Q: Clarification about concerning review
Hi Team, love your other plugins (WP Reset, etc.) and I'm considering adding this one to my WP tool stack.
That said, I was glancing over the reviews and a recent one came up that raised some concern; it's titled "Avoid – even if free."
For the sake of transparency, would you mind clarifying your stance/position on the points raised in the review? Specifically:
"The plugin creators, WebFactory Ltd, go to lengths to silently add their own plugins to the first positions on the 'Add plugin' page on your dashboard. There's no indication that these have been added by a third party, and you have no control over this whatsoever as there's no option to control it. I poked through the plugin's code and there's not even a hook to stop this nefarious behaviour, it's astounding.
...
What is with the insane HTTP requests to your API?"
Thanks!
Gordan_WebFactoryLTD
May 12, 2025A: Hi,
Thank you for the kind words.
I don't know what "insane requests to your API" are. Obviously, every request made to our servers costs us money, so you can rest assured we keep the number of requests to a bare minimum. Also, anybody can open our source and check what data is being transmitted if they don't believe the details we wrote in the ToS.
As for the Featured list of plugins on the Add new plugin screen, yes, we do add our plugins there. That list has been "owned" by Automattic for decades, and they ONLY put their plugins there. No other plugin can get on that list, so we feel others, including us, have the right to promote our plugins. We don't hog the whole list or anything like that.
iXzenoSPLUSThanks for the clarification! I think your reasonings are valid and perhaps the reviewer may have been a little overly hasty or sensitive about these matters.
That said, I admit the alteration of the Featured List does feel *slightly* intrusive, as it's changing what I'm used to seeing (with Akismet at the top). But it's also not a deal-breaker and I understand your perspective of doing that.