Tag: WordPress

Westwhirled

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments
Just ask the guys at the shop how that whole robotic-workforce thing is working out for them. (BRAIN/2018)

A couple weeks back, while trying to discover what exactly the fuck was up with the “Report” button that mysteriously appeared next to “Reply” in comments, I found myself wandering through the bleak, shabby A.I. wilderness, like Ted and the gang in Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.”

I still had a mouth, and I was screaming, albeit virtually. But at whom?

First at bat was a bot, because of course it was. They reign supreme in Lower Supportistan and Customerservicesylvania. This level is tasked with solving the easy problems, which mostly I am not. Ask any publisher.

With the bot dispatched, next up was a WordPress “Happiness Engineer.” Could’ve been from MeatWorld®, maybe ESL with an A.I. assist, but felt slightly off, like the HAL 9000 from “2001: A Space Odyssey.” The greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission, etc. Or maybe the reassuring, yet slightly menacing drone of The President from “I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus.” Occasionally one longs for a Marvin the Paranoid Android from “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”

Still, one never knows. Automattic (with its sidekicks WordPress, Akismet, Jetpack, et al.) has big feet, one in MeatWorld® and the other on the Infobahn. So I dialed back the attitude, got a side of actual help with the platitudes, fired off an email to Akismet support, and went about my business.

Until I got a chipper reply from Akismet’s “Happy Bot” asking whether I was happy too. Ignoring that earned me a followup from — well, I have no idea what. Happy Bot ratted me out to someone, or something, which asked:

Since we haven’t heard back, we’re just checking in to see if the AI-generated response answered all your questions. Our goal is to ensure you get the help you need efficiently. If you require additional support from one of our experts, please reply to this email.

Well. Shit. Lead with your chin, why don’t you? So reply I did, recapitulating the original snark-laden complaint that led me down this digital rabbit hole.

And finally, I got an actual human response.

I think.

Which brings me to this piece in The Atlantic by Charlie Warzel. He writes:

Across so many levels of culture, there’s a feeling of control slipping ever so slightly away. You, me, all of us, whether or not we enjoy or use these tools, are living through a crisis of agency. The agita and paranoia, even the excitement—over AI’s encroachment on work, education, art, and culture—is the by-product of a cultural and technological moment in which humans are sliding into a more passive role in many activities. One way to look at the generative-AI boom is as a massive societal experiment foisted on us by Silicon Valley, the animating question of which is: What is a human for?

There’s much more to it, of course. And you should definitely read the Sam Kriss essay Warzel links to.

The Jetpack “Happiness Engineer” who was my last point of contact regarding this gripe professed humanity. My suspicions about the use of British spellings and semicolons were addressed (my correspondent mentioned having lived in the UK, writing detective novels on the side, and happily claimed semicolon usage as “proof of life”).

And my problem with the “Report” button? It too was addressed, and resolved:

Where things stand now: the developers who built this feature evaluated the results and determined it wasn’t delivering enough value to justify the concerns it raised, including exactly the kind of concerns you described. The Report button has been completely removed. It is no longer appearing on any site, including yours, regardless of your Akismet settings. You don’t need to do anything.

Y’hear that? I don’t need to do anything.

So … I’m happy? I guess. I think so. Yeah, sure, I’m happy.

But isn’t that exactly what they want? (Cue the spooky music. …)

Oh, I ‘reported’ this, a’ight

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments
“Report” your mama. …

A tip of the Mad Dog fedora — the one with the “Press” card in the hatband — to Pat O’B for noticing that, unbeknownst to Your Humble Narrator, WordPress had surreptiously installed a “Report” button next to the “Reply” button in comments.

I’d been having all manner of hassles accessing the goddamn blog this morning, and I suspect that this shameless little attempt at speech-policing may have been the culprit. When the dust finally settled I slapped up the “Don’t touch that dial!” post as a heads-up, Pat commented on same, and hey presto! We were off to the First Amendment races.

First at bat: A.I. When I asked it, “What is this ‘Report’ button that has suddenly become an option in comments on my posts?” WP’s robot buddy told me:

The Report button in comments is a WordPress.com feature that allows readers to flag comments they find inappropriate, spammy, or abusive — it helps with community moderation. It’s shown to logged-in WordPress.com users viewing your posts, and reported comments get reviewed. You can manage your comments at Comments. Want to know more about your comment settings?

Uh, no. Fetch me one of your disgusting Meat-Things® at whom I may shout, and with all possible haste. Be advised that I have my “comment settings” at “phasers on full.”

A Happiness Engineer appeared after a short wait and spake thusly:

We would like to let you know that the report button under comments is a standard feature that now comes with Comment forms, this is so that all of our users can report any content they may find harmful or inappropriate. This doesn’t mean a comment will be deleted for being reported; it will only be flagged and go through our review process.

I threw a flag on that play:

I review comments. Not you. Me. It’s my blog. I can’t begin to tell you how angry this makes me.

I was a professional journalist for 45 years. I began blogging on WordPress ages ago. Everyone who visits my site sees a disclaimer about what to expect. Anyone who acts out gets warned, then blocked.

If WordPress is going to start deciding what is “harmful or inappropriate” on my blog, the blog I pay WP for, based on some undefined “review process,” I will look into taking my tiny little bit of business elsewhere.

The Happiness Engineer divined that my little choo-choo was headed off the rails and ran up the track a ways, waving a red lantern.

When s/he/they jumped back aboard, the story was as follows:

The Report button is part of a recent update to the Akismet spam-protection settings on your site. It’s not a change to how your blog is moderated and no one at WordPress will review or override your moderation decisions. If a comment gets reported through that button, it’s simply flagged to Akismet’s spam system; it doesn’t get removed or hidden from your site.

Uh huh. I’ve edited a story or two in my time, but I usually aimed for clarification, not simply topping it off with, “Just kidding!”

Long story short: If you have a WordPress blog, and this “Report” button appears in your comments, you can remove it in your Dashboard by going to Jetpack > Akismet Anti-Spam and unchecking “Allow visitors to report spam or inappropriate comments.” This bullshit is apparently enabled by default, and fuck you very much, meep meep meep.

I thanked the Happiness Engineer for helping me deny a hall pass to rat finks, stool pigeons and informers, and then added:

Adding this “feature” without a bit of warning is insane. Please feel free to tell Management that.

Come to think of it, if you have an email address for anyone in Management to whom I could express my extreme discontent, that would be helpful. We’re a tiny little group of overeducated First Amendment types, and more than a few of us have WP blogs. We’d like to kick this matter up your food chain if you have someone handy for me to yell at.

The HE promised to “share this internally,” added that my volcanic feedback “shows how this can look very different from what was intended,” and gave me an email address which may or may not be useful: support@akismet.com.

I wonder what Akismet’s robot thinks about this? Probably too busy trolling the Meat-Things’® cloud storage for actionable intelligence. If any.

Don’t touch that dial

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments
“Have you tried turning it off and turning it back on again?”

Is it the State? Is it the Corporation? Aren’t they both the same thing these days? With Jesus as CEO, P.T. Barnum as COO, and Michael Corleone as CFO?

Whatevs. Ye Olde Blogge has been acting out this morning for no good reason, so if all you’ve been getting is the Jolly Roger and a hearty “Stand and deliver!” when you drop by, pay it no mind. It’ll either work or it won’t, just like everything else.

Except the blog don’t cost nothin’.

Housekeeping

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments
Ow. Ow. Ow.

Nothing to see here, folks; move along, move along. I’m just fiddling with the controls to get a handle on how many changes to the posting process WordPress slipped past me whilst I was otherwise occupied.

More as I learn it.

Meanwhile, for any of you who have had comments drift off into the ether, fear not. I’ll begin checking the spam folder a couple-three times a day.

Block editor

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments
Once more around the block.

Some of yis have noticed that commenting via Safari seems to have been restored, all praise to Cthulhu, may Its tentacles grow ever longer.

Last night I heard from a code wrangler at Automattic who advised thusly:

This issue has been forwarded to our development team. I cannot give a time frame on when the issue will be fixed but a workaround is to disable “blocks in comments.”

Huzzah, etc. Remember the last time we had trouble with comments? How it forced me into finally abandoning the Classic Editor for the Block Editor, and changing themes to boot?

Yet now, here we are again. Because not only are comments buggered without the workaround, pending a solution from the development team, it could be that the advanced age of my current “new” theme, Penscratch 2, may be part of the problem.

Thus, a tip of the Mad Dog Safari Hat goes out to our own Steve O’, who suggested as much in — wait for it — comments.

Meanwhile, cheers to Jason the Code Wrangler for kicking this thing up the chain of command and recommending the workaround, which works.

While we await the Wisdom from On High I may slap a new coat of theme on an old blog and ask you Safari users to try commenting there. Steve O’ and Pat O’B have been able to comment on this junkpile, which runs on Independent Publisher 2, but I think that theme is a tad long in the tooth as well.