[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there, and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You have reached episode number 398 entitled, what just happened? Episode two, an only eventful three months.
It was published on Thursday, the 14th of November, 2024. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and in a few short moments, I will be joined by Rae Morey, so that we can have our chat about the last three months.
But before then a few bits of housekeeping. You may have had your eyes, ears closed over the last few weeks, but, despite that you're still going to know that Black Friday is around the corner. Black Friday in the WordPress space can be very, very busy, indeed. All of the companies are gearing up with their deals, and to make the process of finding things a little bit easier in the run up to Black Friday, I have put together the perfect page for you to find all of the deals.
It's WP Builds.com forward slash black. Once more WP Builds.com forward slash and black. Head there, bookmark that page. At the moment, we've got about 250 deals, but that is sure to go up because the product owners are reaching out to me, well, pretty frequently at the moment. Let's just say that.
You can go there and search and filter deals, so that you can hone in on the exact deal that you want. But also if you are a product owner, please go to that page and click the add a deal button. And I will, for free, add your deal on to that page.
If you would like to sponsor that slot and have your product or deal mentioned, pride of place at the top, then there are some little black cards that you'll see right at the top, and go hit the, get started button over there and you'll see the available options.
So once more WP Builds.com forward slash black. Whether you're in the marketplace for a deal, or whether you have a deal go to that page and check it out.
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Okay. What have we got for you today? Well, if you've been paying attention, I've started a whole tranche of new shows. One, about three months ago, was with Rae Morey. It's called what just happened? And the idea is that we sum up the last three months, each time a new show comes along.
The first show that we did, three months ago, that was the usual smorgasbord of things that happened in the WordPress space. Of course, things have been a bit different in the last three months. There's been a whole lot going on. And so that's what we try to pick apart. We do try to stay away from the drama. We try to keep out of it and be well as journalistic as we can. But we try not to throw any more fuel on the fire. But we also talk about a load of other things towards the end that have nothing to do with the more recent dramas in the WordPress space. And I hope that you enjoy it.
I am joined once more on the podcast by Rae Moray. How are you doing?
[00:04:55] Rae Morey: Hi, Nathan. I'm good.
[00:04:57] Nathan Wrigley: We're gonna pretend like we haven't been talking for about an hour and a half. but, we have, we've been talking for absolute ages because Rae and I started a new show about three months ago and it's called What Just Happened. And the first show was episode number 386. So if you go to wp builds.com, search for episode number 386, you can see the first show there.
And the intention is to do a show every three months and sum up what happens in WordPress. And honestly, I think it's fair to say that both of us thought that, there'd be a few things of note that would happen and then the last three months happened,
[00:05:38] Rae Morey: And absolutely nothing happened. Nothing happened. Of note,
[00:05:42] Nathan Wrigley: Nothing of note
[00:05:43] Rae Morey: nothing's happened.
[00:05:44] Nathan Wrigley: No.
So there's a lot to talk about. first of all, do you wanna just introduce yourself and go on promote your thing? 'cause it's so good.
[00:05:53] Rae Morey: I'm so bad at marketing myself. hi everyone. I'm Rae, Rae Morrie. I published the Repository A, started as a newsletter, about the WordPress space, and now I'm developing it as more of a business. I'm, reporting on what's happening across the ecosystem, but have been very caught up lately in, a lot of the drama, but, looking forward to, to, reporting more of the non-drama in the coming weeks.
[00:06:23] Nathan Wrigley: I am gonna drop the URL because you didn't, it's
[00:06:26] Rae Morey: Oh, yes,
[00:06:26] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, it's the, yeah. Perfect. There you go. I'm gonna say it again though. I'm gonna say it slowly so that everybody pauses the podcast and goes and signs up. It's the repository email, which is nice. the fact that you got the exact string of words that you wanted with an appropriate ending as well.
That's perfect.
[00:06:45] Rae Morey: Yeah, it worked out well. But yes, please visit my website. sign up, subscribe to the RSS, subscribe to, my newsletter, and, yeah, stay up to date with what's happening, across WordPress as well as listening to this podcast.
[00:07:02] Nathan Wrigley: right. Yeah. don't go away that quickly 'cause we've got things to talk about. But yeah, I guess what you really need to say is and subscribe, and smash that bell. But we don't have a bell. We don't have a bell on an email or a podcast, but you get the idea. Honestly, I'm not trying to blow raise trumpet beyond what is appropriate, but it, is.
Proper journalism, in the WordPress space. It's well thought out, curated news, and, appreciate the amount of time that obviously goes into it. These kind of
[00:07:31] Rae Morey: Trying my best.
[00:07:33] Nathan Wrigley: well done. Your best is certainly brilliant, so thank you for doing that. However, the enterprise today is to talk about the last three months.
We're recording this kind of in the middle of November. And if you've been following along in the WordPress space, you'll know that a lot has happened like way more than at any point in WordPress's history. So Rae and I, in the hour or so that we've been talking before this, we've put together a spreadsheet of stories which we think have been important in the last three months.
Just a few little caveats and a few little guardrails really. And I, think honestly, a little bit of this is to inoculate the pair of us from possible outrage or drama. But we're just gonna try and say what we think happened. We're gonna try and stay away from things which will cause people to be upset with us.
If you are upset with us for that posture, then I have nothing to say to You we're,
[00:08:26] Rae Morey: what we could possibly do other than, this, podcast is called What Just Happened.
[00:08:32] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, that's
[00:08:33] Rae Morey: We are just gonna talk about what
[00:08:34] Nathan Wrigley: We're just gonna talk about what happened and just say it like that. when truck. Not trying to take any sides or anything like that, here we go. So let's crack on, shall we? The first thing that we wanna mention, I guess if you are in the WordPress space, you'll know what's going on.
we've just called this one WordCamp us. Shall I take this one or do you want to take this one?
[00:08:57] Rae Morey: Yeah, you were there.
[00:08:59] Nathan Wrigley: I was.
[00:08:59] Rae Morey: I was off swanning around in Europe on holiday and wasn't able to go, so I'll leave it with, you. But I guess what, I'm really interested to hear about, I think Word Camp us, the drama's obviously, crowded out what actually happened with the event.
I, I was looking forward to hearing more about what happened there, but haven't been able to, so I'm really keen to hear your take especially about, the showcase day, which I've heard good things about.
[00:09:32] Nathan Wrigley: let's put the drama to one side for a minute. and I'm not saying this to make it seem better. It was hands down the best WordPress event I've been to. the, center was magnificent. The accommodation in, for many people, I know, not for everybody, but the, accommodation was literally.
Like 10 meters away. So there was a lot of ca capacity to I don't know, relax at the same time as go to the venue. And it was just really well attended. It was this huge venue, so there was loads of space to hang out and lots of space to talk and, I love that hallway track thing. I go there in order to carry out interviews.
So I, sadly I'm unable to attend many of the sessions, but the ones that I did go to were just brilliant. And the extra day, the showcase day, I think went down really well. I attended a few of those, but it was more go in, have a look around and come out. But it was a really nice idea. And the idea there was to just do something a bit different, like we know WordPress events are trying to do, and it was a full day of just showing off, what's possible with WordPress.
So that was interesting. The, yeah, genuinely a really great event and, The next one, the next word, camp us is in the exact same place. So assuming that everything is okay and the event takes place, I think it has the capacity to be really good. Again, the, obvious bit here that we're alluding to is where the, where it all just became different.
And that was realistically probably the last 45 minutes of the entire event. And in that 45 minutes, Matt Mullenweg typically at the end of these flagship events, Matt occupies one of the very last things that's going on, and he came onto the stage, and you probably know the story by now, and there was this whole thing about, WP Engine, and we don't probably need to go into the detail of what he said, but that whole thing happened and, you're right, I think it did upend the.
The re the reporting on the event. I imagine there were a lot of people who had a lot of things that they were going to go home and pen on their blog or their newsletter or what have you, and then it all became that. And realistically, it, that is a lot of what's happened since then has been consumed around really, that was the fulcrum around which everything turned.
That was the moment, which Matt, went on stage, mentioned WP Engine, and then it all kicked off from there. But the important thing in there was the event itself was absolutely brilliant. Really, good. And like I said, if it's happening again next year, I'll definitely try to be there.
[00:12:25] Rae Morey: That sounds amazing. Hats off to the organizers. I'm a bit disappointed that they probably didn't get the kudos that they deserved. and Portland is such an amazing city. Did you get to check out much of it?
[00:12:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there was quite a lot of opportunity to do that. And it, is an amazing city. It went off into the sort of hills in the background, hung out with the usual suspects. You, know who I mean. and it was, really great. okay, so that happened. And then the second story on our, list of things here is all about automatic, and Matt subsequently let's, should we say it's falling out.
I don't really know what the right word is, but the, conversation quickly moved away from a conversation on a stage to one in which lawyers got involved. I confess, I've not really kept a track of that story. I think I, don't know, I think you've kept a, track of it in a much more detail than I have.
[00:13:25] Rae Morey: Oh man. Yeah, I have.
[00:13:27] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Do you want to, do you wanna just crack open how it developed from there then?
[00:13:31] Rae Morey: Okay, so, the day, was it the 20th of, September?
[00:13:38] Nathan Wrigley: I think something
[00:13:39] Rae Morey: that was the day before the keynote. Matt published a, Matt Mully published a post, calling out, WP Engine's lack of contributions to WordPress. fair enough. I think a lot of people might agree that they could, have been contributing more, could be.
and the following day, Matt delivered his, he was scheduled to, to give a Q and a at, at Word camp us. And, but got up on stage to do a presentation and I think a lot of people didn't know what to expect. Were a bit surprised when he said it was gonna give something spicy. I wasn't there.
I think you were
[00:14:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I was in the room. Yeah, it definitely, was a, there was definite, an immediate sense of something's changed here. Yeah, definitely. Yep.
[00:14:35] Rae Morey: Yeah. And then went on to, yeah, he spoke about, WP Engine, like contributions, the changes to the software, and, attacks against, silver Lake and the WP Engines private equity firm. And, and that all led to everything that's happened since, Matt's, public attacks against, WP Engine, their subsequent, legal action that they've taken against, Matt and, automatic, they've, they're suing, alleging abuse of power, extortion and anti-competitive behavior amongst other things.
yeah, there's been a lot of fallout in the past few weeks we've really seen the landscape of WordPress. Of the WordPress ecosystem change?
[00:15:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think it, it was like a really pivotal moment and in that when you attend these events that there isn't usually something which happens, which, which, how to describe it, the temperature of the room changed, if There was just at that moment, at, and Matt. I think you said the word spicy.
Matt, if he prefaced that presentation with the word spicy, then clearly knew that this was gonna be reasonably seismic and you could definitely sense something in the room. you could definitely sense that there were people who were thinking, gosh, this is new. This is interesting. And some of the questions that came in the subsequent q and a, reflected that quite a few of the questions were about the, normal stuff of WordPress.
but quite a few of the questions were prompted by what had just been said. And so it Snowballed from there. and what we've done on our spreadsheet, we've picked, I don't know, it's probably about seven or eight things which have happened subsequently, which we feel are significant.
We probably could have mentioned a dozen more, but these are just the ones that we think represent, just the, more major things. So should we go to line five where we, talk about the fact that Yeah. Automattic.
[00:17:00] Rae Morey: it's crazy that, it's only been what, like six, seven weeks since this hap, since Word Camp us. All of these things have happened. I guess one of the, one of the things that happened was, all of these people, so automatic offered a buyout to, and first buyout to staff, basically telling them, if, you disagree with, Matt's direction and the actions he's taking, you can leave.
And they were offered, $30,000 or six months of pay. but they had to, they only had, I think a couple of day, I'm not sure exactly how many days
[00:17:49] Nathan Wrigley: I think it was, I
[00:17:49] Rae Morey: had until
[00:17:50] Nathan Wrigley: it was 48 hours or certainly there was a, moment in time, wasn't it, like midnight in a couple of days
or
[00:17:56] Rae Morey: yeah. So they, had a specific amount of time that they had to consider this, and then they had to leave and they were shut out from automatic and, Yeah. And then, and then had to leave. And I guess the biggest name to leave was Jose Hayden, the former, director, executive director of WordPress.
I personally found that quite shocking that she left. and, I thought, she was, she's a pretty amazing person and she did a hell of a job, wrangling the community.
[00:18:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I
[00:18:38] Rae Morey: there's been a lot of change in the community in recent years and hats off to her for doing such a great job.
[00:18:43] Nathan Wrigley: I think that's absolutely true, isn't it? she really did do a tremendous job. So maybe we should pause here just for a moment and, acknowledge that, that really was quite a breathtaking run. I think wrangling a community like ours. On the face of it, you, have this impression that the WordPress community is, really aligned, all got the same goals.
We, we obviously know that's not the case, but I think Gier has some, incredibly unique characteristics which enable her to read the room, summarize the room, and then get people who are in fairly strong disagreement to somehow. Compromise and she's done that over and over again. An amazing communicator, basically.
And she, will be sorely missed. I think it's fair to say, um, lost, something there. but also, as you said, about 160, I think you've wrote down the number, 159 people took up the offer to, to leave automatic, gotta say that offer was pretty, pretty amazing
[00:19:56] Rae Morey: Generous. Very generous. Yeah.
[00:19:59] Nathan Wrigley: think it was $30,000 or six, maybe it was all six months salary, whichever was the greater. So depending on where you were in the salary scale, you could pick this one or this one. And the terms and conditions were pretty clear. you're gonna have to make the decision in a very short amount of time and it will immediately have consequences.
It's not and then you'll work your two weeks or month or whatever it may be. It was an instantaneous thing. and 159 people took the offer, which obviously, if automatic is full of people who are internally fighting, that's not good. so allowing people to go under those terms was interesting.
And I think there was a subsequent offer as well, wasn't there? And I think
[00:20:48] Rae Morey: There was a subsequent offer, but that was specifically to, draw out someone who was leaking to the media,
[00:20:56] Nathan Wrigley: really.
[00:20:56] Rae Morey: knows? Yeah. Yeah. So this all, Matt mentioned, this in, his TechCrunch interview
[00:21:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I remember that, but I didn't realize the whole thing was around that. Oh
[00:21:10] Rae Morey: Yeah.
[00:21:10] Nathan Wrigley: Sorry. Carry on. I
[00:21:11] Rae Morey: draw out someone who was leaking.
And so the terms were basically automattic were given four hours to accept, a buyout offer of nine months pay. Imagine that if you're on a good wicket. but, yeah, as, Matt said in his interview, the person, who'd been leaking, confessed within the first hour and, and yeah, and they left.
[00:21:43] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. I. Oh, it's, that is interesting. Gosh. It's got it's got all the hallmarks of a, of a thriller book. This, doesn't it genuinely from, the outside. If you were looking from the outside in, obviously we're on the inside looking in, but if you are on the outside looking in, genuinely there's a, there's, maybe a movie in here, as yet on undecided,
[00:22:04] Rae Morey: Who's gonna play Matt?
[00:22:06] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Interesting. okay. So that, happened and then I think subsequently a bit of context. You said that Matt had done an interview with TechCrunch. I think it was there, that I heard Matt say, and again, caveats around this, if I misheard or misremembered or just dreamt it up. I'm sorry. I think Matt said that there was. In his mind, automatic might have grown too quickly. anyway, so it was restoring some kind of numerical balance in what was appropriate for the company. But I imagine also those 159 people didn't come out of all the same thing. I imagine they were dotted around the company. So lots of job postings will need to be filled to, to map to the bits that are now not being, not being the work that's not being carried out.
gosh, I suspect automatic is a slightly different place than it was a little while ago,
[00:22:59] Rae Morey: Yeah, I, can't remember exactly how he, how, how he phrased it in the interview, but he did say that, he did think the company could operate with even less staff.
[00:23:09] Nathan Wrigley: right.
[00:23:11] Rae Morey: that's a lovely, thing to hear if you're currently working there. but yeah, in interesting to see that, they've trimmed down and, but they're also, hiring at the moment.
[00:23:25] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. Yeah, Obviously hiring to fulfill the roles that have been, taken away. Okay. Let's move on to line six. We're about, we're roughly halfway through our bit at the beginning. We will, I promise you get onto other things, but there's too much to say here. Okay. So the next one is what, I think you coined the term checkbox gate, which was where?
wordpress.org. now it, it will be curious, I think maybe there's something lawyery going on here. I don't know, but I wonder. Yeah. I don't really know, but yeah,
[00:24:03] Rae Morey: Yeah.
[00:24:04] Nathan Wrigley: wordpress.org put a checkbox, on the, login screen for WordPress org. I also, I think also, didn't they forcibly. expire everybody's, user session.
So basically you had to log in. I think everybody was logged out, so you, couldn't carry on with the cookies that had you already logged in. And in order to access wordpress.org, you had to tick a box, which I dunno if it's still there actually. Have you
[00:24:31] Rae Morey: It is still there 'cause I logged in today.
[00:24:33] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay.
[00:24:35] Rae Morey: But, yeah. So it basically asks people to confirm that they are not affiliated with WP Engine, financially or in any way. Was it financial anyway,
[00:24:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Something financial or otherwise I think was the
[00:24:50] Rae Morey: Yes. Yeah.
[00:24:52] Nathan Wrigley: but, Um,
[00:24:53] Rae Morey: but yeah. But, and then, WordPress Slack was, in integrated more into WordPress, logging into Slack has been integrated with wordpress.org.
So
[00:25:05] Nathan Wrigley: there's a single sign on now, isn't there? So
[00:25:07] Rae Morey: Yeah. Single sign
[00:25:08] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, if you want to access the WordPress Slack previously, you could just go to, slack and log in the normal way, click a link in an email or what have you. But now you are redirected to wordpress.org. I think I've got this right.
You redirected to wordpress.org. You sign in over there, obviously tick that box. And in that way, you have confirmed your user. You are using wordpress.org and the Slack is ensuring that you've basically said that you, you're not affiliated financially or otherwise with WP Engine. I think this. the, wording of that was confusing to some people.
'cause there, there was a few tweets floating around at the time where people were saying, does it mean, for example, I don't know, I have a client who, has a, site on WP Engine, does this, am I caught up in that? And there was a little bit of confusion, but I guess in the end everybody figured out one way or the other.
But it also prompted a few people to, or I, don't know if prompted is the right word. A few people at that point obviously did have that affiliation. And so it, I guess had the intended consequence. Anybody that was affiliated financially or otherwise with WP Engine, had to be, had to remove themselves with from the Slack or wordpress.org or make the decision to, to just tick the box regardless of what it said and carry on as normally, even if they were affiliated.
[00:26:41] Rae Morey: Yeah, it's been interesting to see, interesting is not the right word. It's been, it's been a bit sad seeing how this has impacted the community, because the, the initial discussion in, WordPress, slack when, it became apparent that this login box had been added. there were a lot of people, I think it's had over 200 comments.
Colin Stewart's comment, asking Matt to clarify. The check checkbox and the legal implications and all of that. It's had over 200 comments. But, it, it was just confusing for a lot of people who didn't understand why it'd been added. the had very late a vague legal implications if people checked it. and then it's had the, it's had consequences. it was, really sad to see, unsure about whether to tick this box or not. So there was a, accessibility, the, WordPress access accessibility team.
[00:27:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,
[00:27:57] Rae Morey: they, had their meeting. They can, they canceled their meetings initially because their two reps, weren't sure about logging in.
I think one, I think they're able, one of them's able to log in now. He decided, screw it. I'm gonna log in. I think, but then there've been other contributors, Andy Frain who, who's been involved for a long time, and he, I've written, about him too. He takes on a lot of the, he's known for taking on a lot of the complex kind of projects and features in WordPress.
[00:28:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:28:33] Rae Morey: he's not, he doesn't shy away from doing the, dirty work.
[00:28:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. 'cause he is not that busy, Andy. because he's, it's, not like he's a, oh, I don't know, a trauma surgeon or anything like that in his spare time.
We'll get onto him later 'cause there's another story
[00:28:49] Rae Morey: We will.
[00:28:50] Nathan Wrigley: which we'll drop at the end. But yeah, so some.
[00:28:53] Rae Morey: so he's put his contributions on whole, on, hiatus as he's put it, because he doesn't wanna have to go to a lawyer to clarify whether he can check the box. He just wants to get on with his life. So he's stepping back.
[00:29:06] Nathan Wrigley: And so the interesting thing trying to be distanced from it is watching. the, two sides. So WP Engine on one side and automatic and whatever else you want to call that on the other side. just watching over the course of weeks, just get further and further apart, with, obviously, Lawyers getting involved, tweets going out, blog posts being written, websites going up, and so on. And that's, that for me is utterly unique in my time in WordPress. Now, I've only been here since about 2014, something like that. But I've never seen this kind of bifurcation of the community and a lot of, I honestly, I wouldn't recommend hanging out too much on X because, if you go down a rabbit hole, it's easy to stay there.
But the, polemic nature of the conversation was pretty extreme. we were seeing people who I suspect six months ago were probably gonna be very cordial to one another. fairly openly hostile to one another and almost if you believe that, then wow. And then the rebuttal, hang on.
You believe that? Wow. And so it has gone, I think it's calmed down a bit on the social networks. More recently, I've certainly inoculated myself from it. It does seem to quieten
[00:30:31] Rae Morey: seems to have calmed down a bit in the past
week. but as you mentioned before, the trick is to look at lots of cat pictures to, to impact the algorithm.
[00:30:43] Nathan Wrigley: This is my advice for anybody caught in a Twitter storm is just go and for 10 minutes look at cat pictures and the algorithm is very good at assuming you are now a absolute fan of cats and that's all you're gonna get. So do that.
[00:30:58] Rae Morey: good tip.
[00:31:00] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so moving on line seven on our spreadsheet is, is, so we mentioned that Joseph Ser, Hayden Choi had left as the executive director of the WordPress project.
That obviously left a gap, which has been filled by somebody I had not heard of, but obviously has a lot of experience. Mary Hubbard or Hubbard, I don't quite know how you say that, do you, do you, know a lot about Mary.
[00:31:29] Rae Morey: I don't, I've only, I only know what's been, Published about her online. So she is no stranger to WordPress. she used to work for Automatic from, 2020 to 2023. she worked as a GM of the WooCommerce marketplace,
[00:31:49] Nathan Wrigley: Gosh. Wow.
[00:31:50] Rae Morey: on to, A CPO, a Chief Product Officer role for wordpress.com. So she's obviously very familiar with WordPress.
and, but more recently she's been, head of TikTok Americas.
[00:32:05] Nathan Wrigley: Wow.
[00:32:06] Rae Morey: a bit of a jump from, TikTok to, to WordPress. yeah, what's interesting about Mary is that she has a very different background to Josepha.
So Joseph's background was a lot in, Marketing and business analysis before she joined automatic.
And, whereas it was, whereas Mary, she comes from a product development background. she has extensive experience in e-commerce. she's previously worked at eBay, Walmart Assurance, true rating. She's worked for some big businesses in e-commerce. So it'd be interesting to see how she takes that experience and applies it in her role as, executive director in WordPress.
Now. She's, she was supposed to start on the, 21st of October. so she's obviously been in her role, I guess She's started automatic and done the usual,
[00:33:10] Nathan Wrigley: The two week rotation
in
[00:33:12] Rae Morey: the rotation in support. So hopefully we'll start hearing from her soon. I have, I, maybe I'm not in the right slack channels on WordPress, slack, but.
Waiting for her to pop up and, make her mark.
[00:33:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, like we said, big shoes to fill from Joseph's point of view, but that is interesting. I hadn't in, I hadn't really got a gauge of the roles previously, but that's lots, isn't it? It's loads and really varied
[00:33:36] Rae Morey: She's very, obviously very talented,
[00:33:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,
[00:33:41] Rae Morey: and very experienced,
[00:33:43] Nathan Wrigley: but obviously there'll be this interesting new jigsaw piece, which is, I guess there'll be some element of listening to the community, trying to heal the community, trying to figure out the path forward so that, some kind of reunification can happen.
all the while. Of course, the, the lawyers are in the background doing their thing, and, we didn't actually mention that, did we? I think the, the date for the lawyers to finally start to face off in court is, later this month, right? Isn't it? The 29th of November or something like that?
[00:34:16] Rae Morey: Yep. Yep. I think we were coming to that. No, hang on. Where are we? Yes, there's so many. Just looking at our spreadsheet. So many things to cover off. yeah, WP Engine has, filed an injunction, preliminary injunction and, the hearing for that as well as, in the court case that comes up on November 26th.
not very long until this is back in court. this is gonna be in court and, yeah, it'd be interesting to see how that pans out, whether the injunction is granted or not.
[00:34:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it will be. Honestly, that for me is gonna be really interesting because. I think letting the lawyers do their thing will be easy, easier for us to pause as a community. 'cause it will just be, the lawyers fighting out and obviously the law, hopefully will win and whatever is decided is what's decided and then we can all look at it and go, okay, that's how it is.
But, I get the feeling that there's gonna be some interesting things. I imagine that both sides have got a fair arsenal of things up their sleeves and it does feel as if it's got the potential to develop into a kind of taking the gloves off, really getting into the nitty gritty and all sorts of things coming out.
It does look like it could be a fairly, explosive couple of weeks. You are gonna be busy, Rae, really busy following that.
[00:35:51] Rae Morey: man. Yeah. it'd be interesting to see what, we've seen a lot that's come out in these, the. documents that, the documents that have been filed with the court so far, there's been some really, the lawyers are very good, writers. It's been interesting reading through these court documents and seeing how they, craft their arguments.
but this, yeah, so I am not sure if this, hearing is just, to decide on the injunction or if there'll be more heard because the, actual case from what I've seen so far, someone correct me if I'm wrong, it's not really scheduled to, to go before the judge until March. So this is gonna be pretty drawn out.
[00:36:39] Nathan Wrigley: Like a preliminary kind of hearing. Okay. Yeah, I, know less about law than almost anything, so it's, I'm just gonna watch and listen to the, likes of other podcasters and, the work that you do to figure out what's going on. Anyway, that's coming up in the near future. Sorry, segued a little bit away from Mary Hubbard there, but we'll draw a line onto that.
should we go to line eight? 'cause we skipped over that one. This is, this is a bit of more positive news actually. and it is that actually should we. Shall we push that one down? Let's put that one into the previous, the next section where we step away. 'cause that's not entirely related to the ongoing drama.
now the new line eight, we've got as automatic under fire leaks, ultimatums, drama continued. Was there anything particular in that which caught your attention? if you've been online, you've probably seen the shots being fired on social media. The lines being drawn in the sand between previous community members who were probably more cordial than they might be at the moment.
Anything in there?
[00:37:43] Rae Morey: I guess, it's been interesting to see how the, this WordPress drama, as we keep calling it, has, it's, gone outside of the community. It's not just the community talking about itself, but the mainstream, tech outlets are picking up what's happening and following it pretty closely now.
we had TechCrunch rep, reporting on it initially and The Verge. And, Samantha Cole from 4 0 4 Media has been, reporting as well, and she had, a scoop about the, environment of paranoia and fear inside automatic, speaking to some insiders there. Don't really wanna comment too much on this one, but, she reported about some things that have been happening within the company there, and if anyone's interested, do check out the reporting at 4 0 4 Media.
They, do some great stuff. and then, in the same week, Ivan, I'm not sure how to pronounce his last name, Maita from TechCrunch. He's been following a lot of this WordPress news lately too, and, he reported on, the, how plans for a, trademark crackdown at Automatic, but you started back in January.
so yeah, it's interesting to see these, these big outlets, in particular TechCrunch, how they're covering this news.
[00:39:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. TechCrunch keep coming back, don't they? OO over in the uk. Even the BB. C. Got hold of it. So it was on the BBC website, which honestly like I never expected anything from WordPress to ever reach the BBC website. No, truthfully, that's just not something I would've imagined. But it obviously grew to, to proportions bit.
it wasn't like it was the headline or anything like that, but it was there, there was a story buried about, it all. okay, moving on. So what have we got here? We've got, can we add anything with this line? We've got WP Engine files, injunction. Have we done that already?
[00:39:57] Rae Morey: talked about it. So let's move on.
[00:39:59] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, in which case we're talking about a website which has popped up called the, I think it's called the WP Engine Tracker, or we've got the URL here.
It's called, the URL is WordPress engine tracker.com. And, this is a website, which at the minute there's a big number on it. It stands at 18,350. And correct me if I'm wrong, this is, it's, it comes from automatic says, so at the bottom actually, it says an automatic thing in the jig. This is, so that number 18,350 is in some way getting information about how many websites have moved away from WP Engine to elsewhere.
It's not, there's no one destination, but it's another destination. curious that website exists, but also curious as to where the, wonder how they know, wonder how they know where these, websites have ended up.
[00:40:52] Rae Morey: Yeah. Remains a mystery. Apparently it's publicly accessible. I've put questions to automatic to ask how it's publicly accessible. They haven't got back to me. I've published a story about this. basically automatic has, they published his site last week. it has a counter that keeps increasing every day, that reveals how many sites have left WP Engine since, Matt Mully began his war against, WP Engine in September.
so it, so what this site does, it attracts, sites that have left WP Engine. It highlights, the top destinations that these sites are going into at the moment, at least. a lot of sites are going Pressable, blue Host Site Ground, several other hosts. and it also, has a link in the bottom asking people to contribute at GitHub, which is interesting.
But, What a lot of people have taken issue with is that it includes a downloadable CSV list of the thousands of sites that have left, WP Engine. So if you download the CSV file, it just has a big list, all the domains that have left. it was interesting on over the weekend when I had a look at this, the site just had a really basic dark design, and it's been, it's got like a new design now.
[00:42:22] Nathan Wrigley: Wow. Yeah. Okay.
[00:42:23] Rae Morey: and, yeah, it's, it's, I guess it's, going into to Matt Mullenweg's arguments about, about websites leaving WP Engine. So in, in a lot of his interviews in recent weeks, he's talked about, WP Engine being a distressed, he's described the company's being in distress, losing customers. he, talked a lot about this in his interview with, Connie Lozo, at TechCrunch Disrupt.
and he stated some pretty, he said some pretty strong things. in that interview. he said that, to quote him, he said, we are at war with them. We are going to go brick by brick and take us and other companies take every one of their customers. and then he went on to say they could end all this tomorrow if they wanna negotiate.
yeah, he's, I guess, visually showing how, automatic and other, web posts are taking customers away brick by brick. it's obviously had, there's been a lot of negative, feedback about this site going up. there's been some ballsy people who've, commented on GitHub, arguing about the purpose of the site, arguing about, trademark issues and all that kind of thing.
It was interesting. Over the weekend, cloud, cloud flare, placed a suspected phishing, warning on the site before it was taken off.
[00:44:06] Nathan Wrigley: Hmm.
[00:44:07] Rae Morey: people reported it. There's someone else who's, purchased the domain for, w wp engine tracker.com and they've put a notice on there asking Matt to please stop.
yeah, look, this is just, the latest volley in the war, which. Seems to be pretty one-sided at the moment. I'm not really seeing wp throwing too many volleys. I reached out to both sides for comment on the story that I wrote and, automatic hasn't replied to me, but WP Engine said that they've asked automatic to shut the site down and, yeah, they just said they're looking forward to their hearing on the 26th about the injunction.
[00:44:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so we'll link to that in the show notes as well. And you can see it there at the moment, eight 18,350. I, as I said, I dunno how that information is arrived at, but it certainly does seem like. Quite a large number. if you transfer that number into dollars per month, that's, Quite a significant amount.
[00:45:14] Rae Morey: yeah. I looked at built with data and they apparently, WP Engine currently hosts about 598,000 live websites. 1.2, about 1.2 million domains redirect to those sites. So
[00:45:32] Nathan Wrigley: It's this is three or 4% of the, something like that. A quick back of
[00:45:38] Rae Morey: very quick with the math.
[00:45:39] Nathan Wrigley: I dunno if what I did was correct, but I, okay. Whatever it is, it's, it's, some, it's not, it's by no means everything but it's also not nothing. so anyway, we'll link to that in the show notes.
And lastly, because we've spent way more time on this than we intended, just the one which I think for many people was the big news, amongst all the other big pieces of news was the.org repository. the a CF, so the free version of Advanced Custom Fields, which is owned by WP Engine, that has now been.
Renamed as secure custom fields and the, I think the, central point of concern for people who thought this was an unusual thing to do was that it also brought the slug with it. So rather than it being a, a fork in the traditional sense of the word, where you would, I don't know.
Take a copy of that code, do things to it, and then pop it somewhere else, give it a different name. Obviously the name has changed, but my understanding is that if you'd visited the URL for advanced custom fields before it happened, and then use the exact same URL after it had happened, you would arrive at the same destination rather than it going into two different destinations.
This of course, meant that the advanced custom fields plugins in people's WordPress websites when they updated that plugin, if they had, for example, automatic updates on, then you would get a new, named plugin called Secure Custom Fields, and, you can, you only have to look at the tweets that were going around at the time.
that was, a, lot for some people to, take on board. Anything to add or should we move on?
[00:47:45] Rae Morey: I don't know what to add to that. We've, been talking about this drama for almost 45 minutes now. It's just a lot to unpack.
[00:47:53] Nathan Wrigley: we thought we'd
[00:47:54] Rae Morey: this was definitely,
[00:47:55] Nathan Wrigley: this, didn't we?
[00:47:57] Rae Morey: you, said 15 minutes.
[00:47:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. What a lie that
[00:48:00] Rae Morey: generous. look, this, as you said, this was the, the line in the sand for a lot of people. I think this got people pretty angry.
yeah. I don't know what I can add to that.
[00:48:17] Nathan Wrigley: no. it, yeah. Go back, have a look. You can see, ask, I guess ask other people what their thoughts are, but it, definitely, was something kind of new. and it definitely, it, it was well within the, within, In, the position that we're at, the moment where you've got two companies and they are really through the lawyers going at each other, this kind of unexpected collateral damage whilst, no, nobody foresaw any of this.
And some of it as it happens feels so peculiar. And then you look back and it's just one other thing. And as, as we said, I think at this point we just have to let the lawyers, take it on and, yeah. okay. I'm gonna draw a line onto that. That
[00:49:11] Rae Morey: Oh, no, I do have something to add. No. Oh, no, I do. I think, while the lawyers can take care of it, what it, signaled for a lot of people, particularly plug in developers, was, that a plugin could be taken over in the repository. And I think that has scared a lot of people who run plugin businesses.
we've seen in recent weeks, a few developers take their plugins out of the repo. Notably paid memberships pro has been taken out of the repo that was, I think added in there in 2011, and they've just taken it out. they're now, self-hosting their, the free version of their plugin. They, their core plugin along with the premium version of their plugin.
And, yeah, they've been, I've interviewed Jason. They've been talking about, taking out the repo for a little while, but seeing, a CF taken over, expedited that. yeah, and I should also mention, if I'm gonna mention that it's, I should also mention that, Jason did have a run in which I reported, with Matt Mullen, who, threatened in a message, to, takeover paid memberships pro.
Yeah, it's been, it's, been interesting reporting that, Jason's obviously, he's gone to lawyers and said, I don't want to deal with Matt. He's not replying to Matt's messages. Matt has said, when I've asked him for comment that it may have been misunderstanding, that he's tried to talk to Jason, Jason not talking to him.
who knows what really happened there.
[00:51:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think in summary, we've just had the most unusual few months, haven't we? So we've charted a fair amount of that and, realistically, if you'd have asked me three months ago what the possible. Worst case thing would've been, I definitely wouldn't have predicted this. it's been so seismic, so transformational.
it's changed the community in the short term for, beyond recognition. However, for my part, it does appear that the people that I know at least do just want the lawyers to figure this stuff out now, and they want to get on running their business, running their plugin, selling their theme, hosting their YouTube channel, whatever it may be.
and they just wanna concentrate on the, on the future now and hope that you know it, that the contributors carry on and the events carry on and all this kind of stuff. I guess only time will tell, I think after 47 minutes. Let's draw a line under this and let's mention briefly is all we can do now, sadly, some of the other things which have happened in the WordPress space and one of them is your thing.
Gender equality in
[00:52:27] Rae Morey: talk about this.
[00:52:29] Nathan Wrigley: go on. I'm gonna wind you up and let you go.
[00:52:32] Rae Morey: I look, I admit I was pretty devastated that we didn't get to talk about this a lot more. So during WordCamp us, WP includes launched the, gender equality and WordPress businesses white paper, which I contributed to as a writer. we ran a survey earlier in the year for about four months where we asked people about their view views on, gender equality in the WordPress space.
the report's pretty eyeopening. it talks about the systemic barriers facing women who work with WordPress, including both a broken rung and a glass ceiling. So it's really hard for some women to get their foot in the door with companies, but then they hit a glass ceiling where there aren't that many women who work in some of the top roles, particularly on boards.
it's, yeah, it's, hard for women to get into senior roles and, also, one of the eye-opening things that I came across was that nearly a, quarter of women experience harassment, bullying, or discrimination at work, compared to just 4% of men. So to think that so many women are facing that, is quite, shocking, I think.
And, something that we really wanted to do with this report was, help individuals and companies figure out how to deal with this. the report does include a lot of actionable steps our business businesses can take to diversify their workforces. consider gender equality. But, unfortunately this report's been really overshadowed by, a lot of what's going on, and, when things quiet down a bit, I really wanna dig into some of the stories that were featured in this report.
And, yeah, I, just wanna say hats off to, Shavonne who, put a lot of herself into, making this report happen. Francesca and Dee at WP includes a fantastic team that are really helping to elevate, women into, roles in senior, positions. So, watch this space. I'm, really looking forward to digging into this a bit more in a very positive way.
We wanna educate the community and help people overcome some of the issues we found in the report.
[00:55:02] Nathan Wrigley: the link will be in the, show notes as all the other things, but if you're just listening to this and you wanna quickly Google it on your car system, gender equality in WordPress business report is the title of that piece. And so you can go and check that out for yourself. it sounds that, I don't want to add too much commentary to that largely because of the time, but that does sound fairly.
maddening. to put it bluntly, I do wonder how, okay, this, huh. How to phrase this without sounding idiotic. Does WordPress, although those statistics are horrible, does WordPress do favorably compared to other industries? Is that a poorly worded question? Forgive me.
[00:55:49] Rae Morey: No, I think, no, that's a definitely a valid question. I, don't have data on that, I'm not really sure. But, anecdotally. particularly speaking to people like, Miriam Schwab, Marika Vander Act, who do, attend other conferences and things, and I guess the women who attend conferences in other, tech spaces.
The, feedback is that the WordPress community is way more open to women. I think tech generally, is, a bit of a, sexist industry and but this is just what we've found in the WordPress space from people who responded to our survey. so yeah, there's a bit of work to do. We are doing better, I'd like to say, than other, tech spaces.
But,
[00:56:47] Nathan Wrigley: Room for improvement. Still though a lot.
[00:56:49] Rae Morey: yeah, definitely.
[00:56:51] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Go and check it out. It'll be in the show notes. let's just whiz through a couple of these, 'cause some of these we can do really quickly. Rae, good news, we mentioned it earlier, but we didn't get into it. The, plugin review team, I don't think, I dunno if they're still on Xero, but they might still be a, close to zero for the longest time.
It took months and months to get your plugin reviewed and into the repository. the other repository not raise repository and now it's down to zero with a wait time of about seven days. And a lot of this is to do with, training different people, but also there's now some, interesting automated processes that have to be stepped through in order to get your review.
your plugin reviewed by humans. There's a lot of automation in the way of that which helps identify stuff which previously humans had to do. So that's quite nice.
[00:57:42] Rae Morey: Yeah. There's a really, there's a really great team of plugin reviewers who, stepped in after, mark Epstein, stepped down after her decade long run, reviewing plugins. the team has, developed the plugin check plugin. So that's a tool that, has been designed to automate the initial review process and now that, rather than the team going through finding the same issues over and over again.
And, imagine that it would be, it must've been such a Groundhog Day thing for Michael before, but, now a lot of that is automated. and they've released the plugin to the, plugin repository. and yeah, it's sped up reviews and made their job, easier, at least initially. so yeah, hats off to the team.
What a, what an effort. It took a year for them to get it down to zero.
[00:58:39] Nathan Wrigley: Amazing, And
[00:58:40] Rae Morey: effort. Yeah.
[00:58:41] Nathan Wrigley: for somebody like me, it's just a, it's just another news item. 'cause I don't release plugins into the repository. But the infuriation of knowing that you've put your blood, sweat, and tears into something and then you've got this artificial hurdle of nine months or six months or whatever it once was, to wait before anybody else can realistically use it.
Obviously there were other ways of distributing it, but harder to be found. That's nice. Down to a sort of seven day process now. Okay, next one then, is the Kim Parel Memorial Scholarship has been expanded to Word Camp Europe and Word Camp Asia. This is, a scholarship which has some caveats around it in terms of who can apply for it, but it was to enable people to, meet the cost of attending Word Camp us and, Kim Passel, a notable contributor to the WordPress project.
There's this memorial scholarship and it now has been extended to, word Camp Europe and Word Camp Asia, so you can apply for it to attend those events. I, reading it, I couldn't quite work out whether there were three scholarships now, one for us, one for Asia, and one for Europe, or whether it meant that there was still one scholarship, but it was, you could apply for it for any of the three events.
But anyway, nice to have that kind
[00:59:53] Rae Morey: I think it's for all three. when you go click through to the website, you can apply separately to WordCamp Asia, and there's a separate application for Word Camp Europe. So they're the ones that are coming up. I think this is a, this is fantastic. so this was actually, an agenda item discussed by the, WordPress Foundation Board recently, in their first ever minutes.
That was a pub that's been published. they discussed, The, I can't remember her name, the most recent Kim Passel scholarship recipient.
[01:00:28] Nathan Wrigley: oh
[01:00:30] Rae Morey: she went on to do some fantastic work with Learn WordPress, in addition to attending Word Camp us. apologies, I've forgotten your name. And I met her during the media briefer.
You would've been there too.
[01:00:44] Nathan Wrigley: dear. Oh, I'm no help.
[01:00:47] Rae Morey: anyway, the, foundation board noted that, she just done a fantastic job and that was impedes for, extending the, scholarship to the other work camp. So this is a really great win for the community and for women, for getting more women to, to word camps.
[01:01:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Nice. Nice. I think I'm gonna miss this one that I'm highlighting. I'll just miss that one over and we'll just go to the next one if that's all right with you. so this is, To say that a, nice website, a, relent, i, describe it as relentless, relentlessly positive, website called Hero Press has reached the, fine, mature vintage age of 10 years.
They've got a decade under their belts. if you wanna, if you, I don't know if you're feeling a bit glom in the WordPress space, which you may be at the moment. This is your antidote. This is how you're gonna go and inoculate yourself, from the fallout. it's just story after story of people from all over the world whose lives have been turned upside down, usually for, for the better, by WordPress.
And they've managed to reach 10 years. I had, tofa, tofa Roja on the podcast talking about it, and just to say that they are in a round of. they're trying to get some sponsorship to keep the whole project going. And having reached 10 years and affected a lot of people with their commentary, I think it would be, remiss of me not to mention that they would welcome your donation.
So if you go to the Hero Press website, you can, help them out by donating over there. Anything to add?
[01:02:22] Rae Morey: No, just agree with all of that. tofa has been doing an incredible job running this website for so long, 10 years. That's a long time to be running this website, chasing people to, to write an essay. I can't think of anything harder. So I, recently contributed my own essay. Tofa had been chasing me for months.
And, I was relieved when I saw that, the longest amount of time that he's chased someone down has been nine months. I
[01:02:56] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. You were,
[01:02:57] Rae Morey: I didn't take that
[01:02:58] Nathan Wrigley: it wasn't you.
[01:02:58] Rae Morey: I take that long,
[01:02:59] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah, that's good.
[01:03:00] Rae Morey: but, it, it's an amazing website. there are so many stories. I, recently came across Tonya Mo's essay and oh my God, if anyone hasn't read that, wow.
What a story. it's such a great website for learning, people in the community that you might not know. Much about and hearing their actual story. Yeah. Or reading their story. Sometimes they read them out. Out.
[01:03:27] Nathan Wrigley: I think one of the nice things as well is that it, it isn't the usual, necessarily the usual cavalcade of people. This is very often people who you, have never heard of, and from parts of the world that you maybe have never been as well, and sometimes written in languages that you cannot read.
[01:03:44] Rae Morey: Yeah.
[01:03:44] Nathan Wrigley: in their own native script as well, which is really nice.
it's. This is nice opening up to those people. So that's great. Well done Tofa and anybody that's touched that project. But, go and donate if you possibly can. So here we are, line 19. We'll just do this really quick. I'm gonna link to the, new WordPress design system, Figma Library. If you are creating a product in the WordPress space and you want it to look word pressy, I think there's a high chance that you are using a design tool like Figma.
Everybody's using Figma these days and previously there was no exact way of modeling the WordPress ui ux. And now there is, and you can download it for free and it will enable you to, replicate the word pressy things and, it's quite nice. Anything or should we go to Andy again?
[01:04:35] Rae Morey: Yeah. Nice. Move on. it's, I'm really, it's great to see the Figma library, but yeah,
[01:04:41] Nathan Wrigley: It is what it is. Yeah. Okay. okay. a Andy Frain, we mentioned him before. the, context of this is a podcast episode that I did with him at WordCamp us. but the, it's the subject matter that's of interest here. And this is to say that a, big thing I think, happened in WordPress in the recent past, and that is to say that, automatic, updates can now be automatically rolled back.
So if you've enabled automatic updates, that's brilliant. What a great piece of technology that is. It enables people to basically set their WordPress website on autopilot. Great for security and things like that. But of course, an update might break something. And in the past, that's it, just broke your website and you'd have to manually go and figure out what the problem was.
Now the WordPress call will figure out which of the plugins broke and then roll back to the previous safe version. Now that. That sounds so straightforward. Andy, in the podcast episode will enlighten you as to why that isn't straightforward, and the answer is that man is, has the patience of a saint, basically.
To be able to pull this off and it work and it looks like it is basically working in almost a hundred percent of cases is pretty amazing. Just making your WordPress website just that one step more automated and secure. Great. Anything on that?
[01:06:06] Rae Morey: what a fantastic effort.
[01:06:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[01:06:08] Rae Morey: I hope Andy comes back.
[01:06:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah, that's right. yeah, 'cause like I said, he's not got enough on his plate with trauma surgery or anything like that. but it wasn't just Andy. He mentions in the podcast the names of, other people who have, were significantly knee deep in the weeds of that.
[01:06:25] Rae Morey: Hmm.
[01:06:26] Nathan Wrigley: another thing to mention then, this is our penultimate one.
Another thing to mention is that, data views has received a lot of attention in the, recent three months. And that is, I think probably the easiest way to describe it is if you go into something like the post list in WordPress, it's pretty. Pretty uninteresting in there. You've got the title, you've got, I don't know, some meta descriptions, things like that.
You might have some SEO injected by a plugin or something, but you don't really have a lot of control over what's in there. you can switch things on and switch things off, but that's about it. Now you will be able to increasingly, as a non-technical WordPress user, add things into places like that on your WordPress website.
So where there's data listed out in, a view, you'll be able to add things like extra columns. I dunno, real estate website comes to mind. You might wanna put the number of bedrooms in that list, or the price of the house or whatever it may be. All of that's gonna be added in and just, again, just makes, for something that non-technical people can do and it'll spread to all different parts of the new, WordPress interface as well.
So I just thought that was worth mentioning 'cause it's cool.
[01:07:32] Rae Morey: And it's laying the groundwork for, the WordPress, dashboard or WordPress admin redesign too, which is exciting. Very exciting.
[01:07:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. So that's nice. And then our final one, not so nice. Maybe don't know. something I'd never heard of until this week. Festing a Vault, festing a Vault is, what you might call a GPL Club. And I'm not sure, I, think, on legal grounds, taking a WordPress plugin and, forking it is completely fine.
This company though, have been, they've got into a battle, a legal battle with automatic, which has resulted in the, that site being shot down. the person responsible for that site. going out and setting up some sort of crowdfunding campaign to raise enough money to get some lawyers.
I did a show on Monday with a panel of people, and several of those had plugins and they didn't have a lot of sympathy for Festing Vault, let's put it that way. the idea that they were charging for other people's work, whilst it may be, maybe it's legal, it's, it doesn't sound particularly moral, but this is not going after them for that reason.
I think they're going after them for trademark violation and things like that, so it's, yeah. Any, anyway,
[01:09:03] Rae Morey: Yeah, so ing a vault. Has been running since about 20 19, 20 20, and unexpectedly shut down in September. and they just placed a notice on the website saying that, automatic had issued as cease and desist and, they were forced to shut down their site. And then, this case is, playing out in the, in the Dutch, legal system.
So I've been trying to track this one down, but then, it was, it was heard in the Amsterdam District Court, last, last month. And, then the, a summary judgment was finally published last week. So it was really interesting to see what actually happened in September. So automatic. This is really, so these are tactics I guess, against these kind of people, but automatic, petition the court for what, what's called an ex parte court order. So it's a court order where they don't hear from the other person. So Martin Group, who is the founder and CEO of Festing, a vault, he, didn't get a chance to, have his say, automatic, put in a, court order to, to temporal to shut down his website.
and then the following, and, sorry, I should add to that, with the daily penalty of 25,000 euros, if didn't comply,
[01:10:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's a lot.
[01:10:34] Rae Morey: automatic. Up to $500,000 to, oh, sorry, euros. the following day, automatic also successfully petitioned the court to seize, gru's personal assets, including his half in, the ownership of his home, his, car.
And they were able to freeze his bank accounts. Yeah, so it was really interesting that the court, noted that, automatic hadn't even been touched to resolve the matter. And, yeah, he just woke up one day and he couldn't access his bank accounts and his, car was, it was almost taken away. They didn't end up taking his car away.
But, it's been fascinating seeing, updates now on the first, in your website. Where Groot is, he's revealing more of himself. He's always been a bit of a mystery spammer, right? and he's been, spamming the community for several years and, now it's come out that he's a, he used to be a psychologist before he started this website.
He suffers some kind of, he, he's, he suffers some kind of muscular, progressive muscular disease. And this is what led him to start this website. He wasn't able to go into work during the pandemic. He, running this website allows him to make money with his limited mobility. yeah, so, this is going back to court, in, at the end of this month on, November 27th.
So the day after. WP Engines injunction hearing, so that when it goes back to court, yeah. So when this goes back to court, it'll be, for a decision on whether to lift the, the ex parte ban on the ing, website. So that means allowing the website to, to be up and running again. and, Gru saying, GRU seems to be pretty confident he's announced on his website that he'll be up and running again in mid-December.
yeah. Watch this space, to see
[01:12:52] Nathan Wrigley: Time will tell. Time will tell. Okay. I think we've got through it. We managed it. it's definitely been, a little bit longer than we anticipated. Hopefully you, stuck with us. When I do the preamble for the show, I will make absolutely sure to mention the time at which the drama bit ends and the normal stuff begin so people can skip through it if they wish to do that.
But, what an unprecedented episode. I, am imagining that the next episode that we do in about three months time will probably be full of equally interesting things, probably from courtrooms and places like that. But, thank you, Rae for sifting through that with me. I really appreciate
[01:13:30] Rae Morey: thank you.
[01:13:31] Nathan Wrigley: to take in.
[01:13:33] Rae Morey: There has been the, past, gosh, not even the past three months, the past six to seven weeks have been a lot, and unprecedented. So it's, yes. Thank you. This is.
[01:13:46] Nathan Wrigley: gonna test the resilience of our community for sure, and we'll definitely see the WordPress community looking different in some way, shape, or form. But yeah, thank you for stepping through all of those articles. As I said, there'll be links in the show notes to everything that we talked about and maybe even some links to some of the stuff that we decided not to talk about.
Thank you, Rae. Take it easy.
[01:14:07] Rae Morey: Thank you, Nathan. See you later.
[01:14:09] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. I hope that you enjoyed that. An absolute pleasure chatting to Rae. Don't forget to go and check out her email, therepository.email. You can find it over there and subscribe. She really is doing a stellar job of keeping up to date with all the WordPress news.
But hopefully you enjoyed it. If you did, had to WP Builds.com. Search for episode number 398 and leave us a comment there.
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Okay, I'm going to fade in some cheesy music. I'm going to say stay safe. Have a good week. Bye bye for now.
