WordPress 1.5.1.3 and Cranky Playground Ladies

Another WordPress upgrade, this time dealing with a security issue which I think first came up in this thread.

The only thing the upgrade appeared to affect was my new captcha. I don’t know why or how, but it worked before I upgraded and now it doesn’t, even after applying the appropriate lines of code to the new wp-comments-post.php file. So I disabled it. Bad-Behavior and Spam-Karma-2 will have to blast spam all by their little lonesomes.

And on a related issue…

The new WordPress forum search hasn’t been as useful to me as the old one, so I now just Google everything I need. In those Googlings I’ve found some sharp and (I think) unfair criticism about a few people who volunteer their expertise on the forums.

It’s been my experience that moderating a forum is thankless, frustrating work. It’s easy to criticize the people in charge, especially when you’ve never given back to the community as they have.

Sure, some volunteers will occasionally do the Cranky Playground Lady thing when they answer a question, especially when said question has been answered many, many times before, or is accusatory or mean.

What I can’t understand is how come so many people have become so thin-skinned about such responses. It’s free software, for crying out loud. The support is FREE. And the people working the forums are…

DOING IT FOR FREE.

I just don’t get the vitriol directed at volunteers. I guess it’s like Mom always said: “Give it away and you’ll get treated like dirt.”

No… wait a minute… I think what she always said was… to not milk cows in order to free them? Or maybe it was about not freeing a dead horse?

I forget.

At any rate, all the critics out there should stop knocking the system and the good-hearted souls holding it together. Offer to help make it a better system instead.

(Like THAT’LL ever happen.)

The rest of us can at least smother the criticism with a little ad revenue by clicking on some ads.

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