Here’s an example of how not to do things. WordPress recently updated their commenting system on WordPress.com so that you need to be logged in to comment with a WordPress account. This sounds sensible right, I mean this is how blogger works. However WordPress seem to have missed some important steps in their process, the first being telling their users in a sensible fashion.
The thing is many people comment on WordPress sites, without even realising they’re on WordPress.com and those people use Gravatars. Plenty of people don’t realise that their Gravatar is their WordPress.com account because they’ve never thought of it that way before, with Gravatar having its own site and all that. So what has been happening over the last few days is that people go to a site hosted on WordPress.com and then get told they need to login to post with that account, because the email address is linked to their gravatar, but, there’s no bloody obvious way of logging in and many people don’t get the link between Gravatars and WordPress accounts, they are one and the same in many cases.
I myself ran into this problem whilst trying to post on Inara Pey’s blog. The workaround was to post without using the email address linked to my Gravatar. However, as can been seen from this forum thread on the WordPress forums, a lot of people are confused as to what the bloody hell is going on. Talk about poor design, implementation and communication.
Now I don’t love my Gravatar enough to be that miffed about this, but it does seem a very silly way of going about things, especially when you consider that you can comment on any self hosted WordPress blog, using your Gravatar, without having to login, there’s a big lack of consistency there.
So why have WordPress done this? Well I’ve seen no official confirmation, but The Diary Of Daedalus suggests it may have been because there was a fake Matt Cutts commenting with Matt Cutts details on WordPress hosted blogs. Matt Cutts is the head of Google’s webspam team and writes a lot on SEO for those who may wonder who he is, he’s quite well known in those circles, I’ve heard of him and I’m not into SEO!
The problem here really is a company rushing to do the right thing, and coming up with the wrong solution. There’s nothing to stop a fake Matt Cutts commenting on WordPress blogs that are self hosted, complete with Gravatar. The way the update was announced was poor, the implementation was confusing and the error messages were not intuitive, leaving users confused and then passing that confusion on to bloggers.
As I said earlier, the concept of logging in to comment isn’t unusual, Blogger does this and it’s not a big problem but if you are going to go down this route, for goodness sake make it obvious to end users what they are required to do, with a little forethought and planning this would have been a decent update for WordPress.com hosted blogs, instead it has been a very messy and very sloppy result.