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Yahoo’s human rights abuse? Who cares if they’ve got a big enough chequebook?

January 9th, 2006

In a nutshell, that’s the attitude of the people at Akismet. Never mind that Yahoo collaborates with the Chinese regime to put innocent journalists in jail, so long as they give Akismet a nice wad of cash they get special access to Akismet each of their customers will get free professional-grade Akismet filtering for their Wordpress blogs, as opposed to the $5/blog the rest of us have top pay.

Sorry guys, but I am not having anything to do with Yahoo, or anyone who chooses to associate themselves with Yahoo. I have nuked Akismet from this blog, and have disabled comments on my wordpress.com blog to avoid sending them through Akismet.

Human rights should come before money – Yahoo forgot that a while ago and it’s sad to see Akismet, who feel empowered to talk about the ‘dirty tricks’ of spammers (yes, sending spam comments to a website is so much worse than assisting a company which directly contributes to the abuse of human rights) going down the same route.

Author: David Russell Categories: Blogging Tags:
  1. January 9th, 2006 at 21:28 | #1

    I was gonna leave a comment on your WP.com account but you’ve disabled the comments… ;)

    I agree entirely with your opinion on Akismet, it’s one of the reasons I haven’t upgraded to 2.0 yet, but I was under the impression that Akismet was run by Automattic.

    Automattic contains Matt who develops WP. Whilst we aren’t paying for WP, surely if we were going to stand that hard against it we would go to another blogging app?

    I’m not going to because I love WP, but I’m not gonna use Akismet for anything other than my WP.com account.

    Peace.

  2. January 9th, 2006 at 21:34 | #2

    I don’t have such a huge problem with Wordpress – that’s why you aren’t seeing a Drupal ‘install in progress’ page [yet?]. I have no major problem with the new Wordpress-Yahoo hosting plan, because Yahoo isn’t getting any special treatment (like it’s getting from Akismet) and even if Wordpress didn’t want them to Yahoo could still do it under the terms of the GPL. So I’m not setting the fires yet, but that might have more to do with the fact that I have exams in 4 days than any desire to continue using Wordpress. I’m investigating Drupal as we speak.

    The reason for comments being disabled on my WP.com account is because it is not possible to disable Akismet itself, and I absolutely will NOT use Akismet.

  3. kipper
    February 11th, 2006 at 03:03 | #3

    Do you have anything positive to say?

  4. February 11th, 2006 at 21:30 | #4

    Not about Yahoo, no.

  5. May 20th, 2006 at 11:54 | #5

    Akismet…

    Well, it appears that Yahoo is no longer getting special treatment from Akismet (any hosting company can now get a volume discount on a site-wide key). That was the only problem I had with Akismet, and I’ve reinstated it.

    ……

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