Automattic crack down on Plugin Developers for Wordpress

Wordpress crack down on plugin developers wanting to Earn Money from their hard work

I have had to remove the PluginSponsors.com Wordpress plugin from all my Wordpress plugins due to Wordpress threatening the maker of the PluginSponsors.com plugin that they will remove any plugins that utilise his harmless advert with removal from the wordpress repository.

It's not as if Wordpress Plugin developers make much money from their hard work in the first place and people who use them seem to expect 24 hour support for free as well.

Rarely I might get a small donation from one of my plugin users but it is hardly enough to cover the expense of running a cloud based server so in my opinion Wordpress is bang out of order.

Not only have I had numerous blogs on wordpress.com removed without explanation (one I have had returned without any reasoning behind the ban in the first place) but when my first wordpress.com blog was banned the other year I found out just how unreasonable the people at Automattic can be from my email discussions with them.

Not only would refuse to offer proper explanations for their reasoning behind the ban even when I gave them logical counter arguments to anything they mentioned but their intransigence reminded me of a stubborn child demanding more sweeties and refusing to back down until they got them.

Then when logic and reason was too much for them they just ignored my emails leaving me with a banned site that was up until then receiving high amounts of traffic.

Today if I was recommending a free hosted blogging tool to anyone I would tell them to go and check out blogspot with Google.

I know this blog is a blogspot blog and doesn't exactly look much but it was my first foray into blogging and I created it a good few years ago.

Nowadays their blogging software is much better and unlike the free wordpress.com blogs they actually allow you to upload images into the header, show adverts and customise the CSS of your blog for free.

After trying to set up 3 wordpress.com blogs that all had the word "horseracing" in the domain which were all instantly banned (without any kind of reason) I set this one up on blogspot: UK Horse Racing Star without any problems at all.

As you can see it's a lot better looking than this old blog plus it took me less than 20 minutes to style it, upload a header image and set the adverts up.

From now on I think I will be sticking to blogspot as Automattic have shown that they don't care about the plugin developers who spend hours even weeks writing all the thousands of plugins that make their system work.

If they did care they would offer a marketplace like Joomla for developers to sell their hard work instead of cracking down on those plugin authors who want some kind of recompense for their development.

You can read the author of the PluginSponsors.com thoughts on the matter here Automattic Bullies.