Asymptomatic

Habari's community is a sight in action. Two weeks ago, I threatened to make a significant change to the appearance of Habari's back-end admin, and the day afterward, I executed on that threat.

The Monolith design for Habari's admin had been on the slate for a long time, even prior to Michael Heilemann's announcement back in February. We've been striving toward user interface excellence. While there's been a lot of contention by those concerned over what constitutes the best design, I think it's impossible to deny that the design is handsome.

The Monolith source code had lingered in a branch of the source repository awaiting the day when it would be mature enough to merge. It became clear to me that although opening branches of our repository for non-PMC (Primary Management Committee) coders to work on special-interest changes to the core code was good for innovation, it wasn't necessarily as inviting in the spirit of our community-contribution nature.

So after a couple of months progress, and with the blessings of several other PMC members, I made good on the threat of merging the Monolith code to the main branch of the code repository, and over the past two weeks the flurry of contributions has been nothing short of amazing. more

A few of the folks I "hang with" online are/were involved in the 9rules network. I am not a member, but I had tried to become one at one point. I've been following the recent actions of the network with some interest, and thought I would save my thoughts for later as they may be relevant for other communities in which I am involved and have influence. Some background on the current issue is probably in order.

Essentially, many people had joined the network for the purpose of being affiliated with other bloggers who created great content. Their goal was to enrich the web. These folks chose to participate in the network insofar as they posted new, quality content to their own blogs, which were syndicated specifically to the rest of the members. Although the network powers-that-be had created a site for interaction among members, these folks never saw participation in those forums as a requirement to their membership, simply their continued contribution of quality blog content.

Recently, the terms of membership changed so that you must participate in the forums to remain a member. The people who thought that their blogging contribution was enough realized (with different levels of reaction) that they would no longer qualify for membership and asked to withdraw. This accounts for more than half of the people who I relate with who are/were also 9rules members. What's bothersome to me, especially had I been a member, is the process surrounding the change of the terms of service....

There has been a good deal of tumult over a recent TechCrunch post that Mullenweg characterizes as a "hatchet job". There are some crazy folks trolling the comments over there, and although there are many points there I find on either side of the validity line both in the comments and the post itself, I do have my own perspective.

Changing Way brings up an interesting point about anyone being able to improve WordPress' spam prevention. After all, WordPress is GPL-licensed, and so anyone can take the source and improve it and re-release it. Skippy has offered a good argument for why a fork of WordPress would have difficulty materializing. But people seem convinced that anyone can submit code changes to the core software to have them included. While this may be generally possible, I think it's more difficult for the common person than you would imagine, and I think it is an unrealistic belief for this specific feature.

Consider that Automattic runs Akismet, a hosted spam prevention service. Packaged with WordPress is a plugin that uses Akismet, which also requires a WordPress.com API key. If you are a pro blogger (which is one reason why most people don't lend some credence to this) then the service that prevents spam is a commercial service, from which Automattic profits. You can also choose not to use the plugin if you aren't worried about spam or have chosen some other route or protection. Where's the bad here? more

There is so much stuff going on, I'm not even sure where to begin.

If you missed it, yesterday's April Fools Day activities went off quite well. Thanks a bunch to skippy, moeffju, and chrisjdavis for helping out and playing along.

Also, I'd like to apologize to all the WordPress users who found the ForkPress link on their Dashboards yesterday. I was really tired when I entered the post, and I hadn't intended to tag it "WordPress" when I was scanning through the text. I hope it was entertaining just the same....