What's That Noise?! [Ian Kallen's Weblog]

Tuesday April 08, 2008

State of the WordPress Pandemic

I've been conversing with Kevin Burton about the WordPress pandemic. We're in agreement that the WordPress community's response to this security issue has been excessively lax. Most of the feedback I've received about yesterday's crawler changes have been supportive; folks generally want more hygienic social media. Kevin is also implementing a change to block spam-infected blogs from Spinn3r's crawls. We're both going to be keeping tabs on this. I'll be developing metrics on the blogs that Technorati is not indexing when they appear symptomatic so that the efficacy (or not) of yesterday's changes are measured. In the meantime, here's an updated trailing 90 days of WordPress updates:

Version	Count (in thousands)	Change
2.3.3	240	+3
2.3.1	153	-1
2.3.2	146	0
2.5	86	+8
2.2.2	75	0
2.2.3	67	0
2.0.1	59	0
2.1.2	37	0
2.2.1	35	+3
2.2	32	+2

It's encouraging to see the numbers for 2.3.3 and 2.5 going up since yesterday. Though the upward bumps measured in 2.2.1 and 2.2 blogs are troubling, they're relatively small. In general these kinds of measurements are prone to bumpiness as the trailing window of time includes blogs that have "awakened" and drops off the ones that have fallen dormant.

Some of the feedback that I've heard from bloggers that haven't upgraded is that the upgrade is a big PITA. Some have asked me for referrals for WordPress consultants to help them get their theme and plugin data rolled forward to a newer version. If anybody has suggestions about where to find reputable consultants knowledgeable about WordPress, please blog about it. If you link to this post and you're not using a vulnerable version of WordPress, I'll even find it on Technorati