[buug] WordPress's Dirty Little Secret

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Zeke Krahlin (pewterbot9 at gmail.com):

> And it was quite difficult tracking down the image map issue via their
> search engine. It seems that if anyone brings this up, the thread is
> immediately removed, or at best, closed.

One of several reasons why I almost never participate in Web forums is 
the high degree of oppressive administration that seems endemic on them, 
including "locking" and removing of inconvenient threads.[1]

The same is true of corporate feedback forums and blogs.  I've seen a
ZDnet columnist, Matt Asay, retroactively re-edit one of his posted
stories about how great badgeware licensing is, after I pointed out in a
comment that his entire story was based on a fundamental factual error.
It turns out that manipulation of posted contents and public comments is 
something of a growth field, in corporate PR.  (Asay was, and I believe
still is, an executive of a badgeware software firm.)

[1] There's also the fact that one cannot very easily keep an archive
copy of one's own posts, unlike with mailing lists and newgroups, the 
incredibly sucky threading model, the lack of killfiles, the
extremely poor presence those forums generally have in Google caches and
in the Internet Archive, and the fact that they have a high statistical
probability of suddenly getting wiped or collapsing.