I get lots of e-mails regarding my WordPress plugins, running the entire spectrum from:

Thank you so much, this works perfectly and is exactly what I wanted.

to:

Your plugin sucks, it dosen’t work and it doesn’t do what I want.

Thankfully I get much more of the former than the latter. 😉 This is the nature of releasing free software, and almost all of the feedback is valuable.

I also get some interesting feature requests at times. There have been occasional but consistent requests (1-2/month) for two of my plugins: Popularity Contest and Articles.

For Popularity Contest, the question is generally:

I’ve got one post that gets much more traffic than all my others, how do I keep it from being #1 in my popularity list?

Or phrased differently:

This one post keeps coming to the top, even when I manually reset its number of views in the database. Is Popularity Contest broken?

Popularity Contest is just telling you what it sees. If you don’t like the results you’re seeing, don’t shoot the messenger. 🙂

Note: It’s true that search engine indexing has a large influence on page views, so I’m considering adding an additional view score to allow you to set the values for search engine traffic separately from other views.

For Articles, the question is generally:

How do I keep Articles from displaying a post under more than one category?

<sarcasm>Hmm, tough one. Don’t put the post in two categories?</sarcasm>

Seriously, how should the Articles plugin decide which category to put the post under? I assume you put it in multiple categories for a reason… if that reason doesn’t hold up in your Articles list, perhaps you should remove the other categories from the post.

Enough bitching. 🙂

Regardless of how crazy these requests are, I do pay attention to them. And I try to find reasonable ways to satisfy the core request that the people are asking for if I can.

This post is part of the following projects: Articles, Popularity Contest. View the project timelines for more context on this post.