This Week in WordPress #351

[00:00:04] Nathan Wrigley: It is time for this week in WordPress, episode number 351 entitled He Makes Things So That I Can Make Things. It was recorded on Monday, the 6th of October, 2025.

My name's Nathan Wrigley, and I'm joined today by my co-host, Michelle Frechette, but also by guests, Tim Nash and Courtney Robertson.

It is a WordPress podcast, so we do get into some WordPress things, but before that, we spend a bit of time talking about whether it's possible for a computer to do anything which is random. Tim is adamant that it's not possible. I really want it to be possible and. It just keeps cropping up throughout the whole episode, so that's a lot of fun.

Michelle Frechette also brings lots and lots of WordPress events to the show as well, and we talk about some bits and pieces coming up. Including WP Accessibility Day, which is just around the corner.

And then we get into all of the different bits and pieces. So WordPress 6.8.3 is being released.

Tammie Lister has a fantastic new project called Blocktober, where she's creating a different block with Telex, every day of this month.

We actually spend a little bit of time talking about WP Accessibility Day because of a podcast episode I did with a couple of the contributors to that project.

Nick Hamze is creating a bit of a stir in the WordPress space, particularly around plugins and how they're discovered. Quite a lot of it I really sympathize with, and so we get into that to quite a large extent.

We also talk about the fact that Kathy Zant has used the podcast plugin PodcasterPlus that me and Dan Maby have been making. She used it out in the wild, and it was absolutely fascinating watching a YouTube video about that.

And then we spend a bit of time talking about the community, about codes of conduct, and a whole load of other things as well. And it's all coming up next on this week in WordPress.

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Hello, hello. Good morning. Good afternoon, good evening. Welcome. Wherever you are in the world. That's probably the wrong way to set up this, isn't it? Let's go with that. That's a bit nicer. There are four of us, but, Tim Nash is.

[00:03:34] Michelle Frechette: Can I say to you, disappeared? Yes. That is either the longest two minutes or the shortest two minutes in like podcasting.

Yeah. Depending on what you're trying to do. Isn't it weird during those two minutes? Yeah. If, there's nothing to do that is torture those two minutes of that song. Oh. but if you've got, loads to do. It's if you're trying to run to the restroom or something, it's oh my gosh, it's almost over.

[00:03:54] Nathan Wrigley: I know. It's ridiculous. Anyway, here we are. We are gonna be joined in a minute by a, fourth guest. He's been on the show, but he just had to, he's been on the panel in the background, but he's just had to nip off for a moment. That's Tim Nash. But, we'll do the, quick introductions, including for Tim as well, 'cause he'll definitely be joining us.

But, let's go round the houses. and firstly say, welcome episode number 351 of. This week in WordPress, as you can see, we've got Michelle Fette and Courtney Robertson joining us. Let's go that way first and say hello to Michelle Fette. How you doing? I am well, thank you. How are you? Yeah, good. Yeah, really nice.

Michelle, as if you've listened to this before, because she's frequently here as a co-host, she's the executive director of Post Status, and in addition to the work over there, she's also the podcast barista of WP Coffee Talk, the co-founder of Underrepresented in Tech, creator of WP Speakers, WP Career Pages, co-founder of Sponsor Me, WP and Speed Network Online.

She's also an author and influencer and a frequent organizer and speaker at WordPress and other tech events living outside of Rochester, New York. She likes to take niche of photographs and the one URL, which we always mentioned that encapsulates a whole lot is meat. michelle.online. Thank you for joining us again.

Really appreciate it. Of course. I, will tell you that it's, our high today is 28 Celsius, 83 Fahrenheit. Whoa. For October. That is almost unheard of. yeah, that's crazy. yeah. We do not have that here. Although I can imagine that where Courtney is, it's a bit hotter. Hello Courtney. It's only maybe one or two degrees.

[00:05:27] Courtney Robertson: either direction, whether it's Fahrenheit or Celsius compared to Michelle. Michelle is about a, I don't know, four and a half, five hour drive from me, I think. Yeah, so it's, not terribly different in the temperature or climate, but it's lovely to be here. My windows were open all night, overnight last night.

Still, I'm enjoying the last bits of. Summer, dare I say October? What hot? Yeah, We've got the same here. It's like it's unseasonably hot, which is really nice. Yeah. Anyway, sorry. Let me do the proper introduction for Courtney. So Courtney Robertson is an open source developer advocate at GoDaddy, WordPress mentor, co-founding board member of the WPS Community Collective.

[00:06:10] Nathan Wrigley: I won't say WPCC then, but realize that it co, it collides, doesn't it? With another project, a former computer science educator. She champions contributor, onboarding and sustainable funding off stage she plays. Now, this is curious. You've never put this in your bio before. At least I've never met meant a made note of it off stage.

She plays a seven string electric violin. What the heck? How do you even get your fingers? I've got bananas for fingers. I'm not even get, I'd be doing three strings at wads. yeah, for the, audio only folks, I just held up my violin and it looks, looks like body, right? Yeah. and it just has three lower strings added to it.

[00:06:51] Courtney Robertson: I wanna know what the, YouTube channel is to go listen to you play. Nah, no kidding. Oh no. Oh, no, we're not doing that. No, Says Courtney. no. Not yet. Come soon to a Word Camp. Stage near you. Yeah. Act. I don't know about a Word camp, but I have asked there is, somebody in our WordPress community that has performed at Cloud Fest Europe.

I might see Yeah, you should get yourself on stage and do that. That's right. Yeah, that'd be interesting. However, I didn't finish the bio. It was a couple of extra things after the seven, EL seven stringing electric violin. Mic drop that. But you also like to play around with 3D, printing, hiking, photographs and gardens.

[00:07:29] Nathan Wrigley: 3D printing is something I always see other people doing. I get jealous, thinking I'd like to try that, but yeah, that's a nice hobby to have, I think. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And that's, so that's two of the three. Tim has joined us. He's back on the camera, so there's Tim. Hello Tim.

How you doing? You've, the top. Oh, it's because you were the first one in. That's how it, yeah, that's how it works. I'm take primary. There's Tim Nash, and he's called himself a doom speaker. He always provides us with an interesting bio, and I confess this time I didn't read it, so I've no idea what's coming.

so let's hope it's not that weird. Tim Nash is the person you don't admit. You call. Okay. Oh, I get it. he has many agencies. Dirty little secret. Oh, it's like that is it. he could be your dirty little secret because as a security consultant specializing in WordPress, he spends his days helping people ensure secure client sites, but he also can be found diagnosing weird issues on servers or helping teams develop new systems and processes.

You can learn more about Tim at Tim Nash. Co uk. There was nothing too weird in there. I love the little dirty little secret bit though. I guess that's quite your life. You just merge into the background never to be seen. And if you, if people are shouting about me, it's probably a problem.

[00:08:48] Tim Nash: Not a great point. But you can get, and you could definitely hire me, is I, the reason I was a bit late was I was on the phone to the garage and now I have a 2000 pound garage bill to deal views. No, never answer the phone to the garage, Jim. it's a basic mistake. Mind you, it doesn't make the bill go away.

[00:09:08] Nathan Wrigley: No, sadly. Let's just have a quick look at the comments. firstly, before we do that, I'll just raise up, if you are joining us and you would like your friends and relations and things to, to come and join with us, that would be lovely. this is probably the best place to do that. Let me just see if I can make the comments not to do that.

I'm not sure why it's doing that. sometimes it doesn't. Auto shift, it says, sorry. Michelle, it's gonna interrupt like that a bit today. there's the url. I just wish I was taller. That's all. Yeah, that's, you need to get one of those chairs where you can pump the handle and up you go.

go share this url, wp builds.com/live. If you go there, there's a little YouTube box on the side, so you need to be logged into Google. You can make some comments in there. However, if you don't wanna be logged in, inside the video player is a little live chat button. Top right says live chat on it. Don't need to be logged into anything at all.

so there we go. WP builds.com/live. Let's have a look. There's always a few comments. It's lovely when people join us. Appreciate that. Today we've got three or four. Let's see who we've got first. First up is Tammy. Hello Tammy. We're in. We're gonna be talking about you later, so maybe you are. Ears are burning.

but good afternoon. She says. Good evening. Says Cameron joining us, I think from Australia. I always say Australia and I'm sure that's right at the moment. One day Cameron's gonna tell you that actually he lives in Bournemouth. Yes. he's in Scarborough. He is just down the road from me. nomad Skateboarding says Good morning indeed.

Good morning. and wrote, we have, yes we do have Robo Courtney. There's not much we can do about that. I think the audio at this point is, just what it is. Yeah. It was better Courtney. And then it's gone back to being badly. It's back. Oh, then it's not. No, just ignore it. it's what it is. We can use, do every word. Yeah. you're just, sorry, friends. Bit strange. Yeah. Just say exterminate. I just wanna hear it once. Go on exterminate. Yeah. A little bit. Yes. There. it's a bit, yeah. Tim's so I feel we found you a new profession. if you've ever, I, dev advocacy is not for you.

[00:11:09] Tim Nash: I can run around with. From a inside of a trash bin. when I was at the airport in Heathrow coming back, like a week ago from Luko, there was an automated little robot that was milling about cleaning things, But, I really thought it was a daic, especially when somebody turned around too quickly and tripped over it.

[00:11:29] Nathan Wrigley: I saw that, I saw, you either posted a video or you posted a picture of it. I, yeah, I didn't, take a video of the person tripping. No, because in the uk in, in America you've got all these waymo's and driverless vehicles and all that. I don't think we've got any of that in this. I could be wrong, but I feel like we don't any of that.

We've got little. You've got little robots that are going down the street delivering things from Amazon. And co-op has co-op little robots all over the place. Do we now? We Yeah. Do we have? Okay. Alright. I take it all back. Way doesn't get in the US We've got robots everywhere. Seen in the airports a whole lot.

But she isn't a Dar I can promise you. She's absolutely real. 'cause I'm saw her a couple of weeks ago. Tammy's come back with a comment. Hot. you must all, you must have all the sun that Nathan. Yeah, the sun. Nathan is, it's not warm. No, it is. It's quite warm here. It's about 20 degrees. It's lovely.

Tammy. So there you go. what else have we got? Mark Wilkinson's joining us. Have you fixed your camera? My camera? I wonder if that's a question to me. Did I break something? I can't remember. And then we've got June, we're gonna mention you in a minute. June. Hello. Very nice to have you with us as well. and then we got various people.

Yeah. Okay. So Tommy says we have robots delivering food, Nathan. I don't like the idea of the sentence food. Nathan, it sounds like I'm on the menu. I But if you, you can get on, the little co-op one. You can actually get on them. Oh. And then they, stop and ask you, very politely, please get off them.

[00:12:53] Tim Nash: Oh, do they? Please remove yourself from me. That's so not operate until you remove me. I swear there's none of that where I live at all. So I live in the, I live in a different century. That's the problem. The further north in the UK you go the further back in, in time. I know. This was like, they were first trialed in Leeds.

So you're on the same plane. Just Okay, alright. Yeah, but you're just not quite the same. Is it? You just never leave your home, Nathan. Yeah, that's right. That's what it's, yeah. Yeah. Look. And then welcome to Grandpa Nathan. Yes, indeed. we have robots. Oh, look, you're all at it. You robot freaks. we have robots cutting the grass on my golf course.

[00:13:30] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Grief. I don't think Mark is responsible for the robots cutting the grass on his golf course. Yeah, no, like that. I was gonna say, he's very highfalutin. He's got his own golf course. hopefully you're taking this in the spirit in which it's offered. mark and then ml Hello from Maya from Belgrade.

Oh, hi, Maya. May ml Maya. Guessing, Marcus Bonnet. We'll make this the last one. Marcus Bonnet says, hello folks. Good to see you all indeed. Thank you. So there we go. That's how you can interact with the show. Honestly, it makes the whole show so much more interesting. I can't promise to keep up, but I will do my best.

And obviously the, panel will help with that endeavor as well. So if you've got something you wanna say halfway through an item, please drop it in. It'll, it, we get diverted quite easily, so that's quite nice. Okay. Should we put on the screen what it is that we're gonna be doing today?

So here we are. A few bits of self-promotion. First, forgive me, but, it keeps the lights on. Here's the first bit. This is our website, WP build.com. If you put your address into this field, we'll send you a couple of emails. Basically when we drop content, two bits a week, this show, and a podcast on Thursday.

Nothing else, basically, except there's this one time of year when we do not honor that. Project and that is now actually it's in the run up to, Black Friday. I dunno if you, I dunno if you follow Black Friday in the WordPress space, but it does tend to get a bit messy. And I don't know, maybe six years ago or something like that.

I started this Black Friday page last year. I think we had about 450 deals on there. You can find it at wp builds.com/black. At the moment there's about 30, 25, 30, something like that. But basically if you've got a product or service in the WordPress space and you wanna stick it on this page, it's totally free.

You just click this, add a deal button, fill out the form, add an image, fill out the required fields and we'll stick it on here. And then when people come along, they can search for the bits and pieces that you submit to us. Hopefully it'll mean that your product or service gets a little bit of a, a bit of a bump.

It's, lots of people Go to this page, each and every year. And then we've got little sponsor slots at the top, if that's your bag as well. if you'd like to have pride of place, as we say at the top, then you can click these little get started buttons. But it's wp builds.com/black. And yeah, you know what it's like in Black Friday, it gets a bit crazy, doesn't it?

So that's happening. The other thing to mention, is that we just do our regular podcast this week. If you're interested, I chatted with Pradeep, from RT Camp. They have a new tool called Web Auditor, which does a load of fun, AI based stuff around auditing your website, including changing things for you automatically, and then doing this AB test so it'll change content for you, see how that works, remove JavaScript, see how that works, and then report back to you.

It's an interesting tool and obviously, RT Camp Enterprise level agency, they're pushing this, now, so that's interesting as well. And that's about it. Okay. So the next thing then is at the beginning of the show, we surface up, user submitted content that is the, panelists.

And although Tim did not surface this, I did on his behalf, because he was posting on, I can't remember, blue sky or something this week. And he, he was talking about the fact that, random, so cut a long story short, computers do not do random. And you had, something happen to you over the last period where somebody came.

And although the article is all about a security thing on a WordPress website, which seems to have been a bit of a non-event, I'm genuinely fascinated by how computers cannot do random. Why the heck is that? Why can't they do random stuff? Because they're programmed. Yeah, but literally, if you think about it, they use logic.

[00:17:16] Tim Nash: Yeah. Logic is all structured and, Now try and just try and think in your mind how you would lo logically break down something to be random. Do you know this? This was for me, the thing that always I always said until two years ago when obviously that moment passed, I always thought this argument, why computers can't do random would be the exact reason they could never make art.

[00:17:42] Nathan Wrigley: They could never make a song, they could never create a painting. because it occurred to me they didn't have that, Ill-defined thing, which creativity. See, there's a bit of randomness and serendipity in it, but that's not the case. they can now do art and they can do songs, but they still can't do random mean, if you gave, the big, the main famous phrase, if you gave an infinite number of monkeys, typewriter that eventually make sha Shakespeare. Yeah. That's pretty much what AI is. You're just giving it, we're just giving it some, slightly more, some constraints and pointing it towards a, a source to start with. So AI is going to all, is what AI produces is not random, but it's curious. It's not creative because the heart of so much security out there, like for example, I have bit warden, it's my password manager.

I, I click the random. Password generator button. And this thing, which approximates random to me, 40 characters of just pseudorandom junk comes out. And I think, yeah, that's random. And it is totally not random. You, presumably you could work backwards if you knew what all the things were that were lined up to get that password out.

I don't know if that's the case. 'cause I imagine it's interrogating your computer for what the heck's the CPU doing. What's the temperature of this thing over here? What's the screen over here? Do you know? It combines all of these things, which creates this simulation of random, but it's still not random.

If you knew all the inputs, the output would always be the same, to a certain extent, yes. but generally ran, so the other thing is how random do we need it to be? And that actually is what the crux of that art article was really about, was not, I, think everybody can accept, if we are building logic systems and deterministic systems, we can't make random.

[00:19:35] Tim Nash: It has to have an external source for its randomness, otherwise, 'cause it can't possibly come up with something. There's no logic to make something random. So once we get past that, we can, we can make something look random and as you say, if we have enough variances, enough things that we're pulling those inputs through, actually too many is proves to be an interesting, secondary problem.

But we can make something look random. And if it looks random, is that good enough? now if in certain security issue considerations around encryption, no, We want to a little bit more random than you might imagine. but even in those scenarios, we still can find ourselves where we can say it's good enough.

It's not perfectly random, but it's good enough. But if I'm just picking, I have six blog posts and I want to show one of them to you randomly. We don't need to be that random about that that's fine. We can come down to a safer set of yeah, this is cool. You could work this out ultimately, but it's quite stuffed to random.

So would, sorry to interrupt that. Would, a new, 'cause I feel like we shot past the Turing test like a, year and a half ago and nobody blinked an eye. It was like, oh yeah, computers can talk to us now. We would never know. Like that was always gonna be a thing. The jury test that just seems yeah, okay, it's in the rear view mirror now.

[00:20:55] Nathan Wrigley: But would if a computer could, produce a random number and it could be proven to be random. Would that be some portion of the Turing test? Would that be some JJ? Just to check, you realize you can't produce a random number. I want to say that I can. Seven. You can. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. You absolutely can't produce a random number.

You had to think about it. I know. You had to think about it. You had to pull from a finite set of digits. It's so infuriating. 'cause you get this whole debate about consciousness and where the heck the number seven actually popped up from. it's irrelevant 'cause the number seven is definitely not random.

Alright. Nine then. No, Tim. Tim, what company is it? I feel like you would know this. There is a company that uses photographs of random stuff in their lobby. CloudFlare, not random. Yeah. Cloud. They've got a wall of lava lumps, haven't they? Yeah. That. Yeah, global or other place. But you would be like, if you were a lap ian determinist and you think you could rewind clock, I couldn't spell it, so it would never be that.

No, but If you, his, whole thing was like, if you could predict, if you could predict, obviously Heisenberg says you can't. But anyway, if you could predict where every molecule in the larva lamp was at any moment and you knew what the, you knew where it was moving, you'd be able to predict each larva lamp.

But of course, it's just out of the bounds of compute. You can't compute, more importantly, the sensor that's taking the, photo is waste. It would be that doesn't matter. But that's ire, irrelevant to that. Even that was then proven that those love lamps were in ultimately not true randomness, but we just need to get close to true randomness.

can I just say I, I totally have proof of the existence of randomness. It's called my cat. My cat is totally random. There's just nothing normal about my cat. it just comes and sits on your face in the middle of the night and things. I imagine that your cat fix it fits very logically, very sensible cat.

Yeah. Oh, it's fascinating. Anyway, there you go. So computers cannot do random. And if you think that they can, you are wrong. Maybe, like I said, one day, that'll be the thing. And more importantly, you can't do random either. Let's, be clear. Humans, animals, cat, whether it's a cat, whether it's a human, whether it's a computer, we all are relatively deterministic in our approach.

[00:23:12] Tim Nash: Yeah. We might not understand though what's causing that supposed logic, but we all work on a set of rules, so Yeah, you're right. You are so right. Okay, here we go. Let's go into the comments. back into why. Computers can't be random. Tammy says, because they're logic machines. Olivia. Hello. Olivia LaFleur says, because computers are deterministic, they rely on things that look like random, like time.

[00:23:33] Nathan Wrigley: But you can replicate 'em if you know the initial conditions. Yeah, that's what I was meaning about the lava lamps. If you could somehow go backwards in time and figure it out. And I men mentioned about art, isn't random. Okay. That's interesting. Yeah. art is predictable. It's just finding the predictability or the pattern.

Oh, this is fascinating. Oli, Olivia again goes on to say artificial intelligence has always been a moving goalpost. Things that were a cri, a criteria for AR 50 years ago, for example, playing chess and now expert systems. Yeah, that's interesting. Artificial intelligence just means we haven't figured out where the limits of the system are yet.

Oh, so much interesting stuff. And then just to bring things back down, this. Let's go back to tea. That's good. Tammy, I'm enjoying tea. I purchased, with you at Luko. oh, look at that. See, that was random. Nobody expected that. Oh, yes, they did. Unexpected in the college. Yeah. Tammy expected it and Courtney done.

Okay. I would love for it. Something to be random, but anyway, let's go to the next thing, but, okay. No, one more thing. Roy says. Those larva lamps were actually first done by SGI in 19. So still very not random. no. I love Zach says close to random is his punk band name. Oh, is it? Okay. Close to random.

not actually random. Okay. See, now if I'd known that, that would've made a way better title. Yeah. Close to random. Tim, can we, God, Zach, will you be mad if we use that as the show title? It's gotta be that, isn't it? Close? Would that infringe upon your band's copyrights at all on the list? My cat is random.

[00:25:14] Michelle Frechette: One of the, one of the two. Okay. There we go. Close. The cat that sits on my head is random. I'd be kinda curious to know. See if anybody can put in a random comment, like just utterly left field that makes us all laugh. That'd be an interesting, but it's no longer random because you've determined it would happen.

[00:25:32] Tim Nash: See he prompted them. Okay. this is why Tim has to go and have no friends or whatever it was he said in his pie. Oh, that's right guys. Not, he had no friends. He's a dirty little secret apparently. What It says, grumpy old man. Get off my lawn. I like it. That's right. I don't know that we've ever gotten this philosophical on the show.

[00:25:51] Michelle Frechette: Yeah. That. So what's, next? Great. Yeah. Okay. We're half an hour in folks. Nothing as good as that, but nevermind. Here we go. Let's randomly pick the exact next tab in here. Okay, here we go. No, I'm not gonna randomly pick the next tab. I'm actually going to the end 'cause you just threw these in, Michelle.

[00:26:06] Nathan Wrigley: 'cause that was Tim's piece. here's some, that Michelle wanted us to mention. They're all events, Perfect. Yeah, we have several events coming up over the next two months. yeah, a little bit over under two months. So Evolve Digital is happening in New York City. It was. Scheduled to be a one day event is now two days.

[00:26:23] Michelle Frechette: They've got so many great speakers lined up and they have, a track specifically for WordPress. And you have Nope, it's too late. It was up until last week too. to apply, to speak. I missed getting it in Michelle. I know, same. Too busy, but, but, you can still plan to attend, so it will be in New York City, at it's civic hall, in Union Square.

November 20th, the 21st. Okay, perfect. That's the first one. Here's number two. Number two is cloudfest. Cloudfest is coming up at the beginning in November 5th and sixth in Miami. Unfortunately, I won't be able to attend one. It's just a little outside of my price range for this year to do all that travel.

but Cloudfest, USA, there's gonna be some amazing WordPress speaking there. Jess Frick, who is one of our co-host here. the week press will be speaking as well. Mary Hubbard will be speaking there too, and a few others that the, whose names are escaping me right now. But tickets are still on sale for Cloud Fest.

USA you could absolutely go and it will be in Miami, so it'll be nice and warm the down there, hopefully. Oh, nice. For the first part of November. nice, Number three then, is this. Yep. Number three is we're Camp Canada, so we're Camp Canada's coming up the 15th, 16th and 17th, in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, and it's on my birthday October 15th.

Oh, so I will be, actually, I'm going to be speaking on the 16th. I am doing, I'm delivering a keynote for Women Tech Global on the 15th, and then I get right in my car and drive to Ottawa for Word Camp Canada. So tickets are still on sale for that as well. Zach says he is gonna be there. He's gonna be in Oh, nice.

[00:27:56] Nathan Wrigley: Miami. Yeah. Yeah, maybe. excellent. Bringing his camera with him. And then the next one I'm gonna introduce in a circuitous way. Yes. via the podcast episode that I did. Perfect. So you'll see in a moment on the screen. There we go. we had a podcast episode, or I had a podcast episode over on the tavern website, with June Lou, who's in the, chat, actually.

Really nice. Yeah. And, Dave, I, know him as Dave. but it's David is what we've got written here. David. Yeah. Dedo, two representatives of WP Accessibility Day. And so we did a podcast about why the mission matters, what's going on the day, and how you can expect that day to run. It's a 24 hour event and so on.

Yes. Which leads me, to the website. Is there anything specific, Michelle, that you wanted to chime in with? I just wanted to make sure that you have to register to be able to attend. It is not live streaming to YouTube as it has in the past. It is live streaming through, through Zoom and through Zoom webinars, so you have to register to attend.

[00:28:53] Michelle Frechette: It is free to do You're absolutely welcome to make a donation at the time that you register. It is run as a, a 5 0 1 C3 charitable organization here in the United States. So if you are in the US any donation you make when you register to attend is tax deductible. but I wanted to make sure that, you can't just happen upon it on the day of.

You absolutely have to register in advance. And that was running on the 15th and 16th of October as well. Yeah, really? Do you know what prompted the change outta curiosity? yes it is because when we have, we are doing, American Sign Language at the same time. So not only are the sessions being transcribed across the bottom of the screen, in English, but we're also doing at the same time American Sign Language.

And to be able to have all of that on the screen at the same time was not possible with YouTube. So it had to be done through Zoom. So it's being transcribed and signed all at the same time. So it's human transcriptions happening at the same time? Gosh, that's, correct. That's so, when people say how, much could it possibly cost to run an event like that when you have human transcription and human A SL happening all at the same time and you're paying for Zoom and all of the things, it does actually add up.

And we are, as I said, a 5 0 1 C3 charitable organization here in the US and all of the money that we raise through that absolutely goes back into the organization to make the event possible year after year. Can I ask a quick question about this? and you may not have the answer, but you mentioned, obviously you've got to pre-register, so presumably there's some funnel that you drop into, which then allows you to get a zoom link and things like that.

[00:30:28] Nathan Wrigley: Correct. If you were to fail to register, but decide on the day that you wish. To register? Is it game over or do you know if there's enough? No, you can register day of. Okay. It's just that you won't get all of the reminders in advance and so you, it won't be on your calendar unless you're, you go all the extra mile to do those things.

[00:30:44] Michelle Frechette: But if you register in advance, you will get the reminder emails that's coming up. You'll get the, the links, everything will happen. and plenty of time to be set up for success to watch at any point during that 24 hours that you'd like to. So if memory serves, it starts as these events often do, like the New Zealand side of the world, the international dateline and then cycles through and then finishes off Hawaii and what have you.

[00:31:07] Nathan Wrigley: By the end, 24 hours. It's starts at, I believe, 1:00 PM Central Time here in the United States. So let's look that up actually, let's see what we can see. What would I do? I'd go to the schedule, wouldn't I? Yes. Let's have a look on there, see what we can find. you've got a really. an impressive keynote speaker, haven't you?

you've got Joe doing the open remarks. Okay. So it's 2 45 UTC. so that's London, Europe and so on. Yeah. And then the actual stuff, if you like, begins, at three o'clock in the UK with, vital Friedman. yes, and I've actually forgotten where he's from. Where's he from? He's from Smashing Magazine.

[00:31:48] Michelle Frechette: That's Smashing Magazine. Yep. He is the, one, the one of the founding members and the editor in chief at Smashing Magazine. go to 2025 dot WP accessibility dot Dave. There's a lot of dots in there. Oh, so just in case anybody did listen to Nathan, it's four o'clock London time, not three o'clock. you're quite right.

[00:32:08] Nathan Wrigley: I simply can't do the maths. there it is clearly on the screen, which, they clearly put on the screen for you. How random was that? That I got that wrong? I'm gonna only keep trying, I'm gonna keep crowbar, which actually I think it's 11:00 AM central time, so I had that one. Oh yeah. Okay. We'll go with that.

Okay. So there we go. There's all the bits and pieces surrounding that. So we've managed to. Get back on track, I think, and here we are. Thank you. Let's put some WordPress e bits and pieces on the screen as well. not really a lot to say here, accepting that if you, are running client websites and they're not auto updating, which.

You really probably should at this point. WordPress 6.8 0.3 was dropped during the course of this week. It was a security fix. So you know it, it says it in bold here. It is recommended that you update your sites immediately. The only bits and pieces that I can see down here, there were a couple of things in terms of security, a data exposure issue where authenticated users could access some restricted content.

And then across site scripting, excess s vulnerability requiring an authenticated user role that affects the NAV menu. and yeah. Hopefully that's, that's gonna all have been taken care of. this sentence caught me short, so I've never really paused this sentence. Maybe it's always been there at the bottom of these security change, security posts.

But it says this. Tell me if I'm wrong. Is this, new, or is this always the case? as a courtesy, these fixes have also been made available to all branches, a to receive security updates currently through 4.7. As a reminder, only the most recent version of WordPress is actively supported. I don't know why I thought, is that a new posture or is that how it's always been, Tim?

No, that's, oh, go Connie. Go call me. Oh, sorry. hosting perspective here, there are sites if people are on a not managed plan, they can choose to run an old version of WordPress. And in running that old version of WordPress, security fixes still need to be addressed. And so those are being deployed pretty much across all, all hosting environments.

[00:34:15] Courtney Robertson: whereas if there is just a feature or a, like some kind of a bug, like a normal bug, the feature doesn't work or something like that's not going to backport the security issues so much. Okay. so they do try to indicate when that happens. And we do see it also in plugins as well, less common in themes, but that's just because, people aren't switching those around quite as frequently, Okay. Okay. Thank you. Tim. You can verify me on, if I was gonna say it is an absolute pain to back port. Yeah, security things. And, there has been discussion every six months or so comes around the should we be backporting? and there is positives and negatives towards Backporting. at the moment. The clear important thing is that officially WordPress only supports the very latest release.

[00:35:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So if you were in a state where it was something where you required compliance reasons that you had to be up to date, you couldn't claim that 4.7 0.39 or whatever the, that, version is co is the latest version or in compliance. it is, as I say, really time consuming and, There has been a lot of, we shouldn't, maybe, the security team shouldn't be backporting.

[00:35:33] Tim Nash: maybe that's not helping people update long way, but they maintaining that process. especially the 4.7 branch because that was the last one before foresight editing. And if you look at the various graphs of where people aren't stopped updating, there's very few prior to 4.7 installs out on the web.

Still some. I came across one that was on 1.5 something the other day. It was like, wow. Had it not been happening? Did you log into that? No. No. Oh, it's, I think if you log into it, it dies. I'm not sure, but yeah, it's like a Schrodinger's WordPress site. it's there only on paper. It works as long as no one logs in.

[00:36:14] Courtney Robertson: Yeah, exactly. but, 4.7 you do see this like little spike and that is where people have gone. Oh, I will not move over to Gu Gutenberg editing that came in version five. Okay. Rightly or wrongly. Yeah. you also, weirdly now see quite a lot of people who went to classic press at that point back on, stuck on that 4.7 branch.

[00:36:35] Tim Nash: You've got this very strange sort of group of people who are there. So the backporting to, that's why it backport specifically to the four branch. At some point that will end. Yeah, they've got, it's got to because the WordPress is diverging away and as Courtney said, they're not putting Backporting new features in there.

Otherwise it would just be a release. So they're only Backporting security fixes. They've also gotta work out if the security fix actually relates to the older version as well. So if the code may have changed significantly, at which point. They are then having to go back and look for a completely different fix for something.

so we really could do a stopping it on that release itself. Probably a more interesting story is, was the little oopsie that patch deck did, where they inadvertently released the, the, there was a security issue before the patch was made available, which they themselves went, oopsie. We, I didn't see that.

Just trigger, just a little bit trigger happy. So if you had Patch Stack installed on, any of your sites, or if your host was pulling in Patch Stack for a little while, it was telling you that you've had a security vulnerability in your WordPress core and it, there, there was no pro, no fix available. that was a little loops.

That was an interesting at the 10,000, sorry, Courtney, you go. Sorry. I think I saw that there was about the individual that had this leak and I know his name, but I choose not to draw extra attention there. is that, out of 10,000 or so times that this person has reviewed things, having this go through and in addition to that, the vulnerabilities, you had to actually do a good bit of work to exploit them.

[00:38:18] Courtney Robertson: oh yeah. This is really is one of those moments that you have to stand on one knee, you pat your head and do the tub thing. Yeah. And even then edge pace, like you have to, get through some security to get to do the thing to make the exploit right? Yeah. And In the sense of, is this a high risk?

No, this is not a high risk. But the urgency to ship the release came because, whoops, now it's out there. And, it, there are a lot of things that the security team could be working on, if they had more bodies or whatever, to get all of that through. That we just don't know about. Yeah. And that is, I didn't pick up on that patch deck story, and that is a really interesting point of failure, isn't it?

[00:39:00] Nathan Wrigley: that, that obviously an organization like Patch Deck presumably has many of these balls juggling in the air simultaneously. And, they get fixed, they announce, they talk about it publicly, blog posts, what have you. But if they accidentally click the publish button, oh, suddenly it's, they do have a fairly robust system for this not to happen.

[00:39:17] Tim Nash: Okay. And this was just a genuine little oopsie, yeah. Yes, And, then it was an oopsie followed by, oh, caching Caleb. We'll screw with you. As, these notifications were all cached in places. Yeah. People who had automated emails were sending them out. You had, hosting companies putting banners all over their web things and, oh, God's crazy.

You've gotta feel, you sat there watching this happen, and then you're like, oh. Yeah. that was meant to go out next week. Yeah. so the curious thing there is really coordination normally. So yeah, in the regular run of everybody's WordPress life, if you inadvertently publish something, you just stick it back in draft state and everything's back where it was.

[00:39:59] Nathan Wrigley: But not this. Loads of dominoes, full loads of dominoes. They were quite apologetic Also, once they were sharing this info, there was discussion of it in post status. Oh my goodness. Oh, I have all of my sympathy goes to the person who, did that. we obviously no names associated with that, but dear me, oh dear.

I can imagine how dreadful that felt. Felt. Okay. So there's a couple of things. Couple of things here. what have we got? mark says, Mark Wilkinson says auto update. Everything that makes perfect sense And, backup as well, and test the backups as well. Dave Den says, how do we still have a one point X branch?

I'm definitely not logging in for local testing now. It, I think he was meaning there was a site out in the wild that yeah, we Nobody's back porting to one point. Yeah, it would be very hard. I think most of the code doesn't exist. Yeah. good fun. Cameron says Gutenberg was only introducing five a bit strange to have FSE in 4.7.

[00:40:58] Tim Nash: Maybe it was me, misspeaking as I was going through, but yeah. the 4.7 branch is the last branch before. FSE That's okay. Thank you. Before Gutenberg was introduced, and then Tammy rightly pointing out every single person that helped with the security release needs, props and kudos. Yeah, they were. And they will be put back on the screens.

[00:41:16] Nathan Wrigley: A whole bunch of people there contributors to this latest release. and ops says, Olivia. Yeah. We're sending all the love things that you could possibly send. There we go. Oh, and Tommy, listen, missed this one. Backporting is an incredible fine art form, okay? And as we know, art is not random. No.

[00:41:38] Michelle Frechette: Therefore, backporting is not either. I'm gonna spend the rest of my day trying to think of something that is truly random. I know I'm gonna fail. But I'm gonna try anyway and I'm gonna step in for Nash, for Tim Nash and say, if you're trying to think of it, it is therefore not random. Am I correct, Tim?

[00:41:57] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, let's move on. Back on track here. I get it. I get it. So here's, we've said at the top of the show, thatt, Tammy, who is on the show frequently last week, in fact, she has got a really nice little project going on. Here it is. and why did nobody secure this name before? That was so obvious. I know.

Block October. What a great idea. Tammy, with the help of, the, telex platform by automatic, I'll just read it. The idea is simple. You can put it on screen too. Oh, sorry. Apologies. I thought I'd done that. That was about to, yeah. Thank you. I'm so sorry. I thought I had, so here we are. This is, block October.

as you. B-L-O-C-K-T-O-B-E-R for those that can't see the screen, dot fun and then forward slash block tober, if you want to get to this page. So the idea was simple. She says A block a day for the month of October. I will, I, as in Tammy, will be using telex by automatics, like a prompt system for creating blocks and plugins and things like that.

But I think blocks specifically, to make these and posting each day at 12:00 PM UK time, one block a day all month. And yeah, if you go back to the homepage, here we go. You can try some of them out. This is a work in progress. I confess, I, tried snake. but I got very annoyed very, quickly.

'cause it turns out I'm not very good at it. And, Tetris might be more your speed than Nathan. it starts a little slower. It's also, do you know what Yeah, it's blocky blocks the problem with any, it's, and I just get really annoyed. I have this high expectation of myself and then I can't live up to it.

And it really annoys me. Hear me? I gave you 20 minutes of my day playing Tetris the one day. Oh, okay. Oh, I feel really bad. 'cause I was at least 45 minutes to an hour before I realized how much I'd spent playing that game. I reached quite robbed hour panel of at least an hour and a half. Tammy make a block about Lego and then it's a block and a block as well, which would be so fun.

Tammy, can you, can I just ask that you, are, you create a random number generator, please. That's gotta be one, number 30. And can you use, I, I don't know, a lava lamp to, to assist in the creation of that as well, but yeah. Nathan, what a, great idea. Sorry, go on Courtney. Slightly off topic, but Tammy may appreciate, the random number generator.

[00:44:27] Courtney Robertson: Tammy should always answer 42. Oh, he says reaching. He is slightly outta the reach copy of the Hitchhiker Guide for the Galaxy. That's a good answer. yeah, so all I can say is go and have a look. Tammy is obviously, it's a lot of fun. Tammy's having a great time creating these different bits and pieces.

[00:44:46] Nathan Wrigley: So we've got Snake, we've got journaling prompt, we've got Pixel, block, terminal, block, asky, Tetris, and now obviously the posts about the actual whole enterprise. I ignoring, I don't want to ignore, but the one, the fun ones like Snake and Tetris. Actually the change log that was published, I mean it might have been today.

[00:45:04] Tim Nash: Oh, it's the one at the top? I actually thought that's super cool. I might actually use that. So what does this one do? This creates a change log from what? As you give it a source, it generates you a change log that is. Yeah. Brilliant. Yeah, that is a good idea. So a block that outputs a change log.

[00:45:20] Nathan Wrigley: This can have a GitHub URL uploaded file or pasted content. You can edit the mark down and so do some simple styling. The I would idea would be to simply show on a page change log, keeping it simple to start. That is nice. And it sums it up beautifully, doesn't it? Look at that. Woo. Yeah, Irene, I was asking Tammy, some questions the other day regarding the prompts that she gives it, and we both settled in on, we go to other AI systems to help write our prompt before we give it to Telex.

[00:45:50] Courtney Robertson: and I'm excited to see if and when Tammy shares some of the prompts that led to the project, how she goes about framing the prompts that get telex to do this. I wanna know. That would be very good if you had like underneath the block, the prompt that was stored there. Oh, Tammy, there you go. That's for next year.

[00:46:08] Nathan Wrigley: That's block October, 2026. You can, you can include tell secrets. Tell us secrets from a year ago. Yeah. so firstly, Tammy says, thank you for including this. Of course, she then goes on, in slightly loud English, I might add, to say, there are no run for generators. There's gotta be, I'm sure of it.

I'm sure you're right. And then, known by skateboarding says they made a ran, they made a random with a quantum computer this year, if that counts. Tim, I'm sure no, Tim's not happy. Tim's. They didn't, they made something a looked random with a quantum computer Okay. This year. Yeah. and then Dave and very kindly saying he's tried out the Tetris and he enjoyed it.

Took lot. Yeah. There you go. There's the problem. Tommy, you're destroying the productivity of many of the people in this chat. now that I've shown it to many more people, maybe we'll get some, more times. Spent in that manner. And then Tacho says, don't worry, Nathan, you are the only one having high expectations of you.

It's true. Even my mother gave up at a very early, oh, I know. It's harsh. It's harsh, but we're not gonna say it out loud. I so often sat on the naughty step so often sound the naughty step. Okay, so there we go. You're Paul. You can say anything. yes. In indeed. There we go. Block Tober f go check it out.

What a fun project type. Great idea. really, genuinely cool idea. And, and what's also really interesting about it is I think many people in their minds associate a block with just a functional bit of a website, like a paragraph or a image or just some component, part of a general webpage.

But of course, as we can see from what Tammy's doing, they really can be like little mini applications if you like, and do some incredibly complicated, unusual, and, Random things. Moving on. Here we go. Next one is this. So Nick Sey, I confess I had not heard of Nick Sey until a few weeks ago.

And now Nick Sey seems to be the, the poster child of really good ideas, in the WordPress space, certainly getting lots of attention. and I don't know that we've ever had the same person, on this show being featured twice, but there's a couple of things that you wrote this week, and we're gonna mention them both.

This is the first one. good chaos, A WordPress discovery, a WordPress plugin discovery experiment. Can I just say, before we introduce this, I think this should happen. I think this is good enough just off the bat to just give it a try. Why not? It's basically for those people who submit their plugin, create a plugin, do all the hard work, make it, put loads of effort into it, and then submit it to.org only to discover that the, days of build it and they will come.

they came and went, you know that's just not gonna happen. If you put your plugin into the WordPress repo, you're up against 56, whatever it is, 59,000, other bits of content. And so it's gonna be hard to find traction and find that new audience. Nick's got a great idea. I that is, I have some thoughts there.

Okay. Should, do you want, do you wanna say it now? Yeah, So for the Plugin directory experiment, I think many people look at this and say, absolutely, yes. I also think that some of the ideas are ideas that other contributors have shared over the years. Okay. Okay. Good to know. And have had no traction about having, for instance, like an area of most recently published plugin on the directory.

[00:49:40] Courtney Robertson: and so I think what I would love, I am adoring the ideas Nick is putting forward. I am concerned that if these ideas get an uptick, that Nick gets the uniqueness I a credit that's there that other contributors may not. And, I believe, not entirely certain, but I believe Nick might be an automatic employee.

So I wanna handle with delicate fingers here, But yeah. these are ideas that we need to see and I want to hear more of Nick's ideas. It's a good reminder to also realize that sometimes when we have an idea that we think nobody else has had, this is amazing, this is great. let's dig back and explore if others have had that idea and maybe why it did not get implemented yet.

Oh, interesting. Okay. And what we could do to solve for that. Yeah. Okay. Sorry, tha thank you for that. And I think you're right. I had never come across this idea before, so just intuited from that, that, that Nick was the originator of it. But you, are I'm sure, that there's probably people who've had a similar idea in the past.

[00:50:44] Nathan Wrigley: I have a slightly unique, not unique, but I have, a different take in the, I get contacted a lot by, people who've got a brand new plugin. 'cause they want a bit of like exposure or something like that. And it is fairly heartbreaking actually, especially this time of year, this Black Friday time of year loads and loads of these things come your way and so somebody will submit something to go on that Black Friday page and you'll look at it and you'll think, wow, that thing that they've got looks really cool.

the plugin is great, the website is great. It's all great. I've never heard of them. And yet they've been going for several years. How, on earth has that happened? And, they're just missing the jigsaw piece of the, of the marketing side possibly or something. So just getting back to Nick or, et al whoever has had that idea in the past, the idea is this, that there's a featured tab, in the plugin directory on.org, which showcases, many things.

And he's saying it seems to, show things which are already successful, featured things, which have already gained traction, already got an audience. So the simple idea is why not learn from other platforms, for example, the Shopify app store, the Mac App Store, Google's play store, and so on and so forth.

And his idea very solid. It's, just this very exacting proposal. Let's feature eight different plugins for one week and track what happens to their install numbers. That's it. Simple, measurable. Reversible. We select eight quality plugins. I dunno what that means, but let's imagine that there's a bit of thought behind that, that deserve a shot at visibility.

Give them featured placement for exactly one week and watch what happens. And that there's more to it than that there. Yeah, it really, he's just trying to say, let's just give some people the opportunity to surface their work. And of course, I imagine that exactly what everybody's gonna say off this one is who are the eight?

Aren't we just creating a new subset of people who are then featured? Let's just randomly generate that. Yeah. oh, That's such a good idea. Oh, but can you just imagine the, oh no. We have an algorithm. Yeah. And what that sort of drama would be. Yeah. Yeah. but just as an thought this, we desperately need better plugin discoverability.

[00:53:02] Tim Nash: Yes. we, I don't mean there's a single person who thinks that the current system works well, unless you happen to be one of the eight currently featured on the featured page. you absolutely. if you, and if you search, even if you know the name of a plug itin, you search for it, there's a reasonable chance that even if you na, put the correct name in it still doesn't come up first in the search directory, depending on various things.

So we all know this, we all know discoverability is a problem. So any work that we have by anybody who says let's go and make, improve it, the problem has been that everybody who we have tried many times jumping up and down and saying, we need to improve this, It is a area that seems to be, walking on eggshells.

And it seems to be very difficult to get traction. I'd love there to be like a featured editor section. I'll be honest, I think hosting companies should have far more control over the plugins page. It would be great. most hosting companies should have control over the plugins. It'd be great if they could have a featured editor section where it's like, these are the plugins that we recommend our people Do.

our managed hosting, we know that you might need certain things. We, can show the caching plugin or our hosting companies plugin there and things like that. Historically, you could get away with modifying and doing this yourselves, but even that in now, people are like, Ooh, you shouldn't be modifying this and you shouldn't be affecting WordPress core.

Which is where things like fair, really appeal to me and this idea that oh, actually this gives us a really good opportunity as if we've started to swap out the backend. We've started to swap out and we've got built in discoverability options. now we can create new UI at the front and we can have fun with doing that.

And people like Nick who was all about we, he, there should be more fun in Word. I'm sure that's one of his posts. Yeah, there was something about that a few weeks, but yeah. Yeah, that's, that creativity and things, we can bring that back in. We can start experimenting, whereas at the moment the plugging screens seemed to be almost feel like they're off limits and that if you can't change that.

And I don't understand where that lock came in and why, because. People have changed it in the past and it's, we've seem to have just gained this sort of Ooh, we can't do that anymore. and I don't know where that came from. to, to that point, Jonathan. Hello Jonathan. says there was once c-section in the dashboard that showed recently released plugins, and it was removed, it thinks about 12 years ago.

[00:55:34] Nathan Wrigley: I wasn't using WordPress that long ago. Yeah, that's a good summary. Yeah. but if that's the case, that's interesting. You, said something interesting there, Tim, 'cause you encapsulated it perfectly. You said an editor's. Featured section, and it's the word editor. So I have an Android phone and if I go into the play store, an Android, there's this, and they call it editor's choice or something like that.

So they're making it obvious that some human being has decided this is worthy of your attention. then you, they've, told you that some human being, it doesn't mean has No, okay. Probably just the algorithmic choice saying they're not, they're making it appear that, okay, this is a, there's a, there's some decision that went into raising this one in front of you.

Maybe that was an algorithm, maybe not. But I think Nick is trying to just say, let's run it as an experiment. So just pick eight, run it for a week, and then look at the telemetry on the other side. and if those eight plugins have had an optic, let's say they go from, I dunno, a hundred installs in the previous week to 15,000 the following week.

we know there was a substantial benefit to those eight plugins. As an experiment, it worked. Then you get into the naughty thing of how the heck do you then decide, which are gonna be featured, 'cause then all of a sudden you've got a new problem to face, haven't you? Every week one gone.

[00:56:58] Michelle Frechette: It also begs the question. That in the, I dunno, what's the question in the repository is only the free plugins. Perhaps you're looking for a plugin that does something that exists that isn't even in the repo. And we have people trying to solve this already in WordPress, right? So we have P plugins, like the plugins, but P plugins.

Oh, plugins, yeah, Dot com where you can search and for, keywords of I used to work forgive. You can look for donation, look at the word donation, and it'll come up with all the plugins that do donations, whether they're free or not. And there's now a plugins plugin, and it's all using ai.

To be able to search and generate those things, even from within your dashboard. So when there is a challenge with, in WordPress, there are often people trying to solve it from the outside, but again, discoverability is the difficult thing, right? So trying to get some momentum behind something like plugins, which is made by Veia, out of Barcelona.

like how do they grow that if they're not in the repo already? so it's a particular argument. Yeah. Here's an idea as well, in fair right now, folks can choose to install plugins that are on some repo. So that could be GitHub or GitLab, Bitbucket, et cetera. Pick your version, Azure and, plugins will go through a process of getting, if it for tho decentralized IDs.

[00:58:31] Courtney Robertson: It basically means the security. Number, essentially numbers letters, similar to if you go to install for those that are devs. If you go to install an extension inside a VS code, it asks you, do you trust this source? WordPress implicitly trusts the sources of wordpress.org hosted plugins. usually folks get other plugins either because they're rolling their own or because they have purchased something premium.

Whereas if you want to start finding and discovering all of these types of things that are out across various skit, repos, et cetera, if they get on board with having a decentralized id, getting the certificate basically, It will become discoverable in the search system if you are using fair to source your updates and installs.

so you can go through in that direction as well. And I think that some of the ideas that are here are just reiterating, these are really good ideas of increasing discoverability. And I, do wanna see, anything that is a directory help to surface that more. And I know, John is here from WP Plugins A to Z.

I know that his show alone has covered Wow. Lots of plugins every week, so Oh yeah. Yeah. I think that. There you go. There you go. Yeah. That's interesting. He's probably got a really unique approach on it. E every week there's a, there's always one thing that gets more comments than anything else. So far this week, this has been the thing.

[00:59:58] Nathan Wrigley: There's too many, just before you jump into the comments, As both me and Courtney have mentioned it repeatedly, fair is, if you wanna learn more about Fair, which is a distributed, way for, getting your plugins, finding your plugins, that doesn't necessarily rely on wordpress.org. The idea is it's completely decentralized.

[01:00:16] Tim Nash: if you go to Fair pm that will give you a load more information about it just in case it's something that you've not come across before. And if, anyone wants to just browse around, the address for browsing around Fair Sources, the plugins right now through Aspire and Aspire Press in particular.

[01:00:36] Courtney Robertson: So if you go to Aspire press.org/plugins, that will also get you there. So you can, it browse around without having to do the work of installing fare at the plugin directory. Essentially, that fare will see at this time. Oh, I see. So you can look at it as if it were installed. You can view a, an example of it.

similar to the.org plugin directory, but it's going to look for everything that's also, not just.org, but out there. Okay. there's a whole bunch of different things in here. I, so I've got the one from Jonathan. he says, if you use the new fair plugin, you will see plugins not normally, on Earthed.

[01:01:13] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you for that. And, but then there's a load of other comments, many of them going backwards and forwards between, each other. the marketing side is from Mark Wilkinson. The marketing side is definitely a bigger problem than the plugin development or idea. And obviously the marketing side of WordPress has taken a bit of a, now, if Telex would also market our plugins as well as build them for us.

Okay, Tammy, I think day 30th of October has been, sorted out for you there. Can you have a marketing, marketing block? Yeah. Marketing. What the heck that would do? I have no idea. Just install it in your site. Solved. Yeah. That's all. Can I have that plug? Can I, can we all have access to that? Okay. So I'll, that Nick, is consuming lots of the oxygen in the room apparently.

there was a little thing up here. Where did it say, taco says, is Nick real? Does anybody know him personally? And Tommy says, yes. he is actually real. I don't think he's consuming, just to be clear, I don't think he's consuming the oxygen in the room. And that was a badly worded phrase. You're right.

Yeah. That apologies that he is. Yes. There is a level where he's, it does feel like someone who's discovering WordPress and he, I know he is, been around for a while, but it does feel like someone who's very excited. He's discovered all these things. He's found all this stuff and he's now meeting the jaded old folk who are going, we think we haven't thought this through.

Yeah. And it's you think these are new ideas? But the thing is, some of the them are new ideas, some of them, any voice that we can bring more voices in, that's gotta be worth doing. So if we sound jaded, that's not a good thing. But it is coming from a place of, huh We've, seen some of these before, but it's brilliant that we're getting new voices and old voices coming up with these ideas.

[01:02:58] Tim Nash: 'cause if we don't, we'll be, yeah. Duck. thank you. And thank you for also picking up on that phrase because I think that phrase does have a negative connotation, doesn't it? And I was definitely not meaning that. So yeah. Thank you for that, Tim. So the other one, which Nick, created, I don't know, shall I do this one?

[01:03:14] Nathan Wrigley: We've got this one about the bill. I'm just looking, you can't, not do it now, haven't we? you right. I can't. The oxygen. That's right. Yeah. Sorry. I'm putting it down. suddenly struggling to breathe. That was the problem. all the oxygen is gone. so this is another one, same website.

It's called Building My Dream Plugin curation tool. So, it's a similar thing as we've just described, and I'll read it 'cause it's gonna be quicker. the plugin repository search functionality is solid for basic queries, but when you want to curate, really curate, you need more, you need a filter, but you need to filter by multiple criteria, sort in different ways.

Analyze trends and discover patterns that aren't immediately obvious. The built-in search wasn't designed for the kind of deep exploration I wanted to do. Then I realized the plugin repo repository has an open API and with modern tools, Tammy, like telex, I could build exactly what I needed. So I did, I created my own solution that lets me search, filter, and analyze plugins in ways the standard interface never could.

and then there's a whole list of different bits and pieces on the screen. I've gotta say, when I go to things like, for example, on the phone, like the Android app store or whatever it's called, play store or something like that, that it's limited over there as well. It's not like I, I get basically get to categorize, I get to sub.

Say, show me this category or search by typing in text. I don't have these kind of faceted filtering, which I presume is what Nick is talking about. I dunno what your thoughts on this are. Again, it seems like a good idea. I don't personally know that I would make a great deal of use of it. Maybe I would if it was there.

but yeah. Anyway, over to you panel if you wanted to mention this. If not, we'll just move on Just very quickly. Package management has been a problem for every system on the planet since the day dot Okay. This, we are the problems and issues we have with package management, which is ultimately what plugin management is in WordPress is not unique and we can reach out to solutions and the popular solutions.

[01:05:19] Tim Nash: your Android play store, your. apple App Store. They've coalesced around this, idea of giving you a, UI with the editor choices and all of this, and a simplified ui. But if we go down the other extremes and we go to Linux systems, which are often very distributed in their way, they, can, they have so many different tools and techniques for how to filter and manage them from, you don't have any through to really complex UIs that are probably too overwhelming for the average person, but for the person who really wants to dig down to find that very specific application because they know it exists.

[01:06:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And I think that's a huge difference in the Linux world, there is an assumption that what you want. Probably exists. I think we're still in the WordPress world under the belief that the vast majority of the time we've come up with an original fault of our own, or we just come up with something that is random.

[01:06:15] Tim Nash: And oh 42, just say I, I missed a crucial part of what Nick was saying and actually it's something that I do. Think is really important. so by the way, on the screen, forgive me if you're listening to this, I'm showing it what he's built. So it's got, it's got sort by most popular sort, sorry, sort by, most popular, highest installs, et cetera, et cetera, you can imagine.

[01:06:39] Nathan Wrigley: And then there's a bunch of categories and then minimum rating. So that's something you've seen everywhere, right? Airbnb and things like that. and then the maximum number of installs. So you can go for things which are, he's called hidden gems, under, i, guess also that would also mean, not so gem as well.

The reason it's got less than a thousand might equally be that it's, not really up to much. But the piece that he really wanted to lean into was this was the images, right? And I'm totally with him on that. Whenever I go to look at a plugin on, the.org repo, this is where I end up. I want to do this.

I wanna see the screens, I wanna be able to cycle through them, see what my options are gonna look like. And the verbiage is interesting, but I always end up looking at the screenshots. And the screenshots on.org are not ideal. You end up on a new page for each screenshot, that kind of thing. And it ends up being a bit of a messy experience.

So I appreciate this bit. I actually think this is a really interesting way of surfacing things. Just the screenshots are front and center. That's the most important thing in Nick's mind. And I actually agree with him on that, whether or not the SP search of, is as useful. anyway, there we go.

He's built it so you can go and have a look. Anything else before we move on? Time is running short. Okay, great. In which case I will move on. Tacho, who was in the comments, contacted me earlier in the week. I am so gonna butcher these words, but nevermind. I will try it. he says, so Tacho very nice chap that he is, he runs a WordPress, event in, I'm gonna say it.

N Megan. Woo-hoo. Did it? and how do you know you did it? Oh. Done. Now you've undermined me. I don't know if I did it, I probably got it wrong. He'll, I know how I'll know it is because Tacho will pop into the comments and say, you did it right. so here we go. Center class. That's the one that I was very un confident about.

I'm guessing it's like short for Santa Claus or something like that. is an event which they run, it's their kind of Christmasy event and it's all about giving gifts and they wanna do the same. So they are looking for, financial and in kind sponsors. So if you sell a WordPress plugin or service or you can gift.

and you want to have it promoted at the meetup, then reach out sponsors at WPM 0 2 4 nl. It's on the screen, it'll be in the show notes, but basically they're looking for people so that their event has the sort of happy giving aspect to it. So the idea of giving away prizes and so on. And in order to make that happen, they would like the prizes to be donated.

So I just thought that was a really nice idea. So it's the WordPress meetup in nine Megan and, presumably, 4th of December, what's that? Two months out. So they're getting ahead of the game, wanting to get bits and pieces lined up for that. So Tacho, hopefully that, hopefully that helps. he says, you did it right.

There you go. That's how I know, I did it right. luckily, tacho drops in, ba No, I wasn't meaning Tacho. That it means it's not a gem. I just mean that there's bound to be some that are under a thousand that are languishing because they are not a jet. Does that make sense? I wasn't trying to pour Also, the other comment that Tacho put on there was not about progress planner.

[01:10:05] Tim Nash: I am. Amazed that it's only got, it's only got around 200 installs. if I always had to guess, I would've been, oh yeah. Yeah. It's probably got, I don't think it would be in the millions, 'cause it's a fairly new plugin, but I'd have gone, it'd be in the tens of thousands, so I'm really shocked when it's oh, it's just, that seems really low.

So just 'cause something's low doesn't mean it's not good. Yes, indeed. You are quite right. okay, and also he says thank you for sharing it. So you're very welcome. I will link to it, it's a LinkedIn post. The URL is on readable because it's got loads of numbers at the end, but I'll put it into the show notes.

[01:10:41] Nathan Wrigley: But you can always reach out to Tacho and the email address. Once again, read it into the record. Sponsors at WPM 0 2 4 10. November l Lima, as well. Check me out doing the phonetic alphabet there. Just a couple of letters for you. woohoo. They're the only two I know, right? Moving on. What have we got here?

No, let's not do that one. Let's move on quickly 'cause time is pressing. this, has never happened to me. it was really interesting. Self-promotion. Apologies. I'll do it quickly. Dan, maybe, and I have got this plugin called Podcaster Plus, which enables you to create podcast players and theme your podcast website.

Quickly, and we put quite a lot of time and effort into it. And, but we never seen anybody using it apart from the beta testers. And they were doing it in limited ways. And then this week, Kathy z dropped a video where she's used it on her website using generate press and generate press elements.

and, and it was just lovely. So I just wanna say thank you to Kathy for creating a bit of content, which shows what the plugin can do. And both Dan and I were like, oh, it's so weird watching somebody else use this thing, that you've built. So that was quite nice. Links in the show notes.

Kathy has redone her. WordPress podcast website. And, she was just showing how you can do that with generate press and generate blocks. And then right at the very end, she introduces our little thing so that you can, you can make the players look unique. So there we go. this has been really fascinating to watch.

This is again, got a load attraction and probably for good reason. Ollie, from Mike McAllister, Ollie, has had for a little while a, a menu designer, I say a little while, a, few weeks, a menu designer whereby you can create your WordPress navigation in a full site editing theme, using blocks.

And I think it's fair to say that the native, the core version of the options available for navigation are. Let's go with limited, let's use that word. and so Mike has come along and dropped what was a pro plugin, and I believe pretty much all of the features that were in the pro, that shipped with the pro version of his theme, is now encapsulated in this free thing.

I think there's a couple of like edge case features that haven't been included. Anyway, the round of applause across the social web has been fairly dramatic actually. Lots of people applauding loudly. Not only that he's done this, but also the product itself. Many people seem to use it and thinking, actually this is it.

I could be wrong about this, but I have, a recollection that Ma Mullenweg. Even suggested it was maybe core worthy. Yep. Yep. In, it was on Twitter when Matt had replied to, Mike's comment about having this ready, he was nudging, contributed to core, and I think it was done in a okay way.

[01:13:42] Courtney Robertson: Like it wasn't gimme your proprietary code kind of a thing. And so I love seeing that Mike is doing this. Mike was known when Ollie was getting off the ground for having an onboarding wizard, and that kind of created a little kerfuffle at a time because it was not the normal way that themes did things to have Oh, yeah.

Dependency on a plugin. Yeah. I have just so enjoyed Mike's willingness to continue forward with this. I do use the Ollie theme on my site, and so I had early access to test out this plugin. I have been the person to write the lesson plan on learn.wordpress.org many times revising it about, FSEs, sorry, we don't say FS e anymore.

That's been a thing for a couple years. We say site editor. Yes. Yeah. And so in site editor, I was the one that handled on learn.wordpress.org for a number of years, continually revising the content of the menu editor because it was just Limited. So I'm really hoping, I'm just gonna not use other words.

I'll just say Okay. Yeah. but I'm really hoping to see that maybe this will come into the site editor experience bits of this at least because it is such a, more intuitive way of laying out what you want in your menu and has more features available to it. just the, mechanics for somebody that is new to site editor of Fussing with the menu is probably the area of site editor I most want to see improved.

[01:15:09] Nathan Wrigley: There's, there's loads of screenshots on the.org repo with it, and you just get an idea, you can basically build more or less anything, that you'd imagine. And obviously Mike does an incredible job of putting screenshots where he really demonstrates how, amazing you can make it.

So anyway, Bravo, Tim, Michelle, anything on that? I love Mike's stuff. I, he makes things so I can make things that, yeah, there you go. Look rubbish. something like Davey Security one oh one.com is running. Ollie, like Courtney, I had access to this a few weeks, over the previous weeks. It's just easy.

[01:15:48] Tim Nash: I understand it. It's, doesn't it, fits into site editing well without ne and it doesn't feel like it's different and unique. I got confused the other day when it wasn't on a site and then I remembered that it was actually part of something, there was something I had to install. So even in a very short space of time, I just would like, where's my menu template?

Why have I not built one yet? That's strange. Yeah. Isn't there one there by default? No. No. Tim, there isn't. No. And, just, you can probably answer this 'cause you played with it. Does it use core tools? I think it does. Yeah. Ev it, it's all just ultimately behind the scene patterns and just a tiny little switching option, in there.

It's brilliant as far as you are concerned. it feels totally native and it's only, the only bit that it's doing is where it's displaying it. Okay. Okay. Interesting. So there we go. A general round of applause, I think for, Mike McAllister's. Ollie, what is it called exactly? Again? Ollie Menu Designer.

[01:16:48] Nathan Wrigley: Completely free available. read the description and actually if you want a more in-depth. Approach. There's this, on the Pository by Ray Moray. She talks about it and obviously has a back and forward conversation with Mike McAllister. Also just worth emphasizing, it's, you don't need Ollie, it will work with any science.

[01:17:05] Tim Nash: Oh, good point. Yeah. So Steam, I realize we kept saying the word Ollie. Yes. A lot. And in fact, I don't think he calls it Ollie's menu. I think it's just menu designer in the plugin. Okay. Okay. Thank you. It's Ali Menu designer on the repo. yeah. I was trying to defend him. How, yeah. so yeah.

[01:17:24] Nathan Wrigley: Widespread applause. Bravo. There we go. have a look at, raise post on the repository if you wish to learn. More. okay. Very quickly, we'll go through these as quickly as we can. this is a developer blog article, so you know, there's not a lot of point in me going through it 'cause it's things that you in a tutorial wouldn't maybe implement for yourself.

But just to say that in the forthcoming version of WordPress 6.9, there is a new developer option, which is, border Radius presets. I think, I think Justin mentioned this and there was a little bit of clamoring on social saying, why are we, I don't know, lauding such basic things as border radius in WordPress core.

'cause it's there and it's cool to have. And, not everything can be amazing, Would it have been nice to have this a little while ago? Yeah, of course it would. But now we have it. And, Justin will explain, how you can implement that if you, I don't know, have a theme of your own, for example.

Anybody want to go into that? No. Okay. Great. In which case I will keep going. I didn't put this one in. So this is over to Courtney. This is WP Ally. Docs update September, 2025. Yeah, the Docs update is the title of the article's, not the most important part, but the important part there to know is the knowledge base is ready to contribute.

[01:18:43] Courtney Robertson: So you see that the, accessibility team is working on having its own knowledge base, and the address for that right now [email protected]. and they need folks to come and contribute. And so I'm excited to see where this is going. They've got a section there that I need to look into, like standards and best practices, testing for accessibility.

I'm excited to see, where, what the direction of this project is. I think it could be really helpful for a lot of folks that need to get up to speed about accessibility, to have a good definitive place and coming from a WordPress lens. Of things. It will hopefully help us with the how to do this inside of WordPress in particular, not just that there are lots of accessibility resources out there, but how do we, in particular bring more accessibility into WordPress using the normal WordPress interface that we have?

[01:19:37] Nathan Wrigley: Very neat. Indeed. so I'll link to both articles, but the, probably the most salient one is this one, WP accessibility.org is gonna be the new home for the, knowledge base, if you like, the documentation surrounding WP accessibility going forward. There's already an awful lot on there, but obviously yes.

Courtney said and come contribute. Okay. Yeah, of course. Yeah. there's a menu item in the sidebar on the left, which, is how to contribute, and there's a whole bunch of different bits and pieces that you can read there for yourself. There were two pieces here, but I'm only gonna do one, Tim, and was it, oh gosh, that didn't come.

Was it this one? That was the preferred one, yes. Yeah, so this is a plugin. It's on GitHub, it's called Block. Logins with CloudFlare and not block as in WordPress block, but block as in stop. we all know what CloudFlare does, but what does this do? so you published this so you should know. yeah, I do.

[01:20:34] Tim Nash: So the quick answer is that, quite often when we try to block bad bots from logging into your site, you will, most people will have come across plugins that will just say after five attempts go, I'm not letting you in anymore. Nearly always these involve storing the IP in the database and the bad actor comes along and uses the new ip.

Yeah. And so your database grows and grows and your login gets slower and slower They're generally really, they're the sort of thing that people think are really good for security, tend to be really terrible. The better solution is to get your host to do this for you. if however, you are in a scenario where your host is not using things like fail to ban or tar pitting on various other methods, you might be using CloudFlare, in which case.

What do you mean better if CloudFlare has blocked it all for you? this plugin does exactly that. Yeah. So instead of storing the ips in your local database so that they hit your site and you consume your resources, you, it basically updates, cloudflare's rules and blocks the bad bots at that level, at the CloudFlare level.

Meaning it never hits your site, it's never using your resources and gives you a much, you are not gonna be slowing yourself down by ineffectively, dossing yourself by trying to in the first place. Yeah, that doesn't sound good. That does sense. so it's quite cool. it's on GitHub. I ha cannot vouch for whether it's at what it's like in terms of the code because I say this is something that Nathan threw in front of me about.

An hour and 20 minutes ago. Yeah, it's, there you go. Yeah. Yeah. cavi mTOR, go and check it out. First. can I ask you a totally random question? Know? Time is short. So this is directed 42. Yeah. what was that? Nevermind. You said the word random and I said 42. I did miss that. the, but she said it like a lic.

[01:22:23] Michelle Frechette: Do you have any intuition in the future? CloudFlare is gonna be an institution that we worry about in the same way that like 15 years ago, everybody thought that Google was this perfect, company. I'm sorry. You, don't think that we already consider this to be a really scary point? so yes.

[01:22:41] Tim Nash: Is the long and the short of it would be Yes. But do you have any intuition that people are relying on this one single point of failure? More and more Yes. we live in a world where, in fact, and if you've gotta look at scary points of infrastructure failure, you have CloudFlare, you have Amazon, yeah.

AWS and those two together, you can then argue things like Azure and Google Cloud. Once you've got, if you have any, an infrastructure problem that hits both CloudFlare and AWS. On the East coast, half the internet ceases to be. Yes. It's crazy. It's just, and, we're not just talking the web.

So as in websites, so much infrastructure runs through CloudFlare Yeah. That we would be losing. And so many services that maybe not actually are even HTTP based, go through cloudflare's infrastructure, go through AWS's infrastructure. yeah, we have these giant points of failure. CloudFlare is a really good example of a company that does awesome stuff and I actively want support.

And at the same time, I actively don't implement a lot of the stuff that we, that they use because I do not want to be caught up in CloudFlare being inevitably something going wrong. their positions, whether that's a political position, whether that is technical issues, whether that's a bunch of just them becoming more evil than they already are.

[01:24:00] Nathan Wrigley: There. That exactly that point is what concerns me is that you just don't know how they're gonna be in the future. No. But you don't know how any company's gonna be any organization. No, exactly. and we have so many good organizations that turn evil. Yeah. And so many bad companies that we, there have been companies that we, collectively say are these are really bad companies who've changed their minds.

[01:24:21] Tim Nash: And actually you end up in really weird scenarios where you're starting to say things like Microsoft, they're really good eggs, aren't they? yeah, exactly. Ta Tacho sums it up. He says, CloudFlare is problematically large, but so far at least they seem to be the good guys on the web. That's why I made the point about Google.

[01:24:37] Nathan Wrigley: Google for me were the good guys on the web. And then suddenly at some point I woke up and went, hang on. No, that all changed what went wrong there, and then it's too late, you're already embedded and everybody's addicted to what they do. He then goes on site and that was only a fraction of what could happen.

I presume he's talking about CrowdStrike there, which, Cameron Jones mentioned, which was a problem we had a little while ago, and then David and says, yeah, a few companies control the majority of the web. Yeah. It was more from not, the technical bit obviously, but also the ethical bit and whether or not they become coerced by a nation state to do certain things in certain ways and that kind of thing.

Anyway, that was just very quickly we're fundamentally destroying the concept of a web. If we, consolidate down to three or four major companies that control everything, it is no longer a distributed system. And that generally is a bad thing, whether you like it or not, you don't want everything going through just three or four companies.

I would like to draw everybody's attention to, now that you've just said that, I quickly looked it up. Go and listen to this one. Dave Weiner, on decentralization and open publishing and things like that. A really interesting episode with a, an absolute stalwart of the internet. it goes back right to the beginnings.

The Tim Burners Lee sort of days and things like that. Had a chat with him over on the tavern, right? Time is really short. Which ones are we gonna cover? it turns out the UK want to have access to your iCloud data. They've wanted this for ages, but I think Apple said no, because you want the entire world's data.

So now the UK government have come back and said, but we only want the UK's. citizens' Data. So we'll see how this, plays out. I'm curious. I'm just watching Tim's face to see. He's got a sort of slightly frowny, unexpectedly, Tim, are you an Android user? No, I'm not. but if I was, I've already lost my data, so I'm quite pleased that, ah, that's true.

[01:26:30] Tim Nash: Google, give it away. You just, yeah, you're just, you just lost it to somebody else. so anyway, that's the thing. Keep your eye on that. maybe more in the spirit of the open web. This is interesting. So this is over on the Social Web Foundation website, and I'll link to the actual thing in a moment.

[01:26:46] Nathan Wrigley: This is a, a move by Blue Sky who obviously now have, I dunno if it's really growing anymore, but certainly for a while it was growing at a reasonable rate. Blue sky. Imagine it like a Twitter X alternative. They have now per, they've planted their flag in the sand a little bit with this thing called the Patent Non Aggression Pledge.

You can find that here. Obviously I don't speak legal language, but. Basically in the future, I'll read it and you can make of it what you want. It goes like this, and I'm sure maybe there's more to it than this. Blue sky social will not enforce any of the patents on any software invention, blue Sky Social owns, nor in the future, except against a party who files threatens or voluntarily participates in a claim for patent infringement, blah, blah, blah.

This pledge is intended to be a legally binding statement. And then there's some more bits and pieces. Essentially what they're saying is, we are gonna be the good guys. We're gonna do the right thing, and we're not gonna go after people for patent infringement and things like that. I don't know whether this is washing or not, but Tim, I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that you can't have a thing that enforces in, perpetuity, in something like that.

[01:27:58] Tim Nash: So they're basically the, and forever part could be over risen with We've changed our minds. Yeah. Okay. yeah. it was, again, this got a lot of attention from a lot of the people who I admire in this space. On the sort of open side of things, they seem to think that it was, it's positive, conceived.

[01:28:15] Nathan Wrigley: But maybe like you said, there's, there's some more thoughts. Sure. There's a get outta jail for therefore when they do, have to That's right. the hidden clause four, which, we're not actually gonna release anyway. There you go. If you are using the social web, this might be something that you're interested in.

What have we got, enough time, Ruby? I don't think we have, I don't think we've got, maybe just this one. Should we just touch on this one very quickly? This is, this came from Courtney. this was from you, Courtney, right? It is, yeah. So the, pulse check on wider open source, Nathan glossed through, there's some drama over in the Ruby community, DHH saying things.

[01:28:56] Courtney Robertson: Matt has. I had his blogging back and forth previously with the hh, and now we're seeing Eric Raymond, who is the author of the Cathedral in the Bazaar, which is one of those fundamental principles under a lot of open source, calling for an end to code of conduct. And so what we're seeing, in some large figureheads in open source, the open web is on par with what we're seeing in global politics right now.

this idea of ending a code of conduct is alarming to me because when things are opaque, when there is not a standard to know what is appropriate and not appropriate, it, it is detrimental to. The bizarre in, in, in Eric's case, the cathedral and the bazaar. The bazaar is the marketplace where people come and build the big cathedral essentially.

And so Morton has a lot to say on that one, Morton Rand Hendrickson. But this idea of getting rid of a code of conduct, it's saying we have no. And we're only here to focus on just the software, not the community, not the people involved in creating this software. And so that puts the individuals that contribute to this at risk.

I really hope that we don't see what Eric is proposing make its way into other open source projects. Eric is known for having, some other opinions that are equally as savory or unsavory, depending upon your mindset. I will, post this. We obviously haven't had a chance to really dig into the weeds of it, but this is on the it's foss.com website.

[01:30:35] Nathan Wrigley: It's called The Man Who Started Open Source in Initiative advocates for abolishing Codes of Conduct. You can read it for yourself, but he basically is arguing that codes of such codes, and I'm gonna quote from the article, such codes have failed their stated purpose entirely rather than fostering collaboration.

He claims they have been ConEd. Tools for causing disruption and he now believes that it really should be encapsulated with this one sentence. The code of conduct should be removed and everything should be written under this one guideline. If you are more annoying to work with than your contribution, than your contributions justify, you will be ejected.

I. Don't really know how to pause that because there's a lot of, subjective stuff in there. Annoying to whom? Yeah. Yeah. Quite Anyway, interesting to see that some, some things are moving in one direction. we saw the blue sky thing there. Trying to at least go in one direction. And we obviously got these people, DHH from Ruby and now, what was this guy's called again?

Eric. Eric Raymond. Ah, thank you. I really like Cameron Jones' comment. Oh, thank you. Cameron has said the following, there's some drama in the Aruba com communities, like saying there's been a little debate in the Middle East. Yes, thank you. Yes. Do you know what? We don't have time to dig in. That's exactly it.

We could literally develop like three hours and still not get to the bottom of the, the Ruby community problem, I think. but maybe that's for another time. Add to what Courtney has said, I think that it would be detrimental to our community at large to get rid of our codes of conduct, having been the target of, bullying in our community in the past.

[01:32:17] Michelle Frechette: Same, having done the, the training to be somebody who helps keep people within the code of conduct and understanding what both sides of that look like. And the recent article that I've seen saying that somebody has been removed from our community for misappropriating funds through Word Camp. Yeah, I think it's really important that we have a set of guidelines, and, nothing is black and white, right?

What is bullying? How can bullying be construed? What is the harm of any particular act? That's where people come in and have the ability to look at each situation and make value judgments about harm to keep those in our community safe. I have big shoulders bully me, and, I'm not gonna be as, I'm not gonna be drummed out of our community.

But there are people who are working their way into the community and who don't have as tough a skin or as big a shoulders as I do, who would feel incredibly, othered and less likely to continue to contribute or begin to contribute if they were the target of some of those things. And so I would argue vehemently that we need to keep code of conduct in place.

[01:33:32] Courtney Robertson: When I experienced the bullying, that led to me taking some years away from WordPress, there was no code of conduct yet. And there were no standards, and certainly no one was going to uphold those. And so I think the impetus is that if we have a set of standards that it applies throughout the organization and that helps ensure the mental wellbeing.

Because a lot of people that are new to contributing to open source don't understand to even look for a code of conduct. They're just new. They don't know what to do if something goes wrong until they're in the situation if something's going wrong. And so how do we, protect folks that are in that realm, and ensure that they become aware of a code of conduct?

I love how at Linux Foundation events, we see the code of conduct on a rollup banner right by the check-in desk. And I feel like that is, you may not stop and read the whole thing, but at least you can't be completely unaware either. Because it's almost an obstacle. And it is when you go to, it's the fine print when you go to buy tickets to things, right?

Yep. But I feel like it is really important for us to watch as a community that we know what are our standards of your newer. Check into our codes of conduct, check into what is appropriate at events or not check into what is appropriate conduct When you're contributing to any of the teams and throughout the organization entirely, we need to make sure that we're upholding those standards for everybody in the project.

Yeah. a pithy way to end it is from, is from Tacho who says, what I'm reading in that quote is that you can be a huge dick, as long as you invest lots of time in doing so. that is not the title of this week's episode. That is, that's far too long. I just meant that three word phrase in the middle.

[01:35:20] Michelle Frechette: Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Oh, no, there's one sure. Five way to be canceled. And it was, this is not only fans, he's carrying on. Tacho has more say, yeah. He says at the Open Source Summit Europe, I completely missed the, COC What code of conduct? Oh. Oh dear. Why did I not get that? during the opening remarks, that's something most all word camps could.

[01:35:44] Nathan Wrigley: could do better. I'm presuming, just one very final thing, 'cause I want to echo everything that both Michelle and Courtney have said, but also just add one tiny thing. A code of conduct is completely worthless if it's not being enforced, implemented. Absolutely. Exactly. Yeah. Will Rogers said good fences make good neighbors.

[01:36:02] Michelle Frechette: And that is that when we have a sets of boundaries, we know how to operate within that community and that's what that code of conduct does for us. Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. I like it. Okay. There we go. So thank you. time is up. We've overextended. I'm really sorry about that for everybody. did, oh no, sorry.

[01:36:21] Nathan Wrigley: I will just put this into the record 'cause Tacho wants to qualify it. No, he's saying that word camp's already. Do better. Sorry, I missed that. An open source summit did. Yes. Yeah. Thank you. okay. so there we go. Thank you to anybody who made a comment that as I said, it keeps the whole conversation going.

It's wonderful to hear your thoughts. Appreciate that. Also, obviously it goes without saying that it's very nice for to be joined by other, can you imagine a show where I was joined by nobody and it was me just waffling on Oh, you have all those comments in the YouTube channel to that's true.

That's true. Oh, no, I don't think anybody wants to imagine that. but so thank you to you three. So just imagine what randomness would come outta your mouth. yeah, probably a lot. I'm looking forward to the day when I can just be replaced by ai. I feel the ba, the barrier's quite low. To reflect, Halloween is coming up and Michelle needs a costume idea.

[01:37:12] Courtney Robertson: Oh, Halloween is coming up and Michelle needs maybe, she'll just have an AI version up here. Yes. Yeah. You can do an AI generated background that might just cut the mustard then, but she, unfortunately I can't be on that episode this year. Oh no, that's true. Yeah. Outside appointments. So I'll be here, but damn, nevermind.

[01:37:33] Nathan Wrigley: sorry. Okay. So thank you to you, the audience. Thank you to our guests, firstly co-host, there. She's Michelle Cher. Thank you very much indeed. Tim Nash over there. thank you so much for all of your contributions and to Courtney over there as well. Thank you for your contributions. Really appreciate it.

We'll be back, in a week, hopefully something like that with another show, with a different panel. The only thing that it remains for me to do is to do the slightly humiliating hand wave. Do you know what I nearly said and I don't know why. Okay? This is random, right? I said it's don't, you've just started is random.

Wait. You wait until you hear what I'm about to say. Then you two will agree. It's quite random. I nearly said the, the humiliating hand wave of death. No, that just shows where your mind was going. What was going on? I'm not doing a hand wave now. No. You got it. Nathan, what of us were you looking at when you thought of this?

[01:38:28] Tim Nash: And do we need to go and see a doctor? I dunno where I was going with that. Maybe Nathan needs to see the doctor. We need help get Nathan help, get help. That's it. Thank you so much. We'll be back next week. Take it easy. If you three wanna hang around and have a little bit of a chat, that would be lovely as well.

[01:38:44] Nathan Wrigley: But, for the audience, certainly see you next time. And why can't I find the button to end it? It's because it's hidden behind a modal. And now the MOD's gone. Here we go. See you later. Bye bye. Bye. Bye bye.