“Writing Options” wording suggestion

Idea for a wording change on the Writing Options page of the Dashboard – what about changing:

“When you publish a new post WordPress can notify site update services.”

to

“When you publish a new post WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services.”

because this makes it a bit clearer to new users that this automatic notification is switched on by default for a new installation and will happen for their very first post. Otherwise the ‘can’ really implies something that WordPress could do but isn’t doing at the moment – I only skim read beyond this point when first exploring the Options, because I just assumed that this would be something I’d have the option of activating later if I wanted to.

Basically even given my (natural, it seems to me, but there’s obviously some debate about this, so never mind!) expectation that software like WordPress wouldn’t do any kind of advertising of my blog without me explicitly asking it to, I think I might have realised a bit sooner (hopefully before any updating happened) that it was in fact doing this by default, if the wording had been different. People like me who are new to blogging and are experimenting can get a really nasty surprise when they see their site stats or find their first ‘blah blah blah’ test post via Feedster. I had no idea this was happening till I saw all these (mysterious, to me) addresses in my site stats – not only that but I started getting referrer spam* instantly on two blogs that are actually behind passwords for only a few friends and family to see. It’s the only thing that’s really infuriated me about WordPress – everything else has been fantastic (and I’m now using it for two blogs and as a simple CMS for two websites).

FF

*Not that I knew what it was then – hunting around to discover what it was was a time-consuming diversion.