This, That, and the Other

Every Monday, Paula Light, with her The Monday Peeve prompt, gives us an opportunity to vent or rant about something that pisses us off.

It should come as no surprise to anyone who has perused my blog over the past four months that my rant today is about WordPress. On November 3rd last year, I wrote a post, “Another WordPress Bug,” in which I pissed and moaned about how WordPress had released an update to its iOS app for the iPhone. That release, version 16.0, had a bug in it.

When I went to my reader and then click to visit posts, I could no longer “like” certain posts. And if I tried to comment on those posts, it didn’t recognize that I was logged onto the app and it asked me to enter my name, email address, and blog URL. And sometimes, even when I did that, I still was unable to leave a comment. I’d never had to do any of that before from within the WordPress app on my iPhone.

Of course I’ve exchanged dozens of emails with the WordPress Happiness Engineers, who have assured me that they’re working on a fix. Almost four months have elapsed since that release and every time WordPress issues a new release, I get my hopes up that the bug will have been fixed.WordPress just released version 16.7 and, once again, my hopes have been dashed. The annoying, frustrating bug persists. But one of the “enhancements” introduced in version 16.7 is described as this…

We continue to improve the experience in your Reader, and you can now mark posts as “seen” as well as view your total of “unseen” posts.

Okay, what does that mean? Why would I want to mark posts as “seen”? Does that send a notification that to the blogger who wrote the post that I’ve seen it? Here’s an example of what it looks like:I can also mark a post I’ve seen as “unseen.”So much for the old saying that once you’ve seen something you can’t un-see it.

I’m hoping that someone out there can explain to me what the purpose of marking a post as “seen” or “unseen” could possibly be.

And I’m going to contact the Happiness Engineers and link to this post and ask them if they can explain how this new “feature” improves the Reader experience, and, more important, why they’re focusing their efforts on seemingly unnecessary features and not on fixing that goddam bug!