WordPress Still Don’t Quite Get It

Some time ago, I logged a report to WordPress that one of their ‘incentive’ messages for completing and posting a blog post was a highly dismissive Capote quote about Kerouac’s writing of “On the Road” – “That’s not writing, that’s typing”. I felt that this was not the kind of thing that you said to someone as an incentive and, nicely, the people who handled my comment appeared to agree and I haven’t seen it since.

Today they sent me their “Your Year in Review” link which gave me a prettied-up, but not overly informative, set of aggregated statistics for 2012. This one stuck out:

“In 2012, there were 438 new posts, not bad for the first year!”

Not bad? I posted every 20 hours on average across the year and that’s not bad???

I know what they’re trying to say but, seriously, their automated encouragement software needs some work. Of course, the scary question is: what does WordPress consider to be good in terms of posting count? Every 10 hours? Every 5 hours?

Seriously, WordPress people, please start thinking about the throwaway language that you are using to pretend that you know what we’re doing. We are all happily using your site – don’t let bad scripting and automated pseudo-encouragement undo all of the cool things that we can do here!