Rongo

C Reign: I understand this fully. But it’s hogwash (for lack of a better word) to spin the redirection of content links through your own site in order to select related content. More likely, and believable reasons, are as follows:

1. You are embedding backlinks to your own site (redirection) and thus, eliminating any real SEO benefit to the publisher, to the point is a selling point to bother with your plugin. ALL the links point back to your site. At the same time, using publisher’s content to instantly create backlinks to your own site and bolster your own backlink profile.
2. Mining data fills a data need that is used to create media kits for your advertisers, based on aggregate data and usage, collected from your plugin users. This translates to a revenue stream for you. Let’s not kid ourselves, you’re effectively selling data access as your own CEO has stated that is the basic business model.
3. You are adding a second icon link into everyone’s pages that link back to your join page, attempting to convince them to join. Once inside, then you can try to get them to install your extensions, apps, etc. for stuff like delivering advertisements and coupons and such to people who install your extensions. This additional link also creates a wide backlink profile to your join page and the shareaholic site overall.
4. The fact “Related Content” is enabled by default is alarming, at best. At the very least it should be Opt-in with a full disclosure that there is little to no SEO benefit, and that you are collecting data from both publisher’s content and surfers, as well as using their sites to embed links to yourself. Being honest is not a bad thing.

I’m trying not to be critical here. But I think its dishonest for Shareaholic to include other provider’s like nRelate who actually do not embed links into your content, redirecting traffic through them, to inflate their backlinks profile and they determine related content just fine.

To be clear, if Shareaholic stopped the practice of syphoning traffic and embedding multiple backlinks into people’s pages, I think it’s otherwise a great plugin and would welcome it back onto our hosting services (Granted, we’re not that big.. only about 850 WordPress hosted sites using Shareaholic) and a bunch of others that won’t use it. At this point, we’ve discontinued support for it entirely. Opt-in, not Opt-out, is what we expect from legitimate providers. If you’d like to open a dialogue elsewhere to discuss our concerns, and are willing to address them then certainly I/we’d be open to that.

But to spin it like you are simply providing a great thing for free is dishonest. You are most certainly charging a price — traffic, backlinks, upsells to your own service AND people’s data.

ETA: In the interest of disclosure, I do not use nRelate only because I do not place our sites at the mercy of a 3rd party server to deliver images. Unless the images are hosted locally, we will not use it, or any plugin/script, etc that pulls content from 3rd party servers.

Micropat: does it track the blog’s users, as the OP claims (ie. data mining of any kind?)?

Does the plugin store any user data, in aggregate or otherwise, on the AddtoAny, or related, servers?

Or, does the plugin keep all data localized the user’s server, with no user/website data being transmitted, stored, disseminated or tracked on the AddToAny servers or services?

peteratomic: I cannot recommend any of the Related Content / Posts types plugins as we simply do not utilize them. In many cases, they can tax a server’s overhead with numerous queries and use inefficient caching, or they use a third party server, not to mention the data mining going on, to scan content and embed the links via third party server. This puts your page load times at the mercy of the speed of their servers, as well as any congestion between your server and their nearest server. If it’s not stored and cached locally on our own server/database, we will not use it.

That said, you can try looking at the plugin repository here at WordPress itself. There’s a bunch of them listed. http://wordpress.org/plugins/search.php?q=related+posts

If you’re concerned about privacy or data mining of your content, then I would suggest reading the documentation on each plugin for disclosure on the practice. I do know a popular one that’s been around for years is “Yet Another Related Posts Plugin”, but there are indeed others. I have no personal experience with YARPP, so am unfamiliar with pros and cons of it. Certainly I would suggest reading reviews prior to using any plugin for questionable behavior.

Similarly, there are far less intrusive Social Network/Sharing plugins available in the repository.

I know for us, the past few updates, more especially with this latest one, just reeks of data mining and lack of respect for users.

Just some highlights of problems over the past few releases:

1. Enabling “features” by default. It was extremely obnoxious, even arrogant, to assume everyone would want “related” content show up on their posts without “opting” in to try it. It just happened when the plugin update occurred. Poof… new unstyled features added to your posts pages without permission.

2. Moving user’s blog plugin settings into a 3rd party cloud service instead of storing, and respecting, a user’s settings in their local database.

3. Covertly registering users for your own service — without full disclosure — just to share content. Registration mining. Wow, just wow.

There are certainly others. These are simply the three that have dramatically altered our perception of the trustworthiness of dealing with Shareholic going forward. The business model of Shareaholic seems to have switched dramatically this year from being a great social bookmarking plugin to one that is focused on data mining.

There is a real trend to implement features without thoroughly thinking it through then reacting afterwards. This further makes me question the integrity of Shareaholic when items like the ones I, and others have mentioned are implemented.

To that end, we will no longer be supporting Shareaholic going forward across our hosting services, and are replacing 850+ sites with a different, less invasive plugin.

It’s shame as this used to be “the” social networking plugin to use, but there are other social sharing options out there without the perceived data mining/registration mining practices being utilized now — and then arrogantly spun as a good thing. Amazing.

Best of luck with your new found direction. For us, no thanks.

In this version, the managing of posts by author is no longer under the Manage Posts section. That’d be too obvious, I guess.

Go into your dashboard and then look at the far right of the screen, you know, where Settings, Plugins, Users are located (the stuff that is supposed to be little used).

Click on Users. Then you’ll see all of your users listed. At the end of each user’s record (row), you’ll see their number of posts. Click the number and it will filter their posts and redirect you back to, you guessed it, the Management section.

You can still filter by author. You just can’t get to those posts directly from the Manage Menu, you have to go through the User’s menu first and get redirected back to the Manage Posts section.

How’s that for efficient? 🙂

The developers decided to hide the posting date function by default, thus making you add yet another click in order to access one of the options on the new write page.

To schedule a date for the future, or to backdate a new post, look for the tiny link “Edit” aright above the Save button. Click that and the date will expand, making it visible, and editable.