I would have thought that we all have learned that there are bad and unacceptable ways to promote your product - pop-up ads, animated banners, sounds on webpages, unwanted software bundled with shareware product installers (by which luckily only Windows users are ever affected).
The rise of GitHub and decline of SourceForge showed us that developers actually don't mind giving their free software with no strings attached (the overwhelming majority of the published projects use a permissive license), and that this software can be hosted on a neat website without ads and other bad technologies.
Then, the rise of App Store, of Humble Bundle, of GOG showed us that developers don't mind selling their commercial software for cheaper and without DRM protection in order to attract more buyers instead of trying to sell a separate license per computer.
Also, I use adblock in all my browsers and on a daily basis visit just a few websites not having any agressive advertisement anyway, so I do not normally face all this shit often.
That was until recently, when I switched this website to WordPress and started trying various plugins and reading WordPress-related sites when I don't know how to code something. And you know what? It's like a different world with all the bad things I thought I had forgotten about. Most of WordPress-releated sites use popups, most of plugins are GPL-licensed, ugly as hell and full of ads promoting paid versions of themselves or other plugins.
My latest finding which prompted me to write this post is the Simple Content Templates plugin. Its free version is utterly simple and limited - it does not have any settings, it allows to specify only title, excerpt and content in templates, also it doesn't use standard UI for templates list and template editor. However let's count how many ads it has offering to buy the full version:
The very first paragraph in bold has an interesting sturcture, basically: "Feature 1, feature 2, feature 3 - if you need any of these, buy the full version". Nice.
The template list page, as well as the template add/edit page have a huge 660x165px banner at the top promoting the full version.
Settings page has just one setting, and twice more space taken by a list of features of the full version and a big 300x300px logo.
Settings page top-right has a email subscription form.
Settings page bottom-right shows a panel with information about the author.
Help page has the same list of features and a logo thing like in settings.
Plugin adds an "Upgrade to full version" menu item to the admin menu.
The main function of the plugin is to add a template chooser to a sidebar on the Add Post screen, which basically a drop-down menu and a button. However what takes four times more space is a message that I'm missing out on advanced features and a Buy Now button.
That is, a plugin that does almost nothing, asks for money in quite annoying and obtrusive way in eight places! Ok, I don't really care much, I just uninstall such shit and write my own plugin if I need (can't find a good one) or remove ads from the plugin code. But I really feel for non-IT people who can't do that and have to suffer this humiliation and in the end buy the plugin and support such behaviour.
That being said, I must note that of course there are good plugins that do just what they're supposed to do and respect their users and don't ask for anything (or do that politely). For the plugin in question, there's an alternative called Easy Content Templates which doesn't have all the features of the paid version of Simple Content Templates, but has more than the free one. And a lot of other "good" plugins that unfortunately are hard to find but they exist - later I will write a post with the list of plugins I use for various tasks and alternative choices I've tried.
