Invasive Cross Plugin Spamming
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You are using this plugin, now that you have very recently purchased it, to SPAM the very new plugin Copy Delete Posts onto sites by placing a banner for it at the top of pages in the backend of sites that has this plugin installed…
When the banner first appeared for an unfamiliar plugin I figured you must be doing this through another plugin I am using, and because it just started I figured it must be one I updated recently…
I batch updated a bunch of plugins on a bunch of sites via ManageWP in the last couple days, and so had to go into the plugins folder for the site I was exploring this with, via cPanel, to try to figure out via last modified dates where it was coming from… I was lucky, my first guess worked, a plugin that was updated just today, and that is installed on a bunch of my sites…
When I deactivated this Enhanced Text Widget plugin the banner went away, when I reactivated it the banner returned…
In my view this is not a very good thing to be doing (to say it very mildly), and it may also be against WordPress policies… I hope so… If it is not it sure should be, because beyond the intrusive and invasive nature of such behavior if it were wide spread amongst plugin developers it would result in a rather cluttered spammy mess just constantly appearing at the top of backend pages… Not good for developers, and way worse for their clients…
I was curious and followed the banner’s link, which directly installed and activated the Copy Delete Posts plugin and redirected to its settings page on the site I was exploring all this with…
I found that on top of all the rest, the Copy Delete Posts plugin freezes the scrolling of the admin menu when on its settings page…
And to pile bad on bad, whatever had been done to this plugin to bring about the banner, it had also made it so that though this plugin can be deactivated, it can NOT be deleted… Deleting hangs, and a huge long error message appears at the top of the plugins page saying so and why… So it became necessary to go in through the cPanel again, of many sites, to delete this plugin once it was deactivated…
I still have some sites to do this on, after I replace more complex things I am doing with this plugin on those sites, in some cases for some years now…
And so beside causing me a lot of time you have also ruined this what was a very useful plugin in the process, ruined it at least for me, because there is no way I could trust it again, under its new “Clever Widgets” ownership, people who apparently believe it is “clever” to spam sites in this manner…
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Thank you for your response. Yes, we rolled back the version now.
As you don’t respond to the question whether the banner was gone after click on “Dismiss”, then our strong assumption is that in your case it wasn’t. This was a bug in an earlier plugin version, which is very annoying, we agree. We heavily apologized it. Please understand that mistakes can happen. We corrected it quickly.
This point is not sidetracking, because the question is really: “How annoying is it for users?”. Non-dismissable banners are super-annoying, and should not be allowed, for sure. We believe it’s very likely that’s this what started the whole thing. If it had been dismissible with one click, then we believe it’s rather unlikely that you would have taken the time to write this all up and spend the time on it.
Now to your core point, whether it should be allowed or not (dismissible banners): As you mention above, you’ve been using the Enhanced Text Widget on many sites, for years. It added a lot of value to you – 100% for free. What you are basically saying is “I profited a lot from this plugin, for free, but when the plugin owners show a banner to point to another plugin they created (which can be dismissed with one click), which happens once every other year or so, then no, that’s too much, I have to give a 1-star rating.”
We believe it’s important to show a bit of appreciation for the value the free plugins added to you, and also to show understanding for the fact that getting traction for a new plugin (no matter how great it is – we believe our new plugin is pretty cool 🙂 is very, very hard. A banner which can be dismissed with one click – that just has to be allowed. If not, then the question is whether there are still any incentives to provide great plugins for free.
Our conclusion is: Yes, those banners should be allowed, they just come at the risk of negative reviews (which hurt A LOT). As mentioned above though, we believe the main issue here was that it wasn’t possible to dismiss the banner.
Also, you mention that it wasn’t clear which plugin placed the banner – that’s a very valid point, we just forgot to mention it (when you’re deep in your own plugins you sometimes get the impression that the world revolves around your plugins and it’s obvious that it’s coming from your plugins 😉 but for normal users it’s not). So we’ll correct that, thank you for pointing to it.
Regarding your other points about the issues in the Copy Delete Posts plugin, we’re very interested in fixing those (it’s a new plugin, so bugs may happen). Let’s clarify those on the pages for the Copy Delete Posts plugin page though, as they belong there. We’ll post there soon.
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