It’s time for my annual WordPress Simple History plugin update post. Our ad-free version from last year is up and still in use and we’re updating it now. Our development team accidentally installed the pay version from WordPress again, reminding me of just what kind of ransomware Pär Thernström (aka Bonny) has turned his WordPress utility into.

Here’s the pricing screen.

I’ve circled where we’d fall in Thernstrom’s pricing scheme: the twenty or so sites where we’d want to run Simple History would cost us $500/year. It’s not just the money. This is another subscription, there’s all kinds of ads and interruption-ware built into Simple History. People like Yoast and Syed Balkhi have been pushing the boundaries of what’s allowed in the WordPress interface. Instead of improving his plugin, Thernstrom has been studying those boundaries of annoyance-ware and has been programming every single one in.

Thernstrom is a smart guy, which is why Simple History was such a great plugin. Now that he’s moved to the dark side, he’s been very successful at making Simple History almost impossible to use in the free version.

Anikin Skywalker was one of the finest Jedi, before he betrayed the Jedi.

Yes, it is. Although Matt Mullenweg and his minions in the plugin directory should have cut off this kind of behaviour early. Mullenweg gave all the plugin home page spots to himself and to those few plugin authors who gave him big money. When this kind of nepotism is built into the project, no wonder rats infest the ship.

The WordPress.org plugin page home page should have been dedicated to showing off the best free plugins for WordPress not advertising Automattic’s spyware like JetPack and the most nuisance-filled and scamridden SEO plugins.

But the “it’s his right” talk runs straight into a wall, which is the GPL v2. Simple History is FOSS. If the plugin author loses his mind or turns the plugin into ransomware, anyone can fork the code. Which is exactly what we did one year ago, and exactly what we’ve done here.

Here’s the kind of petty sabotage which Thernström has built into free Simple History:

/**
 * Update from db version 8 to version 9.
 *
 * Stores retention days in the database so it autoloads
 * and avoids an extra DB query on every page load.
 * Fresh installs: 30 days. Existing installs: 60 days.
 */
private function setup_version_8_to_version_9() {
  if ( $this->get_db_version() !== 8 ) {
    return;
  }

  $retention_days = $this->is_fresh_install ? 30 : 60;
  update_option( 'simple_history_retention_days', $retention_days, true );

  $this->update_db_to_version( 9 );
}

Any new user of Simple History gets only 30 days with a free install. If a publisher already has Simple History installed, Thernstrom does not dare cripple Simple History to that extent. He gets 60 days. The whole Simple History plugin is now filled with this kind of petty sabotage of the free version.

If the free version still worked as well as it always did, and had not become the worst kind of nagware and crippleware, we wouldn’t have to publish a clean version.

1. Simple History no longer steals a spot in the left hand menu (way too many secondary and even tertiary plugins do this, again the plugin directory executives should have stomped out this behaviour early: special permission should be required to take a left hand menu spot) but appears under the site name, which is an underused piece of real estate where Simple History naturally fits.

2. There’s no advertising anywhere.

3. Hovering over a user name no longer shows blurred-out popup box, but a working link to see all the user activity.

Here’s before and after:

4. The Log retention duration can be set in Hidden Settings section:

I’ve donated $200+ to the Simple History project and contributed ideas to its development. I’m not saying that Pär Thernström does not deserve our support. Yes, he does but not on these terms. The current pricing would be well-suited to lifetime licenses. Otherwise, 20 sites should be about $100/year. Under the current model, the only people who get a fair shake from Pär Thernström are web hosts where 500 sites are $1000/year.

I’d like to suggest that publishers buy Simple History from Pär or contribute to the plugin but at this point, I can’t. Simple History has become a cutthroat commercial project. Any publisher who wants or needs support for Simple History, though, you should buy a license. I’m not sure what the support is like. Pär is active on WordPress support forums.

I didn’t realise when I contributed both coin and time to the WordPress project for its first fifteen years that WordPress aims at the enterprise software market. If I had, I would have contributed nothing and I’d be a lot less bitter now.

Matt Mullenweg instead of wasting tens of thousands (is it hundreds of thousands yet) of man-hours on Gutenberg could very well have done a few useful things for WordPress. One would have been to sponsor Pär Thernström and include Simple History in core forever. There’s no way WordPress should be run without some kind of logging. Even for one writer publisher to be able to go through his or her site to check the Simple History logs for logins and login attempts is very useful. Simple History should be part of core.

While Mullenweg was at it, he could have built effective caching into the core of WordPress. Okay a few fanatics and high end websites with many millions of views would have to handroll some additional caching on top of the core caching, but some simple and effective caching should just be built-in. Why should every small publisher have to waste half a day or more on experimenting with and fighting with cache?

Now the best caching plugin is owned by a vulture capitalist holding company who is pulling the same kind of ransomeware shenanigans as one-man operation Pär Thernström.

Oh, and basic SEO should have been built into WordPress, if not from the start, from about five years in. Meta-description for instance. All with intelligent defaults. No writer should have to face the Yoast nonsense to publish their post sensibly.

WordPress instead of the warm community of developers and new publishers has turned into a circus of snakeoil salesmen running wild, each trying to con the other and more users. We’ve calculated it out: a new user who falls into the obvious traps will look at close to $1000/year in plugins just to start publishing – and that’s without ecommerce.

Matt, you started as a petty scammer when you were selling link spam to the highest bidder. You said you changed, but then you stole WooCommerce from its original development house. You ran WordPress in cahoots with Yoast, filling the dashboard with admin spam. You wasted all the goodwill from WordPress on the Gutenberg death march, turning our collective lean CMS (content management system) into a cheap (well expensive) page builder.

Last year you went on a belated crusade against WP Engine. I’ll even agree with you WP Engine is a bad actor in the community and something should have been done to make them either stop using WordPress IP or contribute more. But not the way you did it. If you are wondering why some organisations are so exploitative of the WordPress userbase, you should look in the mirror more often. The fish rots from the head.

Every bad tendency in WordPress you have either encouraged or doubled-down on.

Most of them are disgusted with the commercial turn WordPress took, and disenchanted with how difficult it is to improve the core software. We fought for six years for a 20x speed improvement in comment serving. Every other contribution was that painful. Everything has been done to make WordPress slow and to make it require a baron’s ransom in paid plugins to even function.

Almost all of us have left the building.

A few of us can still make the old ship sail. And we do.

But every day we run into nonsense which makes us say only junior developers who want to learn PHP and/or medium or large businesses should run WordPress. It’s just too much trouble, with all the plugin licenses, and nuisanceware and security alerts for small publishers.

WordPress, Matt, has become awful software under your watch.

Pär Thernström and his Simple History have gone from being a gift and an opportunity to another thorn in the side of publishers.