I enjoy the StackExchange model very much. It’s Q&A with a social twist, as your peers upvote your answers and increase your site reputation. I have been off-and-on active on StackOverflow, the programmer-focused Q&A site, for two years now, dropping in occasionally to answer a few questions when I need to switch gears. Participating in WordPress Answers (as it’s canonically known) has been a whole new experience, starting with the empty canvas of a website, participating in meta, being a more involved member of a community that is still in its infancy.

If WordPress is a part of your online life, I encourage you to help out by asking or answering questions. Do you have a problem with WordPress you just can’t figure out on your own? Can you remember a question from your past that could benefit someone else if it were archived on the site? Do you want to challenge yourself and improve your skills by helping others with WordPress?

Get in on the ground level.

“WordPress Answers,” the StackExchange-powered question and answer site for WordPress, has made it out of Area 51 and into a week-long private beta.

So what’s the legality around creating a new publishing platform that uses the same WordPress function names (but none of the WordPress code), effectively making it compatible with WordPress themes?

What if I already had written a publishing platform in the public domain, using different function names for themes, then wrote a compatibility layer so that someone could drop WordPress themes into my application? What if someone then wrote a theme intending it for my application and its compatibility layer, and WordPress compatibility was not a consideration for that developer? The theme would work in WordPress, but would not require WordPress in order to function.

I believe in open source and the GPL. I don’t believe you should shove it down peoples’ throats. Yes, the WordPress developers have put a lot of time and effort into creating this code base with the intention of it being open source. Obviously the Thesis folks shouldn’t have copied code, but don’t let that muddy the discussion: WordPress takes a lot of effort, but so does theme and plugin development. A commercial theme does not diminish the open source foundation it sits upon, nor does it make that foundation any less open.

Nethaera's Post about the Real ID Change

Blizzard today announced an upcoming change to the way users are represented on the official forums: included with each post will be the user’s real name. Obviously, the shitstorm was immediate and intense. (Over 5,000 posts in the four hours after the announcement, not to mention all the other threads the change has spawned. Update: 12,500 posts after 7.5 hours.)

The highlights:

• Your real name will show up next to your forum posts.
• You may optionally pick a character name to display alongside your real name.
• This change will affect the new forums going live around the Cataclysm release, so existing posts will not be affected.

I have an opinion, but maybe not the opinion one might expect if you’ve ever had a conversation with me about privacy and freedom.

People have the right to privacy. I believe this right does not need to be defended: there is no “but what about…” here. There are a variety of defenses, of course, be they medical, religious, sexual, or political, to name a few, but I think the desire to act in private is itself enough. The “honest people have nothing to hide” argument is ignorant at best and dangerous at worst.

Not every space is a private space, though. My home, the contents of computer, my browser history, are private (or at least I consider them private), but many of the spaces I frequent are public. In, say, a park, you have the right to take a photograph, even if I am in the frame. I do not have the same right to privacy that I have in my home.

Historically, the World of Warcraft (WoW) forums offered a level of privacy. You could create characters on any of the multitude of servers and post as those characters, rather than your “main” character, effectively hiding your identity from everyone but Blizzard employees. There are many potential uses of this feature, some good (asking opinions about your guild leader’s controversial decision) and some bad (trolling or threatening posters).

I am not against Blizzard displaying the poster’s real name next to their post. I think it will reduce the number of posters on the site (good) and result in more thoughtfully constructed posts (also good).

John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory

NPR recently ran a piece entitled “Website Editors Strive To Rein In Nasty Comments.” It elaborates on John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, which posits that Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad (“Shitcock!”). I believe that the addition of real names to the forums will prevent many of the flame wars from starting as people consider that the words they say become part of their online identity. I also believe that it’s harder to berate someone when you see their name on the screen in front of you. Picture two forum posters, Happycowlol and Dave Burkhart. Both post the same question as they struggle with basic game mechanics. How likely are you to tell Dave to log off and delete WoW, particularly if your comment is signed with your real name?

Blizzard recently added Real ID Friends to World of Warcraft. You can add a person to your buddy list and see them online, no matter which game they are playing or which character or server they’re playing on. This is opt-in: you explicitly grant the right to be your Real ID friend and see you online. Likewise, posting on the forums is a choice. If privacy is your concern, there are hundreds of other forums, some of which may even attempt to protect your data. I do not believe Blizzard is obligated to provide users with an anonymous (or quasi-anonymous) message board. On the contrary, I believe this is one of the best things they could do to foster real discussion and discourage trolls.

Some constructive, helpful, genuinely good posters will be driven away by this change. But they have not had any of their rights taken away from them. They are still anonymous in the game, they have just lost the ability to be anonymous on the forums.

Update: There’s an additional blue post over on the European forums:

Posted by Wryxian on 2010-07-07 12:17:

We have been planning this change for a very long time. During this time, we have thought ahead about the scope and impact of this change and predicted that many people would no longer wish to post in the forums after this change goes live. We are fine with that, because we want to change these forums dramatically in a positive and more constructive direction.

It’s been very obvious over the last few years that the forums are an exceptionally valuable source of information both for players and for us to gather feedback. There are many threads on this forum now, and over the last few years, that people have been constructively discussing many aspects of the game. They’ve received new wisdom and have then been able to go back to the game and enjoy it further with the new knowledge acquired through the forums.

These threads, however, can often be lost amongst a great deal of other threads that are basically filled with trolling, name calling, flaming, off-topic conversations and that’s just a small amount of some of the content that has been found in these forums over the years. We don’t want that anymore, and we believe the Real ID change will bring about a lot of the improvement that we are hoping for.

There’s a lot of scare-mongering going on about the change, but there seems a need to make something very clear. The forums have always been an optional extra — something you can choose to participate in if you wish to. With our Real ID changes for the forums, this is still the case. The only difference will be, if you do choose to participate in the forums, then you will do so by using your real name. But only after you’ve been warned and accepted this in advance.

Can’t wait to use the custom post types feature.

Marshall has always been an amazing thing to behold. To be a first-time father with essentially no baby experience, everything was brand new. Like many things in life, it is moments of joy that bury any lack thereof. You easily forget the diaper disasters, the lost sleep, the crying fits you are powerless to end. Everyone experiences these, but to see your child sleeping peacefully, to hold him as he rests against your chest, to watch him smile and laugh and stand and walk and eat for the first time, those are the moments we all live for.

I have always loved my son, but I have looked forward to this time in his life. Babies can feel unknowable at times, but my son is no longer a baby. He will hold my hand and lead me into his “Sun Room,” pull me to the floor and have me sit down, and hand me an instrument while he positions himself in front of his piano. He sings songs, he repeats words with understanding. Last night I asked him to take the clothespin I was holding, and slide it under the door to the basement stairs. He did so with great determination and seriousness, pushing the pin under the door, laying prone on his belly.

These are not trivial things.

His words surprise us, and he finds new ones every day. He joins many of them together, now. “Bye bye <pause> Bella. Bye bye <pause> Neko.” (He has recently found his “k,” and can say “Neko” instead of “Nono.”) “Blue sky,” “sunny day.” Food is an important part of his vocabulary. People. Emotions. “Happy baby,” “hurt,” “stop it” (frustration). And, though we aren’t really sure where it came from, “Happy birthday,” iterating birthday wishes to everyone he can remember.

There is this explosion of activity, and it catches me by surprise when I look back through time. I can clearly remember those first months in the old apartment, tenderly holding this new person who I barely knew. Now he is becoming his own person. The person I looked forward to meeting for so long.

You are almost two years old, Marshall. I resolve to give you all my love, and always put you first. May I never take you for granted.

Red highlights added by me. I wonder if Google has policies regarding this type of ad layout. I think having this poor a ratio of content to ads dilutes all the advertising. Whatever the case, I hate wading through this many ads in search of the article.

In today’s Penny-Arcade post, Jerry Holkins writes:

I find myself waiting with bated breath for each chapter of Arena.net’s ongoing manifesto. I mentioned as much, casually, in a dashed-off chirp while I was doing something else, and received a response to the effect that it was “too late” and that they’d “never beat WoW.” Preparing my response, I shifted my feet to leverage the water-slicing stroke of the suio-ryu school. It was very mean, as I can be sometimes, but what I felt wasn’t anger – it was something akin to nausea. In the end, I couldn’t respond with my blade.

As an aesthetic vision, “defeating World of Warcraft commercially” basically fucking sucks. It’s everything that is wrong with everything, and the looking glass moment here is that this didn’t come from Bobby Kotick or some tertiary corporate marketing organ, swollen with tar – it came from the community. We get infected with this horse race bullshit, and then we wonder why we end up with a truncation of this medium’s Goddamned potential.

Related, Dion Almaer tweets in response to an article on Wired, “Will the Mobile Web Kill Off the App Store?”

“Kill.” is a strong word. Black and white. Media-like. The mobile Web can be everywhere

A few days ago a high school freshman got on my case for being a Mac user. Really? This still happens in a world of iPods and iPhones? I honestly had zero interest in participating in that argument. It’s 2010. I’m 27 years old. I have, very literally, been defending my use of the Macintosh since before this kid was born. Do an old guy a favor and find something else to talk about.

The Desire for Monoculture

There is a theme, here: a perception that there is one way to do things, and no other path is appropriate. I find this idea offensive. There are six and a half billion people in the world with varying needs and interests and requirements. You can make a glass of water that everyone enjoys, but outside that it’s a matter of taste.

Maybe I am more sensitive to this issue because I was a diehard Mac user for so long, and felt the need defend myself against detractors. Over time, the Mac OS has always met my needs. If it did not, I would move on like any rational person. To have someone find out I’m a Mac user and profess, “You can’t play games on that,” or something equally irrelevant was tiresome. I had my Nintendo for games. I had my Mac for music, or the web, or whatever the flavor of the year was. Different expectations, different tools, and different tasks. I wouldn’t buy a blender and get mad when it fails to toast my bread, and I didn’t get mad when my Mac failed to run Counter-Strike. Judging without understanding is just bigotry.

A Google search for “iphone killer” yields 19,300,000 results. I think this is counterproductive. It makes us seem like such binary creatures, when in reality it is the shades of gray that make things interesting. Choice is power. Creativity is our best reason for existence.

I like my Palm Pre, and I confess I am an advocate for the webOS platform, but having the Pre “kill” all other platforms would not somehow validate my choice. The presence of the iPhone and Android do not diminish my enjoyment of the Pre. Ultimately the markets (by virtue of sales figure) have the final say in these matters, but I can’t help but make my case.

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” There doesn’t have to be one platform, just as there doesn’t have to be one voice, and no one else can decide which solution is more valuable to me.