Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress injects Black Friday adverts without permission

Re:Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress injects Black Friday adver... by asadkn on Monday December 02, 2019 @04:43AM (#21681086)

Let's get a few things right since the link is misleading.

- It was an upsell to the Pro version of free plugin. Not some random ad spam.

- The ad was an admin notice - which appear in WordPress on top of every page in the backend Admin Area in what's generally the notification area.

- It's free, GPL, and open source - you know, "No Warranties" and all that.

Grayhat, and not something you should ever do. But not as nefarious as everyone is making it sound like.

WP.org is about freedom, so they're unlikely to restrict it either unless malicious: https://github.com/WordPress/wporg-plugin-guidelines/pull/69...

Being very involved in the WordPress industry, what I find funny is the majority of angry reviews masquerading as victims are from entitled pseudo devs who sell WordPress sites to clients and now they were made to look bad because they had automatic updates enabled while charging their customers for a retainer package with "plugin & themes updates".

How about buying premium version in the first place just as you charged your client for it.

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Re:Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress injects Black Friday adver... by jonny383 on Monday December 02, 2019 @04:51AM (#21681117)

1. It goes directly against the WordPress Detailed Plugin Guidelines to both upsell, and to hijack the admin dashboard [0].

2. If the ad was an admin notice, it didn't look like one. It's a banner image with an outbound tracking link [1].

[0] https://developer.wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-org/detail... [1] https://imgur.com/a/oN7ZFRU

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Re:Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress injects Black Friday adver... by huxflux on Monday December 02, 2019 @06:11AM (#21681471)

Neither could you click the [X], or it was intentional overlapped for people to missclick. Crooks.

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Re:Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress injects Black Friday adver... by jtbayly on Monday December 02, 2019 @08:44AM (#21682214)

It was hard to click, but I managed to click it, and it worked.

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Re:Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress injects Black Friday adver... by asadkn on Monday December 02, 2019 @05:19AM (#21681254)

I believe they played with the semantics here to perhaps get a pass on it not counting as an exact violation of wp.org repository guidelines. There's a proposal to have strict policies and disallow any sort of global ads now but it seems dismissed [1].

It was a dismissable admin notice that looked like an ad and wasn't exactly a tracking link (in the wp.org classifications at least), but a generic marketing campaign link [2].

[1] https://github.com/WordPress/wporg-plugin-guidelines/pull/69... [2] https://github.com/Yoast/wordpress-seo/blob/12.6.1/admin/cla...

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Re:Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress injects Black Friday adver... by aliswe on Monday December 02, 2019 @05:47AM (#21681371)

Dismissable? Didnt the x button lead to a sales page?

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Re:Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress injects Black Friday adver... by jtbayly on Monday December 02, 2019 @08:43AM (#21682212)

Not when I clicked it.

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Re:Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress injects Black Friday adver... by dhimes on Monday December 02, 2019 @09:21AM (#21682503)

It goes directly against the WordPress Detailed Plugin Guidelines to both upsell, and to hijack the admin dashboard [0].

Wow. When I was playing with WP I saw this a ton. It was so annoying that I would have to make a point of disabling the phone line home.

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Re:Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress injects Black Friday adver... by csomar on Monday December 02, 2019 @05:56AM (#21681416)

I used to work in this WP field and I can confirm your story about this industry clients devs. I have one more story:

Back then (maybe still possible now?), if you have a custom plugin named "abc" but which is not uploaded to wp.org repository, I can upload a plugin with the same id "abc" to wp.org, bump the version and WordPress will suggest to update the plugin. This will replace the real plugin with yours. I voiced the problem to the WP guys but they seemed cool with it.

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Re:Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress injects Black Friday adver... by snowwrestler on Monday December 02, 2019 @08:12AM (#21682021)

As someone who has contracted with a bunch of agencies and contractors for Wordpress sites, I have paid for such retainers even though automatic updates are on.

I want automatic updates on; its better for security.

And I want the folks who built the sites available on short notice, so if automatic updates break something, I can get it fixed quickly without trying to do a contract with some random WP dev on short notice.

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Re:Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress injects Black Friday adver... by dhimes on Monday December 02, 2019 @09:23AM (#21682521)

Updates are different from upgrades, though. But if you are saying that we should pay for premium (in order to get the updates, which you are saying we should stay on top of), then I get what you're saying.

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Re:Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress injects Black Friday adver... by saagarjha on Monday December 02, 2019 @05:34AM (#21681312)

> It's free, GPL, and open source - you know, "No Warranties" and all that.

Making something available for free doesn’t absolve you from blame when you make stupid decisions. Well, it does legally, but from a social standpoint it’s still not nice.

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Re:Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress injects Black Friday adver... by sojmq on Monday December 02, 2019 @05:15AM (#21681239)

What makes you think those "entitled pseudo devs" as you call them charged the client for a premium version? You're making an assumption too many.

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