This sort of thing frustrates me to no end:
Ms. Bates, your carefully chosen words say volumes.
Not to confuse people with the facts, but not only does Twitter Tools give you fine grain control over your decision to send (or not send) each post to Twitter, it even has a feature that prevents posts from being tweeted if they were published before you installed Twitter Tools. Could there be a bug? Sure (though it’s unlikely that I wouldn’t have heard about it before now), but that’s not really the point is it?
The “don’t tweet old posts” feature was added in version 1.2b1 back in 2008. It was added solely because people requested it; it certainly wasn’t something I needed – just trying to make things better for the WordPress community.
Of course for every group of people you satisfy by adding a feature, you’ll have an equal number of people requesting the opposite:
The joys of building software and giving it away for free.
The irony of course is that I was getting set to start coding on a rewrite of Twitter Tools this evening (since there is a deadline looming), but comments like the ones above really take the wind out of my sails.
The combination of an evolving set of best-practices in WordPress core and extremely high expectations from the WordPress user community has plugin developers in a tough spot these days.
I hired someone this summer for the sole purpose of updating all of our publicly released plugins/themes from the best practices of the time to the best practices in WP 3.0 (along with a few added features, bug fixes and enhancements). That’s the entire job. I expect it to take about 4-6 months to update the ~30 plugins/themes in question.
That’s an expense I decided we should take on for the good of the community. The cost of the developer’s salary alone is way more than the total donations received on all of the plugins (over a 5-6 year period) – not to mention the time spent creating them in the first place, updating them, etc.
There are many things in the WordPress community that are great. There are also many things that need to continue to evolve and improve.
Enough ranting, I’ll go back to working on something more productive…
This post is part of the project: Twitter Tools. View the project timeline for more context on this post.
I would not even bother looking at comments like that one.
People like that do not even realize how long does it take to actually fix some of the issues that come up.
All they do is read the installation ( sometimes not even that ), activate the plugin and that’s it.
You are great the way you are and you should not change.
Dude, those comments to you were totally uncool. Good on you to admit that there might be a bug, but otherwise … :sigh: Hang in there.
I’m glad I only developed one plugin! When I get this sort of comments, I just redirect them to use a different plugin. Not my loss, really.
Keep up the great work, Alex!
My gave is how that Krissi person blamed you on Twitter, but then acknowledged in her weblog post on the isse that Twitter Tools had nothing to do with the problem (and that the problem was her use of beta software, as well).
There are certain users you DON’T want.
And by “gave”, my iPad autocorrection meant “fave”.
Does that sticker on her head say, “loser” or “jerk”? I can’t make it out!
I Think the sticker says both
Let’s try to keep this constructive please. Personal attacks on anyone aren’t likely to help. Thanks in advance…
Know that there are a ton of people that use your plugins and are totally happy; they just don’t speak up and show their gratitude to offset opposite crowd.
Thanks Alex, keep it up. I appreciate TT, even with that one bug … 🙂
I feel your pain Alex, as you might know i’ve got about 25 plugins myself, and unfortunately I don’t have the luxury of hiring people to fix or support them.
People give you crap if something isn’t updated on time yet the total amount of donations I have received would not cover one working week in fees… Ah well, let’s just say we have fun doing it all, don’t we? 🙂
I love your Twitter Tools Plugin! I think it’s still the best WP-Twitter connection out there.
Dude – you rock – you are amazing for putting your time and energy in to all this stuff. I love the plugin!
Was thinking of something to say re complaining users but instead I’ll just say instead
“Thanks Alex, that’s a great plugin and I get a lot of use out of it.”
Weird. That feels better…
I tend to agree. You should just try to ignore comments like that. They do nothing but bring you down. I know that from my plugin work.
Although that’s not to say you should only read positive comments. As long as someone is giving useful tips or ideas, read ’em. But, if all they’re out to do is tear down a plugin developer who does this for *free* out of a love for the community, I say they’re not worth your time.
If they have anything useful to contribute they should be heard. Otherwise, let them go rant in a corner somewhere by themselves.
But, that’s my opinion…
What’s the expression? “Give them a finger, they want the whole hand?”
Something like that. Anyway, I completely understand where you’re coming from… I can only imagine how often you have to deal with those sorts of comments.
Speaking of the OAuth countdown, I hope that in the rewrite, you’ll consider trying to keep compatibility with other Twitter based plugins. It’d be nice if we could all use the same approach for making OAuth enabled systems.
Email me if you want to chat about it.
OAuth would be a good candidate for a Core Plugin, IMHO. I need to update Twitual for OAuth, but I still need to look over the available PHP libraries (or the other option I’ve considered, which is to migrate the backend to python).
Having a general-use OAuth library available for all WordPress plugins would be a boon for lots of projects.
Agreed, and the timing here is terrible as it’s too late to get a feature in for 3.0 and the devs only have 4 weeks before they all have to roll out their own solutions.
I’m working on a social web connectivity framework to rebuild Twitter Tools on, but doubt it will be ready for others to use with enough lead time for them to adopt.
I completely understand where you are coming from.. I have a few plugins I am working on but most of them won’t be free, I just can’t bring myself to devote the time required to do them right, offer support and pop them all out for free.
I do support the wordpress community when I can and as a matter of fact, if there is anything I can do to assist you (hosting as an example) let me know, i have a few dedicated servers around that are barely being used..
Don’t let others negative remarks take the wind out of your sails. I highly doubt most people that complain like that realize that plugins are done out of someone’s free time. I suspect they are non-technical users and wouldn’t know how to fix the code even if they took the time to search for fixes through Google.
It’s a free plugin lovingly created by a guy who could be spending his time doing something else. If you have a problem with the free (as in beer), then pay a fee.
Audi5000…..
This is the two-edged sword of open source.
Someone gets pumped about some software he’s written, and the talk begins in the user community. The downloads come, then the bug fixes and user support.
After revisions and a lot of time without a lot of monetary support, “development remorse” begins to creep in. The next thing we know, the software goes into its senescent phase, and finally we start seeing the last update date begin to recede into the past. Eventually some change comes in an OS or the core software that breaks it permanently, and a once living piece of software is now dead.
This seems to be the curse of open source. In effect, all that free open source software isn’t really free or open. There’s always a cost, and when that cost begins to weigh on the developer, software starts going bye-bye.
Thank you, Alex, for your willingness to help everyone out. Your feelings are understandable.
DLE, you hit the nail on the head… I would be really curious to see what percentage of open source projects end up taking that “slow death” march down the line.. I bet it would be a surprisingly large number.
It would be really nice if there was a community or group thats sole purpose was to cooperatively develop plugins so the burden could be spread around and give some variety and consistency to the mix.
Alex it sucks that this happens but you should know that there are a lot of people who are very happy with your contributions to the WP community and happily use your plugins. The thing is that a bad experience typically makes a lot more noise.
I think there is often a lot of disconnect on the internet when people use these kind of plugins. When working with clients I’ve noticed that many people don’t even realise that there are independent people developing these plugins. It can be very easy for some people to get frustrated when something itsn’t working as you’d expected and unfortunatley in the heat of the moment that’s when you will often get these messages.
Keep up the good work!
Hey Alex, just a quick and hearty “Thank You!” for Twitter Tools and all the other plugins you have contributed to the community over the years.
[…] or 2 of his plugin that were very negative in nature (to say the least).  You can see them on his You’re Welcome post […]