Dear WordPress.com,

It’s been just over three months since I wrote my first missive to you about all of your ridiculous changes. In that three month period, that letter was read several thousand times. It was reblogged and shared over 100 times. It has 411 likes and 457 comments, mainly from people who agree with me.

Also, in that three months, not one person from WordPress even acknowledged its existence. You didn’t even respond when I portrayed your “Happiness Engineers” like so:

So, by default, I guess your “Happiness Engineers” must be over-enthusiastic puppies. While we’re at it, would you like to hire my dog? She’s excellent at destroying perfectly good things, and if she could type, I’m sure she’d use lots of exclamation points, so I think she’d make a great “Happiness Engineer.”

By the way, “Happiness Engineer” is just about the least apropos job title in history since we are still very unhappy. You have engineered nothing save the destruction of any customer satisfaction and good will.

There have been many changes since I first wrote to you, but none of them are good, so let’s revisit all the ways you are sucking at business, shall we?

Post Editor

I don’t want to go all sweary on you in the first section, because you might stop reading here (my potty mouth could be why you didn’t respond to the last letter), so feel free to replace the Ms in the next two sentences with Fs when you read it.

Muck your post editor. Muck it right in its muckhole. It sucks in every single way that a thing is capable of sucking. It sucks now just like it sucked when you rolled it out a few months ago, only now, you’ve even taken the option away to switch to the old one.

I tolerated this for a while, until the other day when I went to add more posts to the Editors’ Picks widget (FOG Favorites in the sidebar) that is peculiar to my theme from this box…

…which does not exist in your new nightmaresauce Beep Beep Boop editor. Instead of merely clicking on “Edit,” I had to click a thousand more times and do a thousand searches in the “All Posts” section of the dashboard just to use features THAT I PAID FOR. Muck you.

So, I complained again in your forum. Here’s part of what I wrote:

And your response:

No reason, no explanation–just, “We’ve decided not to add these,” right before you tell me what I already told you I know.

Also, apologies and exclamation points don’t typically work well together. “I apologize that I ran over your cat… twice!” Can you see how that might sound insincere? Exclamation points work best with exclamatory statements (hence the name), e.g. “Beep Beep Boop is poppycock!”

Then, there’s this:

Why are you getting rid of features like post revisions and copy a post? I use both of those a lot. I’ve yet to hear a compelling reason for any of this. You must be tired of all of these complaints by now, but seriously, WHY?

Guess which editor I’m using to write this post? Go on, take a guess. Don’t be shy.

Notifications

You know how I look at my notifications? With this bookmark: https://wordpress.com/notifications. I never use your idiotic drop-down menu if I can help it, because it’s absolutely pointless. Reading comments in a squished column on the far right is rather inconvenient, unnecessary and quite dumb.

Do you realize that most people leave more than two-word comments? Yet, two lines is all the room you’ve afforded each comment in the menu. It’s not that the notifications archive at the link above is all that either, since I still have to click on each comment individually, but at least I can see the whole comment at once.

If done correctly, comments are a conversation. And I don’t mean a conversation like this: “Great job!” “Thanks! “High five!” but a real conversation with actual sentences. Your stupid drop-down notifications thing does nothing to foster conversation. In fact, it hinders it.

You did add the “you already replied to this comment, dummy” arrow back in, so thanks for that, but you shouldn’t have taken it away in the first place. Other than that, you’ve improved nothing about it since you foisted it upon us.

It’s hard to improve a pile of dung, because at the end of the day, a pile of dung with perfume on it is still just a pile of dung. In case you didn’t catch that, yes, I mean to imply that your notifications menu is a pile of dung.

Since you still insist that all we need is a perfumed pile of dung instead of real functionality, I’m just going to quote what I wrote last time. It’s still salient:

Comments are an integral part of having a blog. The conversation starts when we hit publish. What on earth would make you think that a dumbass little drop down menu incapable of expanding would be good enough?

Stats

Now that I’m going through this, I don’t even know why I’m writing you a second letter, since so much of the first one is still valid, including this:

For your information, I don’t use your new stats page, because I’m a professional graphic designer and it offends my design sensibilities, but for the purposes of this post, I just took a look at it.

I see you’ve reduced the line spacing and squished another column into the space for one. Why would you squeeze two columns on the right, yet leave the ridiculously large left-hand column that doesn’t need to be there at all?

What is better about your new stats page from your perspective? Really, I would like to know why you think it’s better, because I’m not seeing it. There’s nothing better about the information that’s contained there and there’s certainly nothing better about the design. It hurts my eyes.

Miscellany

Just so we’re clear, your improvements are still unwanted, dumb and not even improvements, but since my Gram used to say there are no complaints without alternatives, here is what I would like you to do.

Post Editor:

1. Get rid of Beep Beep Boop in the regular web interface. If you want to leave it for mobile users, that’s fine. I don’t care, since I don’t write posts on my phone.
2. Barring that, add the functions that we need to it, including post revisions, copy a post and theme-specific options that I paid for.
3. If you’re unwilling to do that, give us the option to switch to the classic editor again. Having to go through the dashboard just to edit a post is incredibly frustrating and time-consuming for no reason.

Notifications:

1. If you insist on leaving the stupid drop-down notifications, put the link to the notifications archive back. Seriously, put it back. Having to read my comments through a bookmark is ridiculous and so very 1990s.

Stats:

1. Hire a graphic designer. That page is ugly as all get out.

General:

1. Stop taking features away from us.
2. Stop using exclamation points in your oblique responses. Exclamation points don’t make us any happier to hear that you’re ignoring our questions and opinions again.
3. Give us a reason why.

So, there you go. There are your action items for the next quarter. I look forward to getting all the things you’ve taken away from me back.

Thanks in advance,
Goldfish

P.S. In case you’re still not getting it, here’s a visual metaphor:

WordPress is the horse. Your “improvements” are the tree. Your customers and source of income are the rider. Cut down the tree.