when contacting the plugin author results in insults? Why is it not a “good idea”, exactly?

We could also just find an alternative, remove the plugin and forget about it. But we take time to post this because we do care about WP and this is our contribution.

I know plugins are worth a lot of work. I also know it takes effort. But you need to understand that it’s NOT okay to take so much space on the dashboard for your plugin. You can put as big a notification as you want on your own plugin’s setting page. You can remind me EVERYTIME how I am an ungrateful freeloader when I use your shortcode but please don’t abuse the dashboard area.

It’s alright to show a smaller notification but a large block containing a bullet point list of content is not okay. This sets up a precedence that quickly becomes an annoyance. I understand that you only show it once but you are missing the point that there are tons of plugins who do that (sometimes it’s not even to advertise the pro version but just to ask for review!) This creates an ecosystem where everyone thinks it’s okay and when we login, we don’t even see the dashboard anymore and everything is pushed down to the bottom. Then we have to click through every single “x” (some of which are sometimes bugged out) before the clutter can be removed.

WordPress has guidelines for this (albeit how strict is open to interpretation) as highlighted here. You have a right to advertise for your free work and that’s okay but please consider adding in a way that it’s atleast collapsed RIGHT ON TOP OF THE DASHBOARD! I mean a line or two is okay but you literally had a bullet list of things right there in the dashboard! (instead of maybe have it collapsed or linked to external site!)

To give you an example, take a look at this. Not my own example but I found it with a quick google search and it perfectly mirrors my example. Now, on TOP of that, imagine a whole BLOCK of text.

Imagine if others start doing the same? Every plugin puts in paragraphs or a bullet-list of features? Yes, we can dismiss them but does that make this behavior acceptable? To me it isn’t. I’ll change the rating to five because I do agree with you on one thing that my anger that day does not justify causing your product harm by muddling its rating and I am, at-least, content that you actually took time to respond.

Thanks and good luck for the future.

P.S. I really don’t know what you mean by “And you tagged your “review” with “abuse”?“
I didn’t even know you could do that ( I noticed just now). So, don’t know what happened there.

• This reply was modified 10 months, 2 weeks ago by navienavnav.
• This reply was modified 10 months, 2 weeks ago by navienavnav.
• This reply was modified 10 months, 2 weeks ago by navienavnav.

HI lenineto!

I am having the exact same problem. Can you give any pointers as to how to identify problematic orders? Like, anything you noticed about the faulty products which might help me find the bad ones, too?

Nope. Not working. And it seems there is no link to the CSS file anymore either but that’s not the problem. The thing is when I am viewing the source code of the final page as viewed on firefox, the troublesome code (at the top) is still right there so regardless of all the changes, the white space is still there.

I think I am going to start from scratch and build up the theme; completely neat and validating at every step. I was just trying to make a short-cut by editing another theme and just “make it work”. The whole code has more than 30 validation errors anyway.

I really thank you keesiemeijer for your precious time and input. If in the future I have a problem, I’ll be sure to reach you. ??

Thanks again.

Here’s the content of header.html :

https://pastebin.com/49S29sYt

I replaced my header.php and index.php with what you provided in the last post but the problem remains.

Thank you so much for your time. I really am grateful!
Awaiting your response.

P.S. I have the same link for every item of the navigation list just for testing purposes. Just in case you were wondering.

I have removed the doctypes in index.php and the header.html file as you mentioned. I don’t exactly know how to use this pastebin thing but I am including what I think I am required to include below :

index.php =>
https://pastebin.com/E4PX4ryg

header.php =>

https://pastebin.com/fX3RCN22

I don’t understand where the code causing the problem is coming from?

Thanks.

Thanks for your quick reply.

What I don’t get is where this extra code above the DOCTYPE is coming from. In the theme, in index.php, there is no such code but it starts from the first doctype itself. Then, where is this four paragraph code above the doctype coming from? Maybe I am missing something? Like some other file adding those codes? Can you give me any hint as to what it can possibly be?

The page in question is this :

https://amritkhare.co.cc/blog/

Content of header.php :

[413 lines of code moderated as per the Forum Rules. Please use the pastebin]

I have basically modified another theme to get the desired result so there might be redundant code in the above files. Sorry about that and many thanks.

hello. thanks for your response. I think it’s working fine now. I took your advice and used your robots.txt content. The old entries that were being shown in google search; i removed them using their URL remover tool in webmasters. It has accepted the robots.txt file and yet shown no errors. Let’s hope when google spider crawls my site again, it doesn’t index everything that should be blocked by robots.txt. I guess then is the only time when we can actually find out if robots.txt is doing it’s job.

Thanks for your really fast and really helpful guidance.

Navneet Khare.

thank you for your reply but will the above code allow the bots to index things other than the specified folders? Are you sure that everything won’t be blocked?