What the WP Engine Dispute Means for Users and the Future of WordPress

Business, Hosting, Open Source, WordPress

The WordPress community is currently witnessing a significant dispute involving WP Engine, Automattic, and Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of WordPress. Recent developments have raised concerns about trademark usage, WordPress’s open-source ethos, and the potential impact on end-users and the broader ecosystem.

At WordCamp US last week, Matt Mullenweg delivered a keynote address covering a range of topics, including contribution ethics, the principles of open source, and corporate commitments within the WordPress ecosystem. Notably, he singled out WP Engine, urging the community to reconsider using their services. This public critique was followed by a post on WordPress.org titled “WP Engine is banned from WordPress.org,” where Matt announced that WP Engine would no longer have access to WordPress.org’s resources.

Behind the scenes, it emerged that Automattic’s CFO, Mark Davies, had communicated to a WP Engine board member that Automattic would “go to war” if WP Engine did not agree to pay a significant percentage of its gross revenues—specifically, 8%—as a licensing fee for using trademarks like “WordPress.” This demand amounts to tens of millions of dollars annually. According to WP Engine’s cease and desist letter, they believe this demand is unfounded, arguing that their use of the WordPress name is legally permissible under established trademark law and consistent with WordPress’s own guidelines.

Adding to the complexity, the WordPress Foundation has filed trademarks for “Managed WordPress” and “Hosted WordPress.” These terms have been widely used in the industry for years to describe specific types of hosting services tailored for WordPress websites. The filing of these trademarks has raised alarms within the community about potential overreach and the future of fair use within the ecosystem.

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CloudMark

CloudMark / CloudFilter.net – Filtering Legitimate Messages and providing no FBL or JMRP.

Business, Email, Hosting, Rants

The current issue.

Over the last few months, the company I work for has been having issues with a company called “CloudMark” blocking the legitimate messages of our users sent to their clients. This has resulted in emails sent to AT&T, T-Mobile, COX Cable, and others to fail. While I’m happy for CloudMark to have expanded and acquired all of these large ISP customers – it hasn’t been a good experience for other service providers trying to reach users protected by CloudMark.

Our clients are having issues sending legitimate email messages to people at AT&T, T-Mobile, COX, and a few others – and we’ve had zero luck working with CloudMark to resolve the issue permanently. While we have managed to get them to unblock us a couple of times – we haven’t had any luck getting any details so we can cure the source instead of putting a bandage over the symptom.

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Trustpilot Content Integrity Team doesn’t know what a “reach around” is.

Business, Rants, Reviews

We received the following obviously fake review:

I will warn you – this paragraph will describe an obscene sexual act – for those that may not know. I am sure some people do not know what a “reach around” is. If you don’t want to read the description skip to the next paragraph. A “reach around”, in the context of this “review”, is when one man masturbates another man while performing anal intercourse with him. This is inherently obscene, no?

You would imagine that someone responsible for reviewing reports of obscene reviews at Trustpilot would be aware or at least spend the 10 seconds it would take to research the term.

It seems that Trustpilot’s Content Integrity Team doesn’t understand this and has informed me, after flagging this review, that it is in fact not obscene. I wonder how over-worked and under-paid Trustpilot Content Integrity Team members are.

It is absolutely terrifying that the people employed to review flagged content, particularly content flagged as obscene, do not understand what they are reviewing well enough to make an appropriate decision in this situation.

Come on Trustpilot, you can do better. Your failure to handle this properly is, in and of itself, obscene.

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A word of warning about Trustpilot Automatic Invitations

Business, Hosting, Rants, Reviews

If you are allowing Trustpilot to invite your users to submit reviews you need to be very careful about who and how Trustpilot sends those invitations. The company that I work for uses Trustpilot to collect reviews from customers and recently an individual that wasn’t a customer and had no experience using our services mistakenly received an invite from Trustpilot. Technically speaking this invitation being sent was due to a minor mistake on our end and that’s one of the main reasons I want to provide this warning – so that you do not make the same mistake.

Trustpilot for a time allowed you to simply send a link to an form to invite customers to write reviews. For a few years this worked fine until they decided that they wanted to handle the review invitations themselves. Somehow they believe that by them sending the invitation instead of you – that it adds legitimacy to the reviews. We actually had a warning on our Trustpilot page for a bit after this change warning that our reviews may not be legitimate due to using manual invitations [i.e. links in our email signatures, new order confirmation emails, etc].

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Hard Boiling Eggs with a Sous Vide Circulator

Miscellaneous

Cooking eggs can be a tricky business, but with a sous vide circulator, you can achieve perfectly hard boiled eggs every time. Here’s how to do it:

  1. Fill a large pot or container with water and attach your sous vide circulator. Set the temperature to 185°F (85°C) and allow the water to come to temperature.
  2. Once the water is at the correct temperature, carefully place large eggs directly in the water. Make sure the eggs are fully submerged.
  3. Cook the eggs for 1 hour and 30 minutes. Less time and the egg yolks will not be cooked through. You will want to add more time for eggs bigger than “Large”.

    I have cooked eggs for as long as 4 hours before with no negative effects.
  4. After 1 hour and 30 minutes, carefully remove the eggs from the water and immediately place them in an ice water bath to cool. This will stop the cooking process and make the eggs easier to peel.
  5. Once the eggs are cool, gently crack the shells and peel them away if you wish to use them immediately. The eggs should be perfectly hard boiled and ready to be used in your favorite recipes.

If you don’t plan to use the eggs immediately, you can store them unpeeled in the refrigerator for up to 7 days. Simply place them in a sealed container and they will be ready to use whenever you need them.

Remember to always use caution when handling hot water and eggs.

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Gravely Pro-Turn Z 52"

Don’t trust Gravely with your money.

Business, Equipment, Miscellaneous, Mowing, Rants, Reviews

You might have read my post about the issue I had with my Gravely Pro-Turn Z 52″ Mower. In the end they offered to send me a hat as compensation for the matter. I asked for a small bottle of touch-up-paint and to my surprise they sent the paint but not the hat.

Well to be honest I wasn’t entirely happy with my experience so I left an honest review of the machine as well as my experience on their site. Here’s an image of the review:

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Gravely Pro-Turn Z 52"

My venture into Commercial Mowing with a Gravely Mower

Business, Equipment, Mowing

Update 06/02/2022: See Part 2 – “Don’t trust Gravely with your money.“

I decided recently that I am going to use some of my free time during the day to start a small business mowing and trimming lawns commercially. I decided that if I was going to do this I should most likely pick up a commercial grade mower – something that will stand the test of time and handle the rigorous use that a commercial mowing business would place on a piece of equipment.

After quite a bit of research I decided to go with Gravely as they’re made in the U.S.A. and Gravely is owned by Ariens. I have had an Ariens snow blower for many years that has been solid and reliable. I have, fortunately, never had to reach out to Ariens for support as the machine simply works and hasn’t given me any issues.

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PHP 8.0!

Hosting, Miscellaneous, Technology

So I’ll start by saying that honestly – I haven’t personally kept in the loop as to what changes and improvements PHP 8.0 brings over 7.X. I would generally assume that it’s similar to what 7.X promised over 6.X etc.

That said – we did just make 8.0 available today on our shared platform and I did move this site, my own personal little rant-hub, over to 8.0. Not that my site is very heavy or anything – but the site does seem nice and quick. Well…. I’m running the LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress too ;).

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WHMCS – Half Implementing Features since 2007

Business, Hosting, Miscellaneous, Rants

I’ve been using WHMCS as a billing and support platform for web hosting since 2007, for over 13 years now, and as near as I can tell WHMCS was founded in 2005. There have been issues over the years where there was unexpected behavior or unexpected changes during upgrades but every software vendor is going to roll out a bug here or there. Even companies with the best quality assurance and testing are bound to have something slip by – and I understand this.

While I do not and have not ever expected perfection and I do understand that bugs can happen sometimes feature implementation is just poor at best or processes are not well thought-out and planned. The most recent instance of this that has caused me problems is Premium Domain Support in WHMCS. This feature was added to WHMCS in version 7.1 which was released over 4 years ago.

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WebHostingTalk.com – Where you can break the rules without breaking the rules.

Hosting, Rants

I have been a member at WebHostingTalk.com, or WHT for short, since December of 2007. I can’t say that I haven’t run afoul of their rules on several occasions since then because I most certainly have. Although I have always personally done my best to make sure I understood and followed the rules there have still been situations where I have mistakenly broken the rules.

In the situations where I accidentally broke a rule it was always very helpful to be able to discuss the incident with the moderation staff in order to get a clearer understanding of what I did wrong and how to avoid it in the future. I’m human and by nature fallible – I will make mistakes – I am not perfect. What is important is that I am able to learn from my mistakes to avoid making them again in the future.

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