WP Mainline Episode 20 - No Thanks Were Given for GoDaddy Breach

Episode 20 December 01, 2021 00:56:22
WP Mainline Episode 20 - No Thanks Were Given for GoDaddy Breach
WP Mainline
WP Mainline Episode 20 - No Thanks Were Given for GoDaddy Breach

Dec 01 2021 | 00:56:22

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Show Notes

Better late than never! I hope everyone had a good holiday last week. I ended up getting some of my much-needed medication so things are not as bleak as they were last week. At any rate, you can listen to last week’s news today!

We start off the show by discussing the major breach that occurred at GoDaddy and question whether two-factor authentication will be a requirement going forward.

We took a look at WordPress 5.9 and shared our opinions of user-facing features we’re looking forward to. We also share the revised schedule for the release of WordPress 5.9. Last but not least, we have a discussion surrounding Black Friday deals, pricing, psychological marketing triggers, and what constitutes a good deal for the consumer.

Stories Discussed:

Click to View Transcript:

Speaker 1 00:00:19 Welcome everybody to episode 20 of the WP mainline podcast for Wednesday, November 24th, 2021. I’m your host, Jeff Chandler and joined by Malcolm porosity. Malcolm served gobble gobble
Speaker 2 00:00:33 Only for you, American.
Speaker 1 00:00:34 Yeah. Yeah. That’s right. You already had your Thanksgiving. That’s right. It’s like a full month ago. Yep. Well, it’s our turn now, buddy. Very much enjoying looking for this is my favorite time of the year. Uh, we’ve got, uh, some stuffing homemade stuffing. We’ve got broccoli and cheese casserole, which is basically just broccoli and cheese brownies. So to speak to very good. I got deviled eggs in the fridge. We’ve got homemade pumpkin pie roll. We’ve got, uh, uh, smoked roasted Turkey from the honeybee Tam company. And what else do we get? Oh, she’s gonna, she’s gonna make some candy yams. We’ve got pumpernickel bread. And uh, the only people who’s going to be here tomorrow is me and my wife and smokey. So, you know,
Speaker 2 00:01:14 That is quite the
Speaker 1 00:01:15 Fees were covered for the weekend. I think
Speaker 2 00:01:18 I was, I was actually talking to a, uh, my coworker and one of the things that I brought up was just how big of a deal Thanksgiving is in the states. And, uh, he said, you know, Christmas is kind of more for the kids and Thanksgiving is kind of more for the adults. So that’s why it’s kind of treated as this, you know, bigger event. Um, how do you feel about that? Do you agree? Like is Thanksgiving bigger than Christmas and, and a lot of,
Speaker 1 00:01:40 Well, let’s put it this way. I think Thanksgiving is the holiday that generates the most sales of alcohol during the year. So I don’t know, take debt for what you will. Uh, but, um, yeah, I don’t know. I suppose I, I think, uh, I don’t know, man, I just love Thanksgiving because you’re almost guaranteed to have a good meal somewhere. You know, if it’s not a relatives, a friend’s house somewhere it’s, it’s always, it’s always this time of year where you just, hopefully you take a step back and you give thanks and you’re thankful and you think about the good in your life and in the good of others and helping out others and kind of all of that stuff. And, and Christmas for me, it’s just, my birthday is on December 21st, which by the way, is the darkest day of the year. Um, you know, my apologies for that, but, uh, you know, I couldn’t help it.
Speaker 1 00:02:30 Uh, um, but, uh, you know, when I was growing up for Christmas, I can never read my birthday present. It was, it was mostly like a leftover or extra Christmas present. And I never really got to do you being a Christmas baby sucks or somewhere around Christmas, but, but in terms of family, I don’t know. I think they’re both Thanksgiving is a big deal and, uh, I don’t know, I just, I’m looking forward to it and, uh, by the way, folks, and there are, you know, I got to figure out a different three words to say, I keep saying, by the way, like I’m forgetful or something. But, uh, uh, my apologies again to, I was supposed to be on the state of WordPress news panel last Friday. Uh, it was hosted by David Bisset and the post status team. I think Dan also was a part of it.
Speaker 1 00:03:17 There was a lot of people who were a part of it and I know showed and, you know, I woke up and it was about three or four o’clock in the afternoon and people were texting us and me saying, are you okay? Are you okay? I actually suffered a pretty, I wouldn’t say severe, but it was very uncomfortable and very unwanted, a anxiety attack and Friday morning, which kind of took me out for the rest of the day. Uh, and I only had that severe. Okay, well, there was, it was severe and, uh, I only have one pill left and I didn’t want to use the pill. And, uh, I was talking to you about this on Twitter, you know, getting anxiety meds. The United States now is becoming a giant pain in my ass. I have to now go through a behavioral therapist. And then after I talked to them, I then have to schedule an appointment and actually go physically see my doctor.
Speaker 1 00:04:05 And then after that, I might get the prescription of meds that I need. And I don’t know, it’s starting to seem to me like the, the, the pills I need. I’m not selling them. I need them. I only use them for, if I feel like an attacks coming on that I can’t control what they do is it’s it’s 0.5 milligrams lorazepam into slows my heart rate down. And it allows me to get control of myself. And, uh, it, it seems like they’re starting to treat them as like opioids or something in the federal regulations. I never get nuts. Yeah. I mean, it shouldn’t be over the counter and all that, but I mean, it should be, uh, should be that I should message my doctor and say, I’m running out. Can you renew my prescription? She says, okay, here you go. And it should be that simple, but it’s not the fax that to the pharmacy and you’re good to go kind of thing. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:04:54 So I’m working on, I’m working on getting some pills, but it’s been such a pain, the acid, I haven’t even, I haven’t even scheduled an appointment with the behavioral therapist yet, so maybe I should work on that now. I’m not as lucky as Malcolm here being married to a behavioral therapist, she she’s an undergrad in psychology. I want you to go, wow, you got there right there. And your son, right by your side, you got some therapy. I mean, I’m sure your, your wife could give you some therapy too, if you wanted, uh, I’m telling you everything wrong with you.
Speaker 1 00:05:31 All right. So there, it was a, a big week in, uh, in the news department, as far as WordPress and con is concerned. Let’s start off with the big story and that is GoDaddy breached. Uh, now this was an article published by Wordfence. Uh, they were the ones who sort of were first on the scene with this, but, uh, according to her report filed by GoDaddy with the sec, uh, an attacker initially gained access via a compromise password on September 6th, 2021. And it was discovered on November 17th, 2021, at which point their access was revoked. So while the company took immediate action to mitigate the damage, the attacker had more than two months to establish persistence. So anyone currently using GoDaddy’s managed WordPress product should assume to be compromised until they confirm that it’s not the case. So we’re talking about upwards of 1.2 million, uh, customers, and that doesn’t even begin to account for the customers of those customers that could potentially be affected by this issue.
Speaker 1 00:06:35 Uh, and now it appears that GoDaddy was storing SFTP credentials, either as plain text or in a format that could be reversed into plain text. Uh, I learned today, uh, from, from some folks on the insight that they definitely were not storing the passwords in plain type. So, uh, I can confirm that, uh, but they were storing them in a way that made it essentially the same thing. Uh, so what they did is instead of, um, uh, instead of using best practices, uh, like using a salted hash or a public key, both of which are considered industry best practices for SFTP, uh, the plain text passwords, a lot of an attack attacker direct access to password credentials without the need to crack them. So this is bad news. This is just bad news all the way around, especially on the week of black Friday, this affects managed WordPress hosting company, uh, customers on GoDaddy, uh, let’s, let’s see media temple, uh, Tieso hosts 1, 2, 3 reg domain, factory Hart, internet, and host Europe.
Speaker 1 00:07:45 So it’s not just GoDaddy, but it’s a whole collection of resellers and other folks under the GoDaddy umbrella. So what you should do, and I think, uh, Godi has already, GoDaddy’s already been doing this is reset your passwords, reset your for, for your WordPress database for your user account. Um, if you have customers, you should probably be set their passwords as well. Uh, because a attacker with that amount of time, they could have installed, you know, maybe a road plugin, they can install malware, they could have installed, or, uh, just log the information down in case they needed it, uh, for a later date. So this is just bad all the way around. And it, it doesn’t, uh, it’s, it’s, it’s it dawns on me, you know, when I was thinking about the show today, I’m like, oh, this is, this is, this is bad news. This is big news, but it’s bad news. And yet go to Eddie sponsors of the show. So how weird is it going to be talking about this new story? And then a few minutes later I’m telling people, Hey, go over there and be a customer, uh, this, you know, so today I’ve decided that it’s just too uncomfortable. I’m not going to do that. I go, daddy’s going to get what they paid for in terms of sponsoring the show, but not today.
Speaker 2 00:09:02 Yeah. I mean, as I said to you before the show, this happens in the biggest companies all the time or not all the time, but often enough, right? Like this is not
Speaker 1 00:09:10 Security incidents happen, but in this way, in, when it involves being able to retrieve passwords or logging credentials in plain text, this is really bad. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:09:21 I agree. I, you know, I will say though, that, um, these kinds of issues are always more complicated than they appear on the surface. Like you mentioned, they likely weren’t stored as plain text, which means that they were like hashed in a way that you could figure out what the hash values were or like, you know, reverse any kind of basic encryption that was being used or what have you. Um, I think the more interesting part about this and the thing that makes me kind of scratch my head is why like, even with press Titan, we don’t store, like our servers are all separate. Like the access and controls are all separate. Everything is separated. Like even if you gained access to my email, let’s say, um, you would still only be able to gain access to like the press site and.com website and maybe like one or two other projects. Um, there’s no single log in or a single place where we have all of this data. So, you know, it makes me scratch my head. Why a company, as big as GoDaddy would store all of this stuff in a consolidated place where you could get like 1.2 million sites affected, right. Like that’s where I kind of get confused. Okay.
Speaker 1 00:10:33 Well, I don’t know if it was all consolidated into an area. I think
Speaker 2 00:10:38 That’s a provisioning system. Right. Um, and, and again, I would just say like, okay, you know, maybe that’s an easy point of failure to fix going forward, right? So like don’t have a single central provisioning system to do all of the managed WordPress sites
Speaker 1 00:10:52 Or a store, these credentials in a secure way, which, which there are already a standard or industry best practices to do that with my question is this, there is a lot of questions like this was from, I think from the sec filing that said this was based on legacy code or legacy systems that they had in place. So the question I have is there had to have been people on the inside employees who have known about these security issues or known about this risk. And they’ve just been, how, how, how has this been able to go on for this long, without it being addressed? And now this ends up happening? No, I’m, I’m very interested to read in the post-mortem about this. If they even publish one as the, how this all came about, there had to been people known on the inside had known that this was, this is an issue and it was going to, it was going to be, uh, something like this is going to happen at some point, if it wasn’t addressed.
Speaker 2 00:11:50 I mean, I would like to assume that that is not the case. I mean, let’s, let’s, let’s look at
Speaker 1 00:11:55 You invest best intentions.
Speaker 2 00:11:56 Listen, again, it kind of comes down to, for me, like there’s some simple, very, very simple things that they could have done to mitigate this risk. And I’d like to think that if someone with decision-making authority knew about it, someone would have made that choice. Like for, for instance, I, I don’t know about you, but a lot of the sites that I use require to FFA to log in with their provisioning system, likely to that, I mean, even logging in the most GoDaddy stuff these days, I need to FFA like to manage the domain names or manage hosting accounts. So I dunno, I just, there’s a lot of like, yeah,
Speaker 1 00:12:32 I don’t even think a to F is required. I think that’s something that the user has to have the customer.
Speaker 2 00:12:38 Right. But I mean, I’m talking about like their provisioning system, how does that not have to have a controls in place? Right. So even if you did store this data in a way that could be exported easily in plain text, let’s say, um, like, you know, make sure that it’s difficult to get access to that system set up access control system. So only certain people have log-ins, um, flag things. If there’s logins outside of standard times that a person would log in, like there’s a lot of very simple security things that they could have done to really kind of reduce this risk. And the length of access is also kind of concerning to me. Um, you know, being able to have access to a system like that for over two months, like that is a lot of time to be able to walk around and export data and see what’s going on and how do they not trip some kind of security thing. And just in general, right? How do they not trip some kind of security thing over the course of two months of being able to log into this system?
Speaker 1 00:13:32 So do you have any, uh, sites or clients hosted on GoDaddy?
Speaker 2 00:13:37 Um, cause,
Speaker 1 00:13:39 Uh, you should probably change your past
Speaker 2 00:13:41 Actually. No, we do not have any sites currently using managed WordPress hosting on GoDaddy, take a deep
Speaker 1 00:13:47 Breath, take a sigh of relief.
Speaker 2 00:13:49 Yeah. I mean, but again, like, even if we did, none of the clients that I’m typically working with are a big deal in that respect, it can be very easy to change that. I think anyone that’s running an e-commerce site or any kind of like that’s where it gets tricky, PII personally, identifiable or identification information or whatever, like your personal information. Um, if you’re running like a, uh, you know, like a health center or even a gym or any kind of e-commerce site, like you might actually be legally required depending on where you live to notify all of your customers, not just ones that may have been like transacting during the time of access, all of them. And that, that like that business burden is going to be very interesting. And I highly doubt a lot of the, the sites that have kind of have this issue will do that. So again, we don’t know what the follow-up actions are going to be. We don’t know what’s going to happen with this whole thing. I feel like this is going to make waves for quite some time as this all gets sorted out. And, uh, you know, again, maybe it’s one of those things
Speaker 1 00:14:51 Where, you know, go daddy for their managed WordPress sites, push heavier on, on to a Fe. Yeah. Maybe, maybe to fan I’ll actually be like a requirement, which probably wouldn’t be a bad thing. Um, I’ve got two FFA turned on practically for everything that I deem important. Uh, let me tell ya, uh, to a phase of pain in the ass, if you lose your phone or switch phones, I can confirm that, but I know, I guess there’s different apps or different things you can use to make it less of a pain, but I don’t know, every time I do it, it’s still a pain. Yeah. I like that for, for I’m in the Google ecosystem. So I’m using the Google authenticator app and moving that from phone to phone has been, I usually, usually I got us set up to do like just a text message.
Speaker 1 00:15:33 So as long as my phone number is in there, it doesn’t matter what my device is. I can still get the code in. I use both email and text message for, uh, for that instead of using authenticator app. Cause I got one time I had to go through such a long process to get the authentic app to on the new device. And it was just like, I can’t do this. This is not good. I’m like, it works so well. I’m locked out of my own accounts. I can’t get access to them. Uh, you know, I feel for the, uh, GoDaddy employees and I, I know a lot of them, uh, you know, it’s, it’s gotta be rough. You know, they, they did just had the page, they had a big announcement, you know, they got acquired by GoDaddy. Everything was looking great. And then this week comes around and bam, you know, you get this bombshell dropped and it’s like, ah, you know that feeling, oh, and then during a week of black Friday, you got all your eCommerce customers or you manage.
Speaker 1 00:16:26 It’s just, you, you know, you know, it’s not, not a good situation for, for anyone. No, I agree. It’s going to be, time will pass. Things will get better. The sun will pop out and we’ll move on and they’ll learn and we’ll, we’ll move on. And you know, at some point in the future, there will be a headlines of a different web host that has a major security incident. No, it’s just a, it’s just a matter of when not if, uh, so speaking of WordPress, uh, there is a, oh, the WordPress, uh, 2021 survey is available to take, if you visit wordpress.org, there’s a banner up at the top. And, uh, I’ve actually in the link I clicked. It actually says it’s in English. So I think it’s available in different languages, which is pretty cool. And if you go through the survey, you can answer various questions about how you use WordPress and other information.
Speaker 1 00:17:19 And that will be shared on the wordpress.org news blog. Uh, so it’s, it’s always quarter to get that kind of information. And the more responses to that survey, the better, the better look we have at the, uh, sort of WordPress ecosystem in general. And I haven’t taken the survey yet, but I plan on doing that because I don’t mind being a statistic. Uh, speaking of WordPress, 5.9, there was a video that was published the other day. Um, I noticed this sometimes, and this hasn’t been the first time it’s happened, but the WordPress Facebook account sometimes publishes videos of a new version of WordPress, like a preview video. And I can not, it’s not published anywhere else. And I was like, when I saw this and I, and I said, introduce and WordPress 5.9, I said, wait a minute, we’re 5.9. Is it going to be released for at least another month?
Speaker 1 00:18:08 Is this a mistake? Is this the intro video? Is this what is going on here? So I watched it and it’s essentially a preview video of what you can expect in WordPress 5.9. It’s actually a well done video that shows off full se adamine being able to edit the nav area, the nav block of your website, uh, through the editor. Uh, but what the highlight for me was the style. So being able to select different styles, every theme, and being able to change your topography and your colors, which I thought was really nice because now you can have a theme, you can create a couple of different styles and depending on how you feel during that time of the year, you can just give your site a little bit of that new look and feel without overly changing everything like the layout and whatnot. And I was talking about this before the show with, uh, w with somebody about, do you remember back in the days of Zen garden and Sam garden was all this check out what we can do with just CSS.
Speaker 1 00:19:03 And I, and I remember there were conversations in the WordPress community with default theme scene, with the idea of trying to do the Zen coding approach, but with the default theme. So you could easily switch themes in and out. It’s just CSS. And then you can have a new look and feel without really changing everything. And then there were child themes, but child themes to me was made it almost as many changes. You know, it could change the layout, it could change the look and feel. It was almost like a full theme, even though it was a child thing. So it’s kind of funny that it just seems like it’s taken us all this time to get to the point where if you just wanted to do simple typography changes and colors, just to kind of spice things up in your site. Uh, now you don’t have to install a child theme or whatnot. You can, hopefully your main theme will come with styles and you can just select the style from within the full site editor and it’s applied and it looks good and everything’s golden,
Speaker 2 00:20:01 You know, what it made me think of though. Um, remember when people used to do like different, uh, you know, add snow to their designs for winter or Christmas
Speaker 2 00:20:12 Yeah. So like, I wonder if I’ll be able to like set up styles per programmatically, like using like the functions that PHB file and like have like, you know, different designs or looks based on maybe the time of day or the time of year or, or those kinds of things. So, you know, and just again, not changing the layout, just changing kind of which styles like which CSS set or color set or type sets that I use for my,
Speaker 1 00:20:38 No, it would be cool is if I had a light theme and a dark mode theme, and based on the time as you say, programming programmatically, uh, the, the style could be applied based on the time of day. You want users wouldn’t need to switch and then wouldn’t need to be a setting stored as a cookie or whatnot on the site. You got the, you got the brain going, sir, that would be cool. I bet you, I bet you, this can be something that could be,
Speaker 2 00:21:05 Um, what do you think of like, I mean, you’ve watched this video, what do you think about five dot nine? Do you feel like it’s an exciting release? It seems like it’s a pretty big release.
Speaker 1 00:21:14 Well, it’s, it’s so big. It’s been delayed and we’ll get to that, but I think, yeah, I think 5.9 because of full site editing and what that entails and because 20, 22 realize and full site editing and we got the nav block and in other things, this is like one of those milestone moments, as I’ve said before, we’re, it’s, it’s like a cutoff point of before full site editing black themes and after full site editing and black themes. No. So it’s going to be, you know, we have WordPress 5.0 yeah. Pre Gutenberg and after Gutenberg, well, this is going to be, you know, one of those big things, but for themes, you know, before FSC and after FSC and from what I’ve seen in the, in the video, and I’ve not actually used or experimented with a full site editing black thing. And yet, uh, there are a few available, but I’m kind of waiting for 5.9 to, to come out and then actually start playing with themes. But from what I’ve seen, I’m kind of anxious to get in there and click around and see what I see what I’m capable of, see how I can break things with this, a new way of, of managing the theme. And something else that I’ve been thinking about too, is, you know, the theme customizer. Yup. What’s going to happen to the customizer in the era of full site editing. Does it disappear? Does it simply become a toggle of turning full site editing mode on or off, or here’s the, what happens with the customized?
Speaker 2 00:22:37 A lot of developers use the customizer to add and store values. So I don’t necessarily see that going away anytime soon, but it definitely feels like the expectation is, uh, a transition away from the customizer to this. I think, you know, when we talk about WordPress five dot nine, to me, I’m a little bit nervous because I feel like it’s a, do you remember what WordPress was like when Gutenberg first came out and everyone was saying goodbye was kind of garbage, but that was like Gutenberg version 0.1. Right. And we have come a long way since then. Is this going to be full site editing version 0.1? Or is this full site editing 1.0, so I, you know, that question to me still, hasn’t been answered. And I’m curious about how good, how easy, how fun basically that this will feel when it actually comes out
Speaker 1 00:23:28 At least early iterate often. That’s what they always say. 1.0 is the loneliest number.
Speaker 2 00:23:34 We have one chance to make a good first impression. Right. I mean, look at the ratings on Gutenberg.
Speaker 1 00:23:41 Yeah. You had to bring that up, huh? Yeah. But you’re right. You’re right. Um, it, yeah, it did. It didn’t go so well, did it? That’s what you get. That’s what you consider a, not warm reception as to what happened with, with the introduction of Gutenberg into WordPress. But, uh, you know, speaking of speaking of saving theme values, I think people will be able to do that now. And the theme that J sound file. I think the theme that Jason file is going to take the place of what you were able to do in the theme customizer. I can’t confirm that, but it seems to me like that’s how it’s going to work.
Speaker 1 00:24:20 So speaking of, uh, you know, I mentioned that WordPress 5.9 is so big that it’s been delayed. Well, there’s going to be a revised or there is a revised release schedule for, it was 5.9. The final release is now planned for January 25th. Uh, during the end of the original alpha release cycle, there were issues that arose that were related to multiple major features planned for the 5.9 release, including full site editing. Uh, the navigation block, the 2022 theme, which depends on full site editing and the 6.0 release isn’t due out until April, uh, which is too long. They, the, the, the team felt was too long for the community to wait for them. So after going through the list of issues, the core editor team saw that the features could ship in 5.9, what the revised schedule and what they did is they had many discussions in terms of when and how, and they decided that the best course of action would be to delay WordPress 5.9 to include the various fixes and shipped them to the community, uh, by the end of January, taking into account the fact that there are less people around, within the last two weeks in the first week, or last two weeks of December and the first week of January, and they’ve actually built in time so that they can actually do a, for the beta if they determined that to be necessary.
Speaker 1 00:25:42 Uh, so I, I don’t think anyone’s going to complain to be honest that, uh, the release has been delayed from December into January. I’ve brought this up before, you know, they say that deadline or deadlines are not arbitrary, I believe is what the saying is. Uh, and I’ve always wondered why not just have a release in January to begin with, you know, at, at January’s bullying month, uh, there’s nothing really going on. Uh, you’re, you’re trying to start a new start, a fresh, and by having a release of WordPress, a major version, you know, the end of January, Hey, you know, it’s something to look forward to in the new year. So in December is just a very, very busy time of year for everybody around the world. So I, I don’t know. I, like I said, I don’t think anybody’s complaining, uh, and nobody, I mean, the full site editing and the other features of 5.9, they’re exciting. And I think people can’t wait to check them out, but now what’s one more month going to do
Speaker 2 00:26:43 Well. I mean, one of the big issues that I’m experiencing, um, at Canberra is getting engaged resources over the holiday season to make movement on things. Yeah. The
Speaker 1 00:26:55 Big question. Oh
Speaker 2 00:26:57 Man. Oh man. I think the big question mark for WordPress then is, you know, let’s assume no, one’s going to do anything meaningful in December for WordPress five dot nine. Is those, are those twenty-five days in January enough to make that meaningful progress to put the release together, they assume. Yes. But I would still be interested to see kind of what the volunteer, or even the like corporate sponsored hours in terms of development for WordPress 5 99 looks like over the course of like, you know, right now, basically through the end of the year.
Speaker 1 00:27:31 Yeah. They do say that the, uh, the blockers that have been identified in the list have already been merged, uh, last week and they’re no longer blockers. So that’s good to know. So now they can just work on bug fixes, hammering some things out, and hopefully having enough time to, to take care of everything before the release in January. And now’s a good time to, uh, the test I’ve actually installed the WordPress beta testing plugin. And I have it set up to be, uh, I think it’s unlikely. So I dunno if something breaks, I’ll let you all know.
Speaker 1 00:28:08 The state of the word is happening. It’s happening December 14th, 2021, between five and 7:00 PM Eastern standard time. At first, I thought it was going to be live-streamed only, but it turns out that automatic has a satellite office in New York city that I didn’t know about. I haven’t kept up on the various satellite offices that automatic has, but it makes sense for them to have one in New York city. That’s also where, uh, Matt has a, uh, a place to stay. He’s, he’s got a home there in New York city and you can actually request a seat to, to go there and participate in seam, deliver the state of the word in person. Uh, so seats are limited to 50 attendees. You need to fill out the request a seat by Sunday, November 28th, not all requests will receive, uh, due to venue capacity, uh, but everyone will receive confirmation or some community, some form of communication on Tuesday, November 30th.
Speaker 1 00:29:10 And if you’re planning on attending this event in person, you’re going to be asked to show your COVID vaccination card at the venue entrance. So, uh, be sure you have that on your person if you, uh, if you go there, but, uh, you can still send in a question if you want. There’s a, there’s a form. You can submit a question during the Q and a portion of the, of the events. I don’t know. That’s pretty cool. At least we’ll be able to see or, or actually hear people clapping maybe during a state of the word. Oh, that’s nice. And then to be able to open that up, and I imagine we’ll have a little after party or get together at the, at the auto medical office in New York city after the event.
Speaker 2 00:29:49 So, you know, who is going one of the people or two of the people that got, uh, some of those seats include Tofor. Oh, really? Yeah. I think tofa and his wife were going,
Speaker 1 00:29:59 Oh, how about that? Nice. Um, I am not going, actually, I wasn’t even invited. I heard that some people get invited to go. They actually, uh, uh, again, invited to go in person and, uh, you know, I wasn’t one of them, I’m sorry, I’m just washed up, man. Uh, but, uh, I don’t know. I wouldn’t go anyways. I’m I’m not, uh, I’m not a one to fly or drive to New York city. That’s absolutely something I don’t want to do. So I’ll just sit here in my nice comfy little home drink, a bottle of water pet smokey, and what to say to the word on my, on my laptop, which I think is what a lot of people would do.
Speaker 2 00:30:42 I hope so. I mean, 50 seats is not a lot, so it’s a pretty exclusive group of people that’ll be there. Um, but I do think that it does bring some kind of energy to the whole presentation to have.
Speaker 1 00:30:52 I just have people there it’s always a much different, did you, uh, I don’t know if you did this, but during last year during COVID, did you ever watch any of the episodes of the prices right
Speaker 2 00:31:03 Now? I didn’t.
Speaker 1 00:31:05 I watched episodes of the prices, right? And I’ve, I’ve determined. You’ve got to have an audience. You’ve got to have people screaming numbers at you, screaming dollar amounts, openness, this show suck without the audience. I mean, drew carries a fantastic host and they all did a great job, but not having that audience interaction. And just having that, hearing the, uh, the recording of people applauding and whatnot, it sought. So having an audience is a huge difference maker, especially sports venues, same thing. No, and they haven’t an audience there. It kind of sucked, but, but actually, but, but now that we have all the people there and now you hear all the cheering and now there’s fights, you know, there’s fights back in the states. Yeah. All right. So we’ll end this show on a bit of a, uh, kind of making me grumpy, but I’ve, I’ve seen conversations within the past week or so.
Speaker 1 00:31:54 And, you know, Carl Hancock brought this up actually, as we’ve just been talking about this on Twitter, you know, Carl, and I’m just talking about pricing and FOMO deals. And if you go to a certain website, they, they hit you with these, uh, sale prices. And sometimes they’re not even a, the sale price, there’s just a lot of, uh, bad mojo going around with the WordPress companies and how they present prices in their sales. And the question that was brought up was that these black Friday deals that so many WordPress businesses are participating in, are they actually deals? So, um, uh, gentlemen, uh, man, I, uh, I, his, uh, I forget his name off the top of my head, but he does WP raccoon.com. And, uh, he’s actually part of a visual composer team and cloud ways, but he actually maintains, uh, a WordPress. He’s got a plugin pricing document that he’s been maintaining now for the past few months.
Speaker 1 00:32:58 And he’s been sharing updates about it on the WordPress for business Facebook group. So he was actually in a prime position to be able to look at the prices he has in his document and compare them to the black Friday deals. And it turns out that a lot of companies are, uh, giving you special offers when it doesn’t really appear that they’re actually that special when you compare the before and after, uh, discount prices when black Friday is concerned. And he also discovered that there were companies that increased their prices earlier on in the month of November and then provided a black Friday deal. But at the end, it really wasn’t a deal. So this is just something that’s going on. I wanted to bring this up because I know we talk about, if you run into business, we talked about user trust, right? You want users is trust you in this to me, if you raising prices, that’s not a problem.
Speaker 1 00:33:52 I don’t think anybody will complain or anybody will say raising prices. That’s your prerogative. As a business, you raise prices when you see fit and that’s what you do. But if you’re going to raise prices, let’s say at the beginning of November and in knowingly participate in black Friday with a deal that doesn’t even seem like a deal or it’s, you’re not even saving as much money as you would, if you would have bought it without the black Friday or early in the month, it just appears shady. It, it appears knownly on trustworthy. Uh, and I think timing is a big deal here when it comes to raising prices in November and in participating in black Friday, it’s just, it rubs me the wrong way. I don’t, I, you know, people were bringing up that in some countries, this kind of crap is illegal. Like if a company has to stick with a certain price for like 28 days before they could do anything with it and whatnot, I think that’s a thing in some of these other countries.
Speaker 2 00:34:46 So, I mean, just to play devil’s advocate because you know, I like doing that.
Speaker 1 00:34:51 Um, you have cute horns.
Speaker 2 00:34:55 I mean, what I like, why does anyone feel like they like, so if you don’t like the pricing, or if you don’t like the deal, why do you get to it? Like, you can comment on it, but like, why do you get to tell them what they can and can’t do what their pricing don’t you live in America, the land of freedom.
Speaker 1 00:35:09 I, I can’t tell, I can’t force them to do whatever, but I, I think, uh,
Speaker 2 00:35:16 Does it feel shady to you? Like what, what are, what are they specifically doing to you that makes it shady? Are they like opening their cloak and the back alley going, Hey, man, I got this deal for you
Speaker 1 00:35:27 Black Friday to me. Well, w what has, why has it become in, uh, in the commercialization of, of, of, of America, uh, it’s a day for customers to feel like they’re getting the best deal of the year. And it’s an opportunity for, for companies before the end of the year to go into the black, instead of the red, that’s what the whole black Friday thing is all about. But to do that in a way to actually look into it and see that, well, this ain’t a deal. What the hell is this? You know, this isn’t, I waited all year for this,
Speaker 2 00:36:00 But here’s the funny part about that, right? So you said like black Fridays about companies getting into the black, and then you, you counter like, compare that to companies, giving deals to customers. It’s really about corporate greed, right? It’s it’s not about making sure that you, the customer happy it’s about making sure the company makes as much money as possible so that they can keep in business and do cool things for another year. So like, you’re, you’re assuming that you deserve the best prices or that like consumers deserve the best prices. When the actual, like focus of the day is about making sure the company makes as much money as possible.
Speaker 1 00:36:38 Um, I’m not, I’m not assuming I’m expecting, it’s my expectation that today’s that the deal I get this black Friday deal is the best deal and the best price I’m going to get on this product for the entire
Speaker 2 00:36:50 A year. But it might be the best one that you’re going to get until the next black Friday next year, right? Like if they’ve raised their prices and now they’ve lowered, lowered them arbitrarily for this single day back to what they did before. If they keep those higher prices for the rest of the year, then they didn’t really do anything shady. They just raise their prices and then reduce them back to what they were temporarily. So that you had one last crack at getting the old price before they raise it permanently.
Speaker 1 00:37:18 I was looking at some of these sites that are mentioned in this list, and I was checking out their pricing pages. I can’t tell you heads or tails. What the hell the original price is on these things anymore. They’ve got, they’ve got crossed out prices. They’ve got sale prices. They’ve got black Friday FOMO. You’re going to miss out. If you don’t act now prices. I have no idea what the hell the original price is on the sink.
Speaker 2 00:37:40 And then, and then the funny part is, you know, is that
Speaker 1 00:37:42 Intended?
Speaker 2 00:37:43 Yes, it is price. Confusion has completely intended, um, because what they want you to do is
Speaker 1 00:37:50 They want to psychologically get me to give them money. And they want me to fear of missing out that they want me to think that this is the best it’s going to be, that now is the time. And you better don’t add biggest plan.
Speaker 2 00:38:02 Yeah. Better. You better pick the biggest thing. Cause otherwise you’re not getting the best deal.
Speaker 1 00:38:09 Yeah. But, and by the way, speaking of that, of the, of the price and pages, I did see the cheapest, the cheapest plan that they had exact same price, no sale, no nothing, but for all the other tiers, you can see what you apparently you could save a little bit of money
Speaker 2 00:38:23 And the joke of this whole
Speaker 1 00:38:24 Thing I want to give away for free.
Speaker 2 00:38:26 Th the joke of this whole thing for me is, so what happens on Monday
Speaker 1 00:38:34 Cyber Monday let’s raise prices.
Speaker 2 00:38:38 So the joke is cyber Monday, right? And this whole idea that, oh, okay, you buy all your digital stuff on Monday about your physical stuff on Friday.
Speaker 1 00:38:44 That’s the way it was supposed to be, but what
Speaker 2 00:38:47 Ended up happening? So now now what we receive is just twice as many bloody emails about sales. Yeah. It’s just,
Speaker 1 00:38:53 Oh, annoying. And on top of that, black Friday has turned into black November. I know.
Speaker 2 00:38:57 I know. And it just keeps getting longer. Doesn’t it? Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:39:01 And I just, I don’t know. I’m, like I said, on Twitter, I’m thankful that I’m in a position to where black Friday means nothing to me. I, I’m not, uh, I’m not out there looking for a black Friday deal on a TV, on a WordPress plugin on hosting or anything of that nature. It just another day for me. And I just get to sit back and drink a drink of coffee and not have to worry about traffic. I know I have a few times in my life I’ve gone out just to do it just for fun, not really to go shopping, but just to experience it. And it is an experience to go out on black Friday shopping. It’s, uh, most of the time it’s good. Sometimes it’s bad being in a home Depot at 5:00 AM and people are just crashing into you, a card skeet and other goods. That’s something I’m glad I actually got to witness that one time going inside the mall at 3:00 AM. That was fun. But other than that, you know, I just, black Friday is a thing I hope that I don’t have to mess with. But, uh, yeah, I don’t know. It’s just, um, I think it’s a note ticket is that, you know, maybe we just in the back of your head just wonder, are you really getting the best deal? I mean, best deal at that time, maybe.
Speaker 2 00:40:10 So I’m curious, have you at, at no point you thought, Hm, should I run a WVU mainline black Friday deal for subscriptions or advertising or anything?
Speaker 1 00:40:22 Well, I, it, my smart ass self was going to run a black Friday, uh, special this week where, uh, people save no money. It was just the same price.
Speaker 2 00:40:33 Well, at least you didn’t raise prices, right? Yeah,
Speaker 1 00:40:35 Exactly. Now I got that going for me. I don’t know. I thought about it. I thought maybe doing a black Friday, but no, Nope. Not going to do it
Speaker 2 00:40:44 Just interesting. Ah,
Speaker 1 00:40:46 Any, any, any black Friday deals going on over there at press tightened?
Speaker 2 00:40:50 No, I mean, we’re so bad at that kind of stuff. Uh, we don’t do like marketing or special promos or anything like that. I mean, at one point for like a couple of years back, like three years back, I thought, I think that we were going to like, try to do like a low value offer to try to like build trust and confidence by like, and it was going to be like, not just, it, wasn’t going to be like a specific day around that, that I was going to be just a, long-term like, here’s our low price offer. So you can kind of get to know us and see if we’re we’re half decent. Um, and we ended up like canceling it after like three months because all the people that it was attracting were not really the people that would be interested in.
Speaker 1 00:41:28 Yes. Well, let me ask you this. If, if a company has a product of service, it’s on sale, but it’s on sale for the entire year is, seems isn’t really a sale or is that the price?
Speaker 2 00:41:39 Well, so it becomes, it’s a marketing thing, right? So they’re hoping that you haven’t seen their sale price before, and they’d probably put like a cookie on your computer. So like, you know, you see those repeating countdowns, right? If you clear out your cache and cookies and you go back to a website and the countdown’s now like 10 days until the sale is over and you clear your cookies like two days later, and it’s like 10 days until the sale is over. I mean, they do that on purpose to try to get that scarcity mindset going so that you’re willing to like pull the trigger without actually kind of thinking through your purchasing decisions. I mean, all this stuff is like marketing 1 0 1. And so when I say,
Speaker 1 00:42:10 I know it must, I must, it must work because all of these websites are doing the damn thing. Like I went to, uh, just before the show, I went to two websites, uh, to view the pricing pages. And they were hitting me with FOMO. I’ve got two days and so many hours to take advantage of this offered. And when I clicked on the X or was getting near the exit on the tab, it gave me a big banner saying, no, don’t go. And then in the bottom left hand corner, it was telling me people’s names and locations of people who bought this and that, uh, in the right hand corner, I’ve got, um, some chat support reps saying, Hey, uh, you interested arrested now? Well, how can we help you spend your money here? I mean, that was, I was bombarded, man. I was in a psychological nightmare on that website.
Speaker 2 00:42:53 And you have to ask yourself, right? Like, is it really like for certain things, is it really valuable for them to do this? Like, are they truly making enough money to like warrant this kind of hard sell or this kind of like emotional manipulation? Like if they’re making like 30 bucks off of me, like, is that really enough to be doing this and potentially like annoying however many other people that they could have potentially sold to like, just the whole thing is strange to me. I don’t, I don’t understand marketing the same way as, as I think a lot of other companies do.
Speaker 1 00:43:26 And, you know, and I’ll ask you, and this is something Carl Hancock was talking about that the FOMO that I was mentioning, the, the, the, you visit a website and boom, it shows if you don’t purchase within a certain amount of time, you know, you can’t get access to this price or that deal. Like, what do you think about that? That’s, that’s totally tapping into the, the, the mindset of consumers and it’s art of most of the time it’s artificial FOMO.
Speaker 2 00:43:49 Yeah, for sure. But I mean, it’s, it’s using the exact same, like it’s
Speaker 1 00:43:55 Kind of crappy illegal
Speaker 2 00:43:56 And well, probably Carl, Carl points this out, but the funny part is like, if you go to gravity forms right now, and you look at their black Friday page, they have a countdown on their website as well. Now, you know, it’s not going to reset magically and it’s not going to be this permit price discount and this like trickery or, or like kind of, you know, gray hat marketing, emotional
Speaker 1 00:44:16 Manipulation,
Speaker 2 00:44:18 Uh, six days, 16 hours, 11 minutes,
Speaker 1 00:44:21 The first black Friday week or something.
Speaker 2 00:44:25 Yeah, exactly. So like the sales are getting longer and longer. These opportunities are there. Everyone’s using these countdown timers, whether or not they’re real countdown timers, like everyone’s doing this and they
Speaker 1 00:44:36 Just a consumer at the end of the day with all this going on, does the consumer actually, when are they getting the better end of the stick on all this?
Speaker 2 00:44:44 I mean, sometimes, sometimes they are actually kind of shoots themselves in the, in the foot a little bit, because if I’m, if I see this sale, right, the elite version of gravity forms is $129 American right now, normally it’s $259 when this sale is done. If I didn’t pull the trigger for whatever reason, maybe I didn’t have money in my bank account until January 1st kind of thing right now come January 1st. I’m going to go, well, I’m going to wait until they run another sale, right? Like they’ve now devalued their product in my mind to the point where I’m going to wait until it’s like around that same price again, before I purchased. And I may might forget about it in the interim and never purchase the elite version of gravity forms because I’m waiting for this magical sale to happen again. And it might never happen again.
Speaker 1 00:45:26 And guess what, you, you, you didn’t read the post that they published back in November saying at the beginning of the new year, we’re going to raise price,
Speaker 2 00:45:33 Right. And so then, and then it’s even worse right now. I’m now I’m really kicking myself and I’m also going, well, I’m not going to pay 2 89 or whatever the heck the new price is. I’m definitely going to wait for a sale now. So these, these kinds of games, especially in terms of software, you have to be very careful of, um, when I used to sell advertising on, um, uh, splash press media’s websites, way back in the day is a blogging. That’s a name I know. Right. Um, you know, it was, it was one of those funny things where depending on the client, like I, I went out and I sent all these emails to these different businesses that I knew advertised on blogs in like the WordPress space or in the technology space. And they wouldn’t even talk to me until I added another zero on the end of the price.
Speaker 2 00:46:14 Right. Because it was all about the value that I was presenting and not about the true value of what I was offering. Um, because value is a perception, right? It’s what, what is the most amount of money that someone’s willing to pay? So when you put something in front of someone for 200 bucks, or you put something in front of someone for $2,000, it’s a very different value proposition that they assume it’s not, it’s not necessarily a tangible, like, understandable thing. Is gravity forms worth $300? Is it worth $600? Is it worth a thousand dollars? I think it probably is. Is it worth $129? Heck yeah, man, you guys should be like clicking buy an hour on that all day long. But like, they, they, they, like, I don’t even know that they know what their maximum price actually is or what that turn is.
Speaker 1 00:46:57 Yeah. I mean, how many of us, even as individuals actually know what our value is?
Speaker 2 00:47:02 Oh, no, I, yeah, I agree. But we don’t necessarily have the same sales data. Right. Like you and I are not selling ourselves every day where we can kind of start to build an understanding of our value in that, in, in the wider marketplace. So
Speaker 1 00:47:14 Yeah, I mean, when I was, when I was coming up with like prices on member, subscription memberships and stuff like that, advertising for WP mainline, I was talking to my good buddy, Bob WP, Bob done do the woo. Uh, yes, I got one in there. I was talking to have any sent man just experiment. He said, just put, put the prices of what you need, what you feel you need, you can get by, you can make a living not, and just base it on that and then experiment. And he says, you know, the, the worst thing that can happen is, you know, you just have to change your prices. So I I’ve been kind of sticking with that. And it’s, it’s worked so far and, uh, to wrap up the show, you know, you’re, you’re, you’re so hyped on Crowdy forums. You know why it is because back in 2009 at work camp Chicago, they bought you, they should, they gave you a preview of what it was and hook line and sinker, baby.
Speaker 1 00:47:59 They got you. And I only, and I, and I choke, I can’t, I bring that up because last night and Twitter, uh, some folks, we started talking about a word camp, Dallas, the first word camp Dallas, which was in preschool, Texas, where Matt Malawi showed up on a Saturday as he just, he just had his wisdom teeth pulled, but that was my first ever work camp. And then we’re somehow we got up to work camp Chicago in 2009 and we’re Chicago 2009 was a big deal because that’s when Matt Mullenweg announced commercial, uh, commercial themes would be added to the WordPress team directory if they were a hundred percent GPL, which then led into all of the discussions with Brian Garner and Jason Schuler and Corey Miller of I themes and a bunch of other theme shops with Matt, mulloway saying, well, what does that mean?
Speaker 1 00:48:44 What does it mean to be a hundred percent GPO? Can we do this? Can we do that? And, uh, so that was a big deal, but it was also a big deal. And there are pictures of this in the racket genius flicker account. And, uh, I have a few on my account, I believe where you can actually see Carl Hancock and the rocket genius team showcasing gravity forms to Matt Mullenweg, mark gauche, uh, and some other folks, including, uh, Malcolm Peralta, who at the time was a big boy with curly hair know. And, uh, you know, he got to see it firsthand. And that was a really cool cause I remember those days and I said, man, I looked at it and I looked at the interface. I said, you guys nailed it. This is going to be a big deal. This is going to be a popular product. And, um, you know, I’d take no credit and being right, but, but, but Hey, it has served them well over the years and it continues to be one of the top form solutions and WordPress. And uh, at one point you actually got to work for refugees.
Speaker 2 00:49:41 I did, yeah. For like two years.
Speaker 1 00:49:43 It was great. But do you remember, do you remember that event where camp Chicago, any, any fond memories of that event? Um, I mean that was bounce back in the beef five media days.
Speaker 2 00:49:53 Geez. Yeah. I, uh, you know, I didn’t really get to attend many word camps in my career. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve, I’ve been very much kind of, uh, uh, heads down doing my work kind of WordPress user or WordPress, whatever. Um, but that was, that was certainly an event for the times. And, uh, you know, I’m so glad I was there because I think that really did end up kind of putting me as a front runner for being, you know, part of their, uh, customer support team and helping out with some early marketing and stuff like that. And I just, uh, I feel so grateful that, you know, I attended that event and, uh, yeah, I remember there was, there was so many, like I look back at the pictures and I’m like, I wonder what happened to this person in that person? Cause like the, you know, the, the big names in WordPress at the time who have gone off and done other things. And so it’s, it’s always interesting to kind of go back and look at it
Speaker 1 00:50:47 Like Mika Baldwin, I got a picture of him. He was there. He was, he was a, he was a big deal at the time. And, uh, you know, I was looking at pictures of Corey Miller and bred Williams and we looked like kids 2009. And me, I looked like, uh, me of today looked like I ate 2000 meat 2009. I mean, I don’t know what happened, man. The years of not kind to me. Yeah. It’s all Cove it’s fought, but man we’re camps 2009, 2010, big time, I still got a picture of the, of the screenshot on the projector. It said commercial, GPO themes on a directory or whatnot. Like did the announcement, man, that was, that was a big deal. And then that launched to all the GPO debates and arguments and things of 2010, 2011, those were good times, easy page views, GPL.
Speaker 1 00:51:42 That’s what it turned out to be. Anyways. It was kind of cool looking back on that I’m like the WordPress historian for some of those times and medians and things I’ve been able to take advantage of. So it’s always, always fun for me to, to bring all that stuff up and reminisce. Um, so there you go. And before we go, um, it’s Thanksgiving for me. So let me say, let’s see, what am I thankful for? I’m thankful for my wife, I’m thankful for smoky and thankful for medication that works for anxiety attacks. I’m thankful for all of the people out there who check up on me on a regular basis on Twitter. And, uh, so on the various social media, I’m thankful for Malcolm for being able to put up with me and my jokes and co-hosting the show with me on a weekly basis. And, uh, what else am I am thankful for WordPress and its community and everyone who is, uh, been able to financially support me or just support me in general. Thank you very much. And I’m thankful for what else am I thankful for? Oh, heated car seats. Those things are awesome.
Speaker 1 00:52:47 Do you ever have a heated car seat? Oh my God dude. It’s so nice. I live in Canada.
Speaker 2 00:52:51 You kind of have to,
Speaker 1 00:52:54 And I know your Thanksgiving was in is, uh, was a month ago, but, uh, I don’t think I ever asked you what you were thankful for. Well, off the top of your head for my wife. Yes. Okay.
Speaker 2 00:53:10 We have a wonderful house with a wonderful dog. My mom lives with us and uh, she takes the lion’s share of cooking dinners for us that are just absolutely amazing. I mean, otherwise we’d really be just kind eating a lot of like frozen. Um,
Speaker 1 00:53:23 They spent so much time to work and everything else have work, food cooking. I mean, you gotta, you gotta have, you gotta have time.
Speaker 2 00:53:29 So the, the support that we get is amazing, um, where we live right now, my, my, my jobs like, uh, press Titan and Cambra creative, and the people there have been so supportive. Um, you know, the, the societal change, my, you know, the biggest thing I’m thankful for actually this year is the societal change that we’re seeing in terms of being able to talk about mental health. Um, you know, I never thought as a teenager, that the world that we lived in would get to the point where we could talk about this stuff without being shamed for it, or just told to like, you know, just think positive. And so I’m, I’m most thankful for that change, um, because it’s meant a lot to me and I hope it has meant a lot to you as well.
Speaker 1 00:54:10 Yeah. It was kind of weird when I made the announcement on Twitter and I apologized and I said, this is what happened. You know, I had quite a few people liking that tweet and telling me, Hey, that was really, um, uh, strong or it was really, um, what’s the word I’m looking for a brief. It was really brave of you for, to come on and to say that. And I said, it doesn’t even feel brave to me. I’m just telling you what happened. No, but I don’t know for a lot of other people, I guess they didn’t, they, I guess they don’t expect people to just come out and say, this is what happened and, and attack and no show this, uh, I don’t know. You know, that’s just, I mean, that’s just what happened. So, but if it helps others, if it inspires others or if it makes others feel as though they can say these things and, you know, I guess that’s a positive thing. Yep. So with that, that’s going to do it for this Turkey edition of, uh, the WP and mainline podcast. You can find show notes for this episode and all other episodes on WP mainline.com. And you can follow me on Twitter at Jeffrey, J E F F R zero and Malcolm, sir.
Speaker 2 00:55:21 Uh, you can find me at find purpose on Twitter and if you need anything, you can always find me through press titan.com or Canberra creative.
Speaker 1 00:55:29 So everybody have a safe, enjoyable holidays, uh, sucks from Malcolm. He already had his, so it’s our turn. But think of it this way, Malcolm you’ll have at least three or four, maybe five days of quietness from the us side of things, which, you know, maybe you’ll appreciate. We’ll all be well, we’ll all be quiet for the next few days, maybe. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:55:53 Uh that’s. I mean, it is what it is. I’ll make it work.
Speaker 1 00:55:58 All right, everybody, we’ll talk to you again next Friday afternoon. So long everybody

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 00:00:19 Welcome everybody to episode 20 of the WP mainline podcast for Wednesday, November 24th, 2021. I'm your host, Jeff Chandler and joined by Malcolm porosity. Malcolm served gobble gobble Speaker 2 00:00:33 Only for you, American. Speaker 1 00:00:34 Yeah. Yeah. That's right. You already had your Thanksgiving. That's right. It's like a full month ago. Yep. Well, it's our turn now, buddy. Very much enjoying looking for this is my favorite time of the year. Uh, we've got, uh, some stuffing homemade stuffing. We've got broccoli and cheese casserole, which is basically just broccoli and cheese brownies. So to speak to very good. I got deviled eggs in the fridge. We've got homemade pumpkin pie roll. We've got, uh, uh, smoked roasted Turkey from the honeybee Tam company. And what else do we get? Oh, she's gonna, she's gonna make some candy yams. We've got pumpernickel bread. And uh, the only people who's going to be here tomorrow is me and my wife and smokey. So, you know, Speaker 2 00:01:14 That is quite the Speaker 1 00:01:15 Fees were covered for the weekend. I think Speaker 2 00:01:18 I was, I was actually talking to a, uh, my coworker and one of the things that I brought up was just how big of a deal Thanksgiving is in the states. And, uh, he said, you know, Christmas is kind of more for the kids and Thanksgiving is kind of more for the adults. So that's why it's kind of treated as this, you know, bigger event. Um, how do you feel about that? Do you agree? Like is Thanksgiving bigger than Christmas and, and a lot of, Speaker 1 00:01:40 Well, let's put it this way. I think Thanksgiving is the holiday that generates the most sales of alcohol during the year. So I don't know, take debt for what you will. Uh, but, um, yeah, I don't know. I suppose I, I think, uh, I don't know, man, I just love Thanksgiving because you're almost guaranteed to have a good meal somewhere. You know, if it's not a relatives, a friend's house somewhere it's, it's always, it's always this time of year where you just, hopefully you take a step back and you give thanks and you're thankful and you think about the good in your life and in the good of others and helping out others and kind of all of that stuff. And, and Christmas for me, it's just, my birthday is on December 21st, which by the way, is the darkest day of the year. Um, you know, my apologies for that, but, uh, you know, I couldn't help it. Speaker 1 00:02:30 Uh, um, but, uh, you know, when I was growing up for Christmas, I can never read my birthday present. It was, it was mostly like a leftover or extra Christmas present. And I never really got to do you being a Christmas baby sucks or somewhere around Christmas, but, but in terms of family, I don't know. I think they're both Thanksgiving is a big deal and, uh, I don't know, I just, I'm looking forward to it and, uh, by the way, folks, and there are, you know, I got to figure out a different three words to say, I keep saying, by the way, like I'm forgetful or something. But, uh, uh, my apologies again to, I was supposed to be on the state of WordPress news panel last Friday. Uh, it was hosted by David Bisset and the post status team. I think Dan also was a part of it. Speaker 1 00:03:17 There was a lot of people who were a part of it and I know showed and, you know, I woke up and it was about three or four o'clock in the afternoon and people were texting us and me saying, are you okay? Are you okay? I actually suffered a pretty, I wouldn't say severe, but it was very uncomfortable and very unwanted, a anxiety attack and Friday morning, which kind of took me out for the rest of the day. Uh, and I only had that severe. Okay, well, there was, it was severe and, uh, I only have one pill left and I didn't want to use the pill. And, uh, I was talking to you about this on Twitter, you know, getting anxiety meds. The United States now is becoming a giant pain in my ass. I have to now go through a behavioral therapist. And then after I talked to them, I then have to schedule an appointment and actually go physically see my doctor. Speaker 1 00:04:05 And then after that, I might get the prescription of meds that I need. And I don't know, it's starting to seem to me like the, the, the pills I need. I'm not selling them. I need them. I only use them for, if I feel like an attacks coming on that I can't control what they do is it's it's 0.5 milligrams lorazepam into slows my heart rate down. And it allows me to get control of myself. And, uh, it, it seems like they're starting to treat them as like opioids or something in the federal regulations. I never get nuts. Yeah. I mean, it shouldn't be over the counter and all that, but I mean, it should be, uh, should be that I should message my doctor and say, I'm running out. Can you renew my prescription? She says, okay, here you go. And it should be that simple, but it's not the fax that to the pharmacy and you're good to go kind of thing. Yeah. Speaker 1 00:04:54 So I'm working on, I'm working on getting some pills, but it's been such a pain, the acid, I haven't even, I haven't even scheduled an appointment with the behavioral therapist yet, so maybe I should work on that now. I'm not as lucky as Malcolm here being married to a behavioral therapist, she she's an undergrad in psychology. I want you to go, wow, you got there right there. And your son, right by your side, you got some therapy. I mean, I'm sure your, your wife could give you some therapy too, if you wanted, uh, I'm telling you everything wrong with you. Speaker 1 00:05:31 All right. So there, it was a, a big week in, uh, in the news department, as far as WordPress and con is concerned. Let's start off with the big story and that is GoDaddy breached. Uh, now this was an article published by Wordfence. Uh, they were the ones who sort of were first on the scene with this, but, uh, according to her report filed by GoDaddy with the sec, uh, an attacker initially gained access via a compromise password on September 6th, 2021. And it was discovered on November 17th, 2021, at which point their access was revoked. So while the company took immediate action to mitigate the damage, the attacker had more than two months to establish persistence. So anyone currently using GoDaddy's managed WordPress product should assume to be compromised until they confirm that it's not the case. So we're talking about upwards of 1.2 million, uh, customers, and that doesn't even begin to account for the customers of those customers that could potentially be affected by this issue. Speaker 1 00:06:35 Uh, and now it appears that GoDaddy was storing SFTP credentials, either as plain text or in a format that could be reversed into plain text. Uh, I learned today, uh, from, from some folks on the insight that they definitely were not storing the passwords in plain type. So, uh, I can confirm that, uh, but they were storing them in a way that made it essentially the same thing. Uh, so what they did is instead of, um, uh, instead of using best practices, uh, like using a salted hash or a public key, both of which are considered industry best practices for SFTP, uh, the plain text passwords, a lot of an attack attacker direct access to password credentials without the need to crack them. So this is bad news. This is just bad news all the way around, especially on the week of black Friday, this affects managed WordPress hosting company, uh, customers on GoDaddy, uh, let's, let's see media temple, uh, Tieso hosts 1, 2, 3 reg domain, factory Hart, internet, and host Europe. Speaker 1 00:07:45 So it's not just GoDaddy, but it's a whole collection of resellers and other folks under the GoDaddy umbrella. So what you should do, and I think, uh, Godi has already, GoDaddy's already been doing this is reset your passwords, reset your for, for your WordPress database for your user account. Um, if you have customers, you should probably be set their passwords as well. Uh, because a attacker with that amount of time, they could have installed, you know, maybe a road plugin, they can install malware, they could have installed, or, uh, just log the information down in case they needed it, uh, for a later date. So this is just bad all the way around. And it, it doesn't, uh, it's, it's, it's it dawns on me, you know, when I was thinking about the show today, I'm like, oh, this is, this is, this is bad news. This is big news, but it's bad news. And yet go to Eddie sponsors of the show. So how weird is it going to be talking about this new story? And then a few minutes later I'm telling people, Hey, go over there and be a customer, uh, this, you know, so today I've decided that it's just too uncomfortable. I'm not going to do that. I go, daddy's going to get what they paid for in terms of sponsoring the show, but not today. Speaker 2 00:09:02 Yeah. I mean, as I said to you before the show, this happens in the biggest companies all the time or not all the time, but often enough, right? Like this is not Speaker 1 00:09:10 Security incidents happen, but in this way, in, when it involves being able to retrieve passwords or logging credentials in plain text, this is really bad. Yeah. Speaker 2 00:09:21 I agree. I, you know, I will say though, that, um, these kinds of issues are always more complicated than they appear on the surface. Like you mentioned, they likely weren't stored as plain text, which means that they were like hashed in a way that you could figure out what the hash values were or like, you know, reverse any kind of basic encryption that was being used or what have you. Um, I think the more interesting part about this and the thing that makes me kind of scratch my head is why like, even with press Titan, we don't store, like our servers are all separate. Like the access and controls are all separate. Everything is separated. Like even if you gained access to my email, let's say, um, you would still only be able to gain access to like the press site and.com website and maybe like one or two other projects. Um, there's no single log in or a single place where we have all of this data. So, you know, it makes me scratch my head. Why a company, as big as GoDaddy would store all of this stuff in a consolidated place where you could get like 1.2 million sites affected, right. Like that's where I kind of get confused. Okay. Speaker 1 00:10:33 Well, I don't know if it was all consolidated into an area. I think Speaker 2 00:10:38 That's a provisioning system. Right. Um, and, and again, I would just say like, okay, you know, maybe that's an easy point of failure to fix going forward, right? So like don't have a single central provisioning system to do all of the managed WordPress sites Speaker 1 00:10:52 Or a store, these credentials in a secure way, which, which there are already a standard or industry best practices to do that with my question is this, there is a lot of questions like this was from, I think from the sec filing that said this was based on legacy code or legacy systems that they had in place. So the question I have is there had to have been people on the inside employees who have known about these security issues or known about this risk. And they've just been, how, how, how has this been able to go on for this long, without it being addressed? And now this ends up happening? No, I'm, I'm very interested to read in the post-mortem about this. If they even publish one as the, how this all came about, there had to been people known on the inside had known that this was, this is an issue and it was going to, it was going to be, uh, something like this is going to happen at some point, if it wasn't addressed. Speaker 2 00:11:50 I mean, I would like to assume that that is not the case. I mean, let's, let's, let's look at Speaker 1 00:11:55 You invest best intentions. Speaker 2 00:11:56 Listen, again, it kind of comes down to, for me, like there's some simple, very, very simple things that they could have done to mitigate this risk. And I'd like to think that if someone with decision-making authority knew about it, someone would have made that choice. Like for, for instance, I, I don't know about you, but a lot of the sites that I use require to FFA to log in with their provisioning system, likely to that, I mean, even logging in the most GoDaddy stuff these days, I need to FFA like to manage the domain names or manage hosting accounts. So I dunno, I just, there's a lot of like, yeah, Speaker 1 00:12:32 I don't even think a to F is required. I think that's something that the user has to have the customer. Speaker 2 00:12:38 Right. But I mean, I'm talking about like their provisioning system, how does that not have to have a controls in place? Right. So even if you did store this data in a way that could be exported easily in plain text, let's say, um, like, you know, make sure that it's difficult to get access to that system set up access control system. So only certain people have log-ins, um, flag things. If there's logins outside of standard times that a person would log in, like there's a lot of very simple security things that they could have done to really kind of reduce this risk. And the length of access is also kind of concerning to me. Um, you know, being able to have access to a system like that for over two months, like that is a lot of time to be able to walk around and export data and see what's going on and how do they not trip some kind of security thing. And just in general, right? How do they not trip some kind of security thing over the course of two months of being able to log into this system? Speaker 1 00:13:32 So do you have any, uh, sites or clients hosted on GoDaddy? Speaker 2 00:13:37 Um, cause, Speaker 1 00:13:39 Uh, you should probably change your past Speaker 2 00:13:41 Actually. No, we do not have any sites currently using managed WordPress hosting on GoDaddy, take a deep Speaker 1 00:13:47 Breath, take a sigh of relief. Speaker 2 00:13:49 Yeah. I mean, but again, like, even if we did, none of the clients that I'm typically working with are a big deal in that respect, it can be very easy to change that. I think anyone that's running an e-commerce site or any kind of like that's where it gets tricky, PII personally, identifiable or identification information or whatever, like your personal information. Um, if you're running like a, uh, you know, like a health center or even a gym or any kind of e-commerce site, like you might actually be legally required depending on where you live to notify all of your customers, not just ones that may have been like transacting during the time of access, all of them. And that, that like that business burden is going to be very interesting. And I highly doubt a lot of the, the sites that have kind of have this issue will do that. So again, we don't know what the follow-up actions are going to be. We don't know what's going to happen with this whole thing. I feel like this is going to make waves for quite some time as this all gets sorted out. And, uh, you know, again, maybe it's one of those things Speaker 1 00:14:51 Where, you know, go daddy for their managed WordPress sites, push heavier on, on to a Fe. Yeah. Maybe, maybe to fan I'll actually be like a requirement, which probably wouldn't be a bad thing. Um, I've got two FFA turned on practically for everything that I deem important. Uh, let me tell ya, uh, to a phase of pain in the ass, if you lose your phone or switch phones, I can confirm that, but I know, I guess there's different apps or different things you can use to make it less of a pain, but I don't know, every time I do it, it's still a pain. Yeah. I like that for, for I'm in the Google ecosystem. So I'm using the Google authenticator app and moving that from phone to phone has been, I usually, usually I got us set up to do like just a text message. Speaker 1 00:15:33 So as long as my phone number is in there, it doesn't matter what my device is. I can still get the code in. I use both email and text message for, uh, for that instead of using authenticator app. Cause I got one time I had to go through such a long process to get the authentic app to on the new device. And it was just like, I can't do this. This is not good. I'm like, it works so well. I'm locked out of my own accounts. I can't get access to them. Uh, you know, I feel for the, uh, GoDaddy employees and I, I know a lot of them, uh, you know, it's, it's gotta be rough. You know, they, they did just had the page, they had a big announcement, you know, they got acquired by GoDaddy. Everything was looking great. And then this week comes around and bam, you know, you get this bombshell dropped and it's like, ah, you know that feeling, oh, and then during a week of black Friday, you got all your eCommerce customers or you manage. Speaker 1 00:16:26 It's just, you, you know, you know, it's not, not a good situation for, for anyone. No, I agree. It's going to be, time will pass. Things will get better. The sun will pop out and we'll move on and they'll learn and we'll, we'll move on. And you know, at some point in the future, there will be a headlines of a different web host that has a major security incident. No, it's just a, it's just a matter of when not if, uh, so speaking of WordPress, uh, there is a, oh, the WordPress, uh, 2021 survey is available to take, if you visit wordpress.org, there's a banner up at the top. And, uh, I've actually in the link I clicked. It actually says it's in English. So I think it's available in different languages, which is pretty cool. And if you go through the survey, you can answer various questions about how you use WordPress and other information. Speaker 1 00:17:19 And that will be shared on the wordpress.org news blog. Uh, so it's, it's always quarter to get that kind of information. And the more responses to that survey, the better, the better look we have at the, uh, sort of WordPress ecosystem in general. And I haven't taken the survey yet, but I plan on doing that because I don't mind being a statistic. Uh, speaking of WordPress, 5.9, there was a video that was published the other day. Um, I noticed this sometimes, and this hasn't been the first time it's happened, but the WordPress Facebook account sometimes publishes videos of a new version of WordPress, like a preview video. And I can not, it's not published anywhere else. And I was like, when I saw this and I, and I said, introduce and WordPress 5.9, I said, wait a minute, we're 5.9. Is it going to be released for at least another month? Speaker 1 00:18:08 Is this a mistake? Is this the intro video? Is this what is going on here? So I watched it and it's essentially a preview video of what you can expect in WordPress 5.9. It's actually a well done video that shows off full se adamine being able to edit the nav area, the nav block of your website, uh, through the editor. Uh, but what the highlight for me was the style. So being able to select different styles, every theme, and being able to change your topography and your colors, which I thought was really nice because now you can have a theme, you can create a couple of different styles and depending on how you feel during that time of the year, you can just give your site a little bit of that new look and feel without overly changing everything like the layout and whatnot. And I was talking about this before the show with, uh, w with somebody about, do you remember back in the days of Zen garden and Sam garden was all this check out what we can do with just CSS. Speaker 1 00:19:03 And I, and I remember there were conversations in the WordPress community with default theme scene, with the idea of trying to do the Zen coding approach, but with the default theme. So you could easily switch themes in and out. It's just CSS. And then you can have a new look and feel without really changing everything. And then there were child themes, but child themes to me was made it almost as many changes. You know, it could change the layout, it could change the look and feel. It was almost like a full theme, even though it was a child thing. So it's kind of funny that it just seems like it's taken us all this time to get to the point where if you just wanted to do simple typography changes and colors, just to kind of spice things up in your site. Uh, now you don't have to install a child theme or whatnot. You can, hopefully your main theme will come with styles and you can just select the style from within the full site editor and it's applied and it looks good and everything's golden, Speaker 2 00:20:01 You know, what it made me think of though. Um, remember when people used to do like different, uh, you know, add snow to their designs for winter or Christmas Speaker 2 00:20:12 Yeah. So like, I wonder if I'll be able to like set up styles per programmatically, like using like the functions that PHB file and like have like, you know, different designs or looks based on maybe the time of day or the time of year or, or those kinds of things. So, you know, and just again, not changing the layout, just changing kind of which styles like which CSS set or color set or type sets that I use for my, Speaker 1 00:20:38 No, it would be cool is if I had a light theme and a dark mode theme, and based on the time as you say, programming programmatically, uh, the, the style could be applied based on the time of day. You want users wouldn't need to switch and then wouldn't need to be a setting stored as a cookie or whatnot on the site. You got the, you got the brain going, sir, that would be cool. I bet you, I bet you, this can be something that could be, Speaker 2 00:21:05 Um, what do you think of like, I mean, you've watched this video, what do you think about five dot nine? Do you feel like it's an exciting release? It seems like it's a pretty big release. Speaker 1 00:21:14 Well, it's, it's so big. It's been delayed and we'll get to that, but I think, yeah, I think 5.9 because of full site editing and what that entails and because 20, 22 realize and full site editing and we got the nav block and in other things, this is like one of those milestone moments, as I've said before, we're, it's, it's like a cutoff point of before full site editing black themes and after full site editing and black themes. No. So it's going to be, you know, we have WordPress 5.0 yeah. Pre Gutenberg and after Gutenberg, well, this is going to be, you know, one of those big things, but for themes, you know, before FSC and after FSC and from what I've seen in the, in the video, and I've not actually used or experimented with a full site editing black thing. And yet, uh, there are a few available, but I'm kind of waiting for 5.9 to, to come out and then actually start playing with themes. But from what I've seen, I'm kind of anxious to get in there and click around and see what I see what I'm capable of, see how I can break things with this, a new way of, of managing the theme. And something else that I've been thinking about too, is, you know, the theme customizer. Yup. What's going to happen to the customizer in the era of full site editing. Does it disappear? Does it simply become a toggle of turning full site editing mode on or off, or here's the, what happens with the customized? Speaker 2 00:22:37 A lot of developers use the customizer to add and store values. So I don't necessarily see that going away anytime soon, but it definitely feels like the expectation is, uh, a transition away from the customizer to this. I think, you know, when we talk about WordPress five dot nine, to me, I'm a little bit nervous because I feel like it's a, do you remember what WordPress was like when Gutenberg first came out and everyone was saying goodbye was kind of garbage, but that was like Gutenberg version 0.1. Right. And we have come a long way since then. Is this going to be full site editing version 0.1? Or is this full site editing 1.0, so I, you know, that question to me still, hasn't been answered. And I'm curious about how good, how easy, how fun basically that this will feel when it actually comes out Speaker 1 00:23:28 At least early iterate often. That's what they always say. 1.0 is the loneliest number. Speaker 2 00:23:34 We have one chance to make a good first impression. Right. I mean, look at the ratings on Gutenberg. Speaker 1 00:23:41 Yeah. You had to bring that up, huh? Yeah. But you're right. You're right. Um, it, yeah, it did. It didn't go so well, did it? That's what you get. That's what you consider a, not warm reception as to what happened with, with the introduction of Gutenberg into WordPress. But, uh, you know, speaking of speaking of saving theme values, I think people will be able to do that now. And the theme that J sound file. I think the theme that Jason file is going to take the place of what you were able to do in the theme customizer. I can't confirm that, but it seems to me like that's how it's going to work. Speaker 1 00:24:20 So speaking of, uh, you know, I mentioned that WordPress 5.9 is so big that it's been delayed. Well, there's going to be a revised or there is a revised release schedule for, it was 5.9. The final release is now planned for January 25th. Uh, during the end of the original alpha release cycle, there were issues that arose that were related to multiple major features planned for the 5.9 release, including full site editing. Uh, the navigation block, the 2022 theme, which depends on full site editing and the 6.0 release isn't due out until April, uh, which is too long. They, the, the, the team felt was too long for the community to wait for them. So after going through the list of issues, the core editor team saw that the features could ship in 5.9, what the revised schedule and what they did is they had many discussions in terms of when and how, and they decided that the best course of action would be to delay WordPress 5.9 to include the various fixes and shipped them to the community, uh, by the end of January, taking into account the fact that there are less people around, within the last two weeks in the first week, or last two weeks of December and the first week of January, and they've actually built in time so that they can actually do a, for the beta if they determined that to be necessary. Speaker 1 00:25:42 Uh, so I, I don't think anyone's going to complain to be honest that, uh, the release has been delayed from December into January. I've brought this up before, you know, they say that deadline or deadlines are not arbitrary, I believe is what the saying is. Uh, and I've always wondered why not just have a release in January to begin with, you know, at, at January's bullying month, uh, there's nothing really going on. Uh, you're, you're trying to start a new start, a fresh, and by having a release of WordPress, a major version, you know, the end of January, Hey, you know, it's something to look forward to in the new year. So in December is just a very, very busy time of year for everybody around the world. So I, I don't know. I, like I said, I don't think anybody's complaining, uh, and nobody, I mean, the full site editing and the other features of 5.9, they're exciting. And I think people can't wait to check them out, but now what's one more month going to do Speaker 2 00:26:43 Well. I mean, one of the big issues that I'm experiencing, um, at Canberra is getting engaged resources over the holiday season to make movement on things. Yeah. The Speaker 1 00:26:55 Big question. Oh Speaker 2 00:26:57 Man. Oh man. I think the big question mark for WordPress then is, you know, let's assume no, one's going to do anything meaningful in December for WordPress five dot nine. Is those, are those twenty-five days in January enough to make that meaningful progress to put the release together, they assume. Yes. But I would still be interested to see kind of what the volunteer, or even the like corporate sponsored hours in terms of development for WordPress 5 99 looks like over the course of like, you know, right now, basically through the end of the year. Speaker 1 00:27:31 Yeah. They do say that the, uh, the blockers that have been identified in the list have already been merged, uh, last week and they're no longer blockers. So that's good to know. So now they can just work on bug fixes, hammering some things out, and hopefully having enough time to, to take care of everything before the release in January. And now's a good time to, uh, the test I've actually installed the WordPress beta testing plugin. And I have it set up to be, uh, I think it's unlikely. So I dunno if something breaks, I'll let you all know. Speaker 1 00:28:08 The state of the word is happening. It's happening December 14th, 2021, between five and 7:00 PM Eastern standard time. At first, I thought it was going to be live-streamed only, but it turns out that automatic has a satellite office in New York city that I didn't know about. I haven't kept up on the various satellite offices that automatic has, but it makes sense for them to have one in New York city. That's also where, uh, Matt has a, uh, a place to stay. He's, he's got a home there in New York city and you can actually request a seat to, to go there and participate in seam, deliver the state of the word in person. Uh, so seats are limited to 50 attendees. You need to fill out the request a seat by Sunday, November 28th, not all requests will receive, uh, due to venue capacity, uh, but everyone will receive confirmation or some community, some form of communication on Tuesday, November 30th. Speaker 1 00:29:10 And if you're planning on attending this event in person, you're going to be asked to show your COVID vaccination card at the venue entrance. So, uh, be sure you have that on your person if you, uh, if you go there, but, uh, you can still send in a question if you want. There's a, there's a form. You can submit a question during the Q and a portion of the, of the events. I don't know. That's pretty cool. At least we'll be able to see or, or actually hear people clapping maybe during a state of the word. Oh, that's nice. And then to be able to open that up, and I imagine we'll have a little after party or get together at the, at the auto medical office in New York city after the event. Speaker 2 00:29:49 So, you know, who is going one of the people or two of the people that got, uh, some of those seats include Tofor. Oh, really? Yeah. I think tofa and his wife were going, Speaker 1 00:29:59 Oh, how about that? Nice. Um, I am not going, actually, I wasn't even invited. I heard that some people get invited to go. They actually, uh, uh, again, invited to go in person and, uh, you know, I wasn't one of them, I'm sorry, I'm just washed up, man. Uh, but, uh, I don't know. I wouldn't go anyways. I'm I'm not, uh, I'm not a one to fly or drive to New York city. That's absolutely something I don't want to do. So I'll just sit here in my nice comfy little home drink, a bottle of water pet smokey, and what to say to the word on my, on my laptop, which I think is what a lot of people would do. Speaker 2 00:30:42 I hope so. I mean, 50 seats is not a lot, so it's a pretty exclusive group of people that'll be there. Um, but I do think that it does bring some kind of energy to the whole presentation to have. Speaker 1 00:30:52 I just have people there it's always a much different, did you, uh, I don't know if you did this, but during last year during COVID, did you ever watch any of the episodes of the prices right Speaker 2 00:31:03 Now? I didn't. Speaker 1 00:31:05 I watched episodes of the prices, right? And I've, I've determined. You've got to have an audience. You've got to have people screaming numbers at you, screaming dollar amounts, openness, this show suck without the audience. I mean, drew carries a fantastic host and they all did a great job, but not having that audience interaction. And just having that, hearing the, uh, the recording of people applauding and whatnot, it sought. So having an audience is a huge difference maker, especially sports venues, same thing. No, and they haven't an audience there. It kind of sucked, but, but actually, but, but now that we have all the people there and now you hear all the cheering and now there's fights, you know, there's fights back in the states. Yeah. All right. So we'll end this show on a bit of a, uh, kind of making me grumpy, but I've, I've seen conversations within the past week or so. Speaker 1 00:31:54 And, you know, Carl Hancock brought this up actually, as we've just been talking about this on Twitter, you know, Carl, and I'm just talking about pricing and FOMO deals. And if you go to a certain website, they, they hit you with these, uh, sale prices. And sometimes they're not even a, the sale price, there's just a lot of, uh, bad mojo going around with the WordPress companies and how they present prices in their sales. And the question that was brought up was that these black Friday deals that so many WordPress businesses are participating in, are they actually deals? So, um, uh, gentlemen, uh, man, I, uh, I, his, uh, I forget his name off the top of my head, but he does WP raccoon.com. And, uh, he's actually part of a visual composer team and cloud ways, but he actually maintains, uh, a WordPress. He's got a plugin pricing document that he's been maintaining now for the past few months. Speaker 1 00:32:58 And he's been sharing updates about it on the WordPress for business Facebook group. So he was actually in a prime position to be able to look at the prices he has in his document and compare them to the black Friday deals. And it turns out that a lot of companies are, uh, giving you special offers when it doesn't really appear that they're actually that special when you compare the before and after, uh, discount prices when black Friday is concerned. And he also discovered that there were companies that increased their prices earlier on in the month of November and then provided a black Friday deal. But at the end, it really wasn't a deal. So this is just something that's going on. I wanted to bring this up because I know we talk about, if you run into business, we talked about user trust, right? You want users is trust you in this to me, if you raising prices, that's not a problem. Speaker 1 00:33:52 I don't think anybody will complain or anybody will say raising prices. That's your prerogative. As a business, you raise prices when you see fit and that's what you do. But if you're going to raise prices, let's say at the beginning of November and in knowingly participate in black Friday with a deal that doesn't even seem like a deal or it's, you're not even saving as much money as you would, if you would have bought it without the black Friday or early in the month, it just appears shady. It, it appears knownly on trustworthy. Uh, and I think timing is a big deal here when it comes to raising prices in November and in participating in black Friday, it's just, it rubs me the wrong way. I don't, I, you know, people were bringing up that in some countries, this kind of crap is illegal. Like if a company has to stick with a certain price for like 28 days before they could do anything with it and whatnot, I think that's a thing in some of these other countries. Speaker 2 00:34:46 So, I mean, just to play devil's advocate because you know, I like doing that. Speaker 1 00:34:51 Um, you have cute horns. Speaker 2 00:34:55 I mean, what I like, why does anyone feel like they like, so if you don't like the pricing, or if you don't like the deal, why do you get to it? Like, you can comment on it, but like, why do you get to tell them what they can and can't do what their pricing don't you live in America, the land of freedom. Speaker 1 00:35:09 I, I can't tell, I can't force them to do whatever, but I, I think, uh, Speaker 2 00:35:16 Does it feel shady to you? Like what, what are, what are they specifically doing to you that makes it shady? Are they like opening their cloak and the back alley going, Hey, man, I got this deal for you Speaker 1 00:35:27 Black Friday to me. Well, w what has, why has it become in, uh, in the commercialization of, of, of, of America, uh, it's a day for customers to feel like they're getting the best deal of the year. And it's an opportunity for, for companies before the end of the year to go into the black, instead of the red, that's what the whole black Friday thing is all about. But to do that in a way to actually look into it and see that, well, this ain't a deal. What the hell is this? You know, this isn't, I waited all year for this, Speaker 2 00:36:00 But here's the funny part about that, right? So you said like black Fridays about companies getting into the black, and then you, you counter like, compare that to companies, giving deals to customers. It's really about corporate greed, right? It's it's not about making sure that you, the customer happy it's about making sure the company makes as much money as possible so that they can keep in business and do cool things for another year. So like, you're, you're assuming that you deserve the best prices or that like consumers deserve the best prices. When the actual, like focus of the day is about making sure the company makes as much money as possible. Speaker 1 00:36:38 Um, I'm not, I'm not assuming I'm expecting, it's my expectation that today's that the deal I get this black Friday deal is the best deal and the best price I'm going to get on this product for the entire Speaker 2 00:36:50 A year. But it might be the best one that you're going to get until the next black Friday next year, right? Like if they've raised their prices and now they've lowered, lowered them arbitrarily for this single day back to what they did before. If they keep those higher prices for the rest of the year, then they didn't really do anything shady. They just raise their prices and then reduce them back to what they were temporarily. So that you had one last crack at getting the old price before they raise it permanently. Speaker 1 00:37:18 I was looking at some of these sites that are mentioned in this list, and I was checking out their pricing pages. I can't tell you heads or tails. What the hell the original price is on these things anymore. They've got, they've got crossed out prices. They've got sale prices. They've got black Friday FOMO. You're going to miss out. If you don't act now prices. I have no idea what the hell the original price is on the sink. Speaker 2 00:37:40 And then, and then the funny part is, you know, is that Speaker 1 00:37:42 Intended? Speaker 2 00:37:43 Yes, it is price. Confusion has completely intended, um, because what they want you to do is Speaker 1 00:37:50 They want to psychologically get me to give them money. And they want me to fear of missing out that they want me to think that this is the best it's going to be, that now is the time. And you better don't add biggest plan. Speaker 2 00:38:02 Yeah. Better. You better pick the biggest thing. Cause otherwise you're not getting the best deal. Speaker 1 00:38:09 Yeah. But, and by the way, speaking of that, of the, of the price and pages, I did see the cheapest, the cheapest plan that they had exact same price, no sale, no nothing, but for all the other tiers, you can see what you apparently you could save a little bit of money Speaker 2 00:38:23 And the joke of this whole Speaker 1 00:38:24 Thing I want to give away for free. Speaker 2 00:38:26 Th the joke of this whole thing for me is, so what happens on Monday Speaker 1 00:38:34 Cyber Monday let's raise prices. Speaker 2 00:38:38 So the joke is cyber Monday, right? And this whole idea that, oh, okay, you buy all your digital stuff on Monday about your physical stuff on Friday. Speaker 1 00:38:44 That's the way it was supposed to be, but what Speaker 2 00:38:47 Ended up happening? So now now what we receive is just twice as many bloody emails about sales. Yeah. It's just, Speaker 1 00:38:53 Oh, annoying. And on top of that, black Friday has turned into black November. I know. Speaker 2 00:38:57 I know. And it just keeps getting longer. Doesn't it? Yeah. Speaker 1 00:39:01 And I just, I don't know. I'm, like I said, on Twitter, I'm thankful that I'm in a position to where black Friday means nothing to me. I, I'm not, uh, I'm not out there looking for a black Friday deal on a TV, on a WordPress plugin on hosting or anything of that nature. It just another day for me. And I just get to sit back and drink a drink of coffee and not have to worry about traffic. I know I have a few times in my life I've gone out just to do it just for fun, not really to go shopping, but just to experience it. And it is an experience to go out on black Friday shopping. It's, uh, most of the time it's good. Sometimes it's bad being in a home Depot at 5:00 AM and people are just crashing into you, a card skeet and other goods. That's something I'm glad I actually got to witness that one time going inside the mall at 3:00 AM. That was fun. But other than that, you know, I just, black Friday is a thing I hope that I don't have to mess with. But, uh, yeah, I don't know. It's just, um, I think it's a note ticket is that, you know, maybe we just in the back of your head just wonder, are you really getting the best deal? I mean, best deal at that time, maybe. Speaker 2 00:40:10 So I'm curious, have you at, at no point you thought, Hm, should I run a WVU mainline black Friday deal for subscriptions or advertising or anything? Speaker 1 00:40:22 Well, I, it, my smart ass self was going to run a black Friday, uh, special this week where, uh, people save no money. It was just the same price. Speaker 2 00:40:33 Well, at least you didn't raise prices, right? Yeah, Speaker 1 00:40:35 Exactly. Now I got that going for me. I don't know. I thought about it. I thought maybe doing a black Friday, but no, Nope. Not going to do it Speaker 2 00:40:44 Just interesting. Ah, Speaker 1 00:40:46 Any, any, any black Friday deals going on over there at press tightened? Speaker 2 00:40:50 No, I mean, we're so bad at that kind of stuff. Uh, we don't do like marketing or special promos or anything like that. I mean, at one point for like a couple of years back, like three years back, I thought, I think that we were going to like, try to do like a low value offer to try to like build trust and confidence by like, and it was going to be like, not just, it, wasn't going to be like a specific day around that, that I was going to be just a, long-term like, here's our low price offer. So you can kind of get to know us and see if we're we're half decent. Um, and we ended up like canceling it after like three months because all the people that it was attracting were not really the people that would be interested in. Speaker 1 00:41:28 Yes. Well, let me ask you this. If, if a company has a product of service, it's on sale, but it's on sale for the entire year is, seems isn't really a sale or is that the price? Speaker 2 00:41:39 Well, so it becomes, it's a marketing thing, right? So they're hoping that you haven't seen their sale price before, and they'd probably put like a cookie on your computer. So like, you know, you see those repeating countdowns, right? If you clear out your cache and cookies and you go back to a website and the countdown's now like 10 days until the sale is over and you clear your cookies like two days later, and it's like 10 days until the sale is over. I mean, they do that on purpose to try to get that scarcity mindset going so that you're willing to like pull the trigger without actually kind of thinking through your purchasing decisions. I mean, all this stuff is like marketing 1 0 1. And so when I say, Speaker 1 00:42:10 I know it must, I must, it must work because all of these websites are doing the damn thing. Like I went to, uh, just before the show, I went to two websites, uh, to view the pricing pages. And they were hitting me with FOMO. I've got two days and so many hours to take advantage of this offered. And when I clicked on the X or was getting near the exit on the tab, it gave me a big banner saying, no, don't go. And then in the bottom left hand corner, it was telling me people's names and locations of people who bought this and that, uh, in the right hand corner, I've got, um, some chat support reps saying, Hey, uh, you interested arrested now? Well, how can we help you spend your money here? I mean, that was, I was bombarded, man. I was in a psychological nightmare on that website. Speaker 2 00:42:53 And you have to ask yourself, right? Like, is it really like for certain things, is it really valuable for them to do this? Like, are they truly making enough money to like warrant this kind of hard sell or this kind of like emotional manipulation? Like if they're making like 30 bucks off of me, like, is that really enough to be doing this and potentially like annoying however many other people that they could have potentially sold to like, just the whole thing is strange to me. I don't, I don't understand marketing the same way as, as I think a lot of other companies do. Speaker 1 00:43:26 And, you know, and I'll ask you, and this is something Carl Hancock was talking about that the FOMO that I was mentioning, the, the, the, you visit a website and boom, it shows if you don't purchase within a certain amount of time, you know, you can't get access to this price or that deal. Like, what do you think about that? That's, that's totally tapping into the, the, the mindset of consumers and it's art of most of the time it's artificial FOMO. Speaker 2 00:43:49 Yeah, for sure. But I mean, it's, it's using the exact same, like it's Speaker 1 00:43:55 Kind of crappy illegal Speaker 2 00:43:56 And well, probably Carl, Carl points this out, but the funny part is like, if you go to gravity forms right now, and you look at their black Friday page, they have a countdown on their website as well. Now, you know, it's not going to reset magically and it's not going to be this permit price discount and this like trickery or, or like kind of, you know, gray hat marketing, emotional Speaker 1 00:44:16 Manipulation, Speaker 2 00:44:18 Uh, six days, 16 hours, 11 minutes, Speaker 1 00:44:21 The first black Friday week or something. Speaker 2 00:44:25 Yeah, exactly. So like the sales are getting longer and longer. These opportunities are there. Everyone's using these countdown timers, whether or not they're real countdown timers, like everyone's doing this and they Speaker 1 00:44:36 Just a consumer at the end of the day with all this going on, does the consumer actually, when are they getting the better end of the stick on all this? Speaker 2 00:44:44 I mean, sometimes, sometimes they are actually kind of shoots themselves in the, in the foot a little bit, because if I'm, if I see this sale, right, the elite version of gravity forms is $129 American right now, normally it's $259 when this sale is done. If I didn't pull the trigger for whatever reason, maybe I didn't have money in my bank account until January 1st kind of thing right now come January 1st. I'm going to go, well, I'm going to wait until they run another sale, right? Like they've now devalued their product in my mind to the point where I'm going to wait until it's like around that same price again, before I purchased. And I may might forget about it in the interim and never purchase the elite version of gravity forms because I'm waiting for this magical sale to happen again. And it might never happen again. Speaker 1 00:45:26 And guess what, you, you, you didn't read the post that they published back in November saying at the beginning of the new year, we're going to raise price, Speaker 2 00:45:33 Right. And so then, and then it's even worse right now. I'm now I'm really kicking myself and I'm also going, well, I'm not going to pay 2 89 or whatever the heck the new price is. I'm definitely going to wait for a sale now. So these, these kinds of games, especially in terms of software, you have to be very careful of, um, when I used to sell advertising on, um, uh, splash press media's websites, way back in the day is a blogging. That's a name I know. Right. Um, you know, it was, it was one of those funny things where depending on the client, like I, I went out and I sent all these emails to these different businesses that I knew advertised on blogs in like the WordPress space or in the technology space. And they wouldn't even talk to me until I added another zero on the end of the price. Speaker 2 00:46:14 Right. Because it was all about the value that I was presenting and not about the true value of what I was offering. Um, because value is a perception, right? It's what, what is the most amount of money that someone's willing to pay? So when you put something in front of someone for 200 bucks, or you put something in front of someone for $2,000, it's a very different value proposition that they assume it's not, it's not necessarily a tangible, like, understandable thing. Is gravity forms worth $300? Is it worth $600? Is it worth a thousand dollars? I think it probably is. Is it worth $129? Heck yeah, man, you guys should be like clicking buy an hour on that all day long. But like, they, they, they, like, I don't even know that they know what their maximum price actually is or what that turn is. Speaker 1 00:46:57 Yeah. I mean, how many of us, even as individuals actually know what our value is? Speaker 2 00:47:02 Oh, no, I, yeah, I agree. But we don't necessarily have the same sales data. Right. Like you and I are not selling ourselves every day where we can kind of start to build an understanding of our value in that, in, in the wider marketplace. So Speaker 1 00:47:14 Yeah, I mean, when I was, when I was coming up with like prices on member, subscription memberships and stuff like that, advertising for WP mainline, I was talking to my good buddy, Bob WP, Bob done do the woo. Uh, yes, I got one in there. I was talking to have any sent man just experiment. He said, just put, put the prices of what you need, what you feel you need, you can get by, you can make a living not, and just base it on that and then experiment. And he says, you know, the, the worst thing that can happen is, you know, you just have to change your prices. So I I've been kind of sticking with that. And it's, it's worked so far and, uh, to wrap up the show, you know, you're, you're, you're so hyped on Crowdy forums. You know why it is because back in 2009 at work camp Chicago, they bought you, they should, they gave you a preview of what it was and hook line and sinker, baby. Speaker 1 00:47:59 They got you. And I only, and I, and I choke, I can't, I bring that up because last night and Twitter, uh, some folks, we started talking about a word camp, Dallas, the first word camp Dallas, which was in preschool, Texas, where Matt Malawi showed up on a Saturday as he just, he just had his wisdom teeth pulled, but that was my first ever work camp. And then we're somehow we got up to work camp Chicago in 2009 and we're Chicago 2009 was a big deal because that's when Matt Mullenweg announced commercial, uh, commercial themes would be added to the WordPress team directory if they were a hundred percent GPL, which then led into all of the discussions with Brian Garner and Jason Schuler and Corey Miller of I themes and a bunch of other theme shops with Matt, mulloway saying, well, what does that mean? Speaker 1 00:48:44 What does it mean to be a hundred percent GPO? Can we do this? Can we do that? And, uh, so that was a big deal, but it was also a big deal. And there are pictures of this in the racket genius flicker account. And, uh, I have a few on my account, I believe where you can actually see Carl Hancock and the rocket genius team showcasing gravity forms to Matt Mullenweg, mark gauche, uh, and some other folks, including, uh, Malcolm Peralta, who at the time was a big boy with curly hair know. And, uh, you know, he got to see it firsthand. And that was a really cool cause I remember those days and I said, man, I looked at it and I looked at the interface. I said, you guys nailed it. This is going to be a big deal. This is going to be a popular product. And, um, you know, I'd take no credit and being right, but, but, but Hey, it has served them well over the years and it continues to be one of the top form solutions and WordPress. And uh, at one point you actually got to work for refugees. Speaker 2 00:49:41 I did, yeah. For like two years. Speaker 1 00:49:43 It was great. But do you remember, do you remember that event where camp Chicago, any, any fond memories of that event? Um, I mean that was bounce back in the beef five media days. Speaker 2 00:49:53 Geez. Yeah. I, uh, you know, I didn't really get to attend many word camps in my career. As I've mentioned before, I've, I've been very much kind of, uh, uh, heads down doing my work kind of WordPress user or WordPress, whatever. Um, but that was, that was certainly an event for the times. And, uh, you know, I'm so glad I was there because I think that really did end up kind of putting me as a front runner for being, you know, part of their, uh, customer support team and helping out with some early marketing and stuff like that. And I just, uh, I feel so grateful that, you know, I attended that event and, uh, yeah, I remember there was, there was so many, like I look back at the pictures and I'm like, I wonder what happened to this person in that person? Cause like the, you know, the, the big names in WordPress at the time who have gone off and done other things. And so it's, it's always interesting to kind of go back and look at it Speaker 1 00:50:47 Like Mika Baldwin, I got a picture of him. He was there. He was, he was a, he was a big deal at the time. And, uh, you know, I was looking at pictures of Corey Miller and bred Williams and we looked like kids 2009. And me, I looked like, uh, me of today looked like I ate 2000 meat 2009. I mean, I don't know what happened, man. The years of not kind to me. Yeah. It's all Cove it's fought, but man we're camps 2009, 2010, big time, I still got a picture of the, of the screenshot on the projector. It said commercial, GPO themes on a directory or whatnot. Like did the announcement, man, that was, that was a big deal. And then that launched to all the GPO debates and arguments and things of 2010, 2011, those were good times, easy page views, GPL. Speaker 1 00:51:42 That's what it turned out to be. Anyways. It was kind of cool looking back on that I'm like the WordPress historian for some of those times and medians and things I've been able to take advantage of. So it's always, always fun for me to, to bring all that stuff up and reminisce. Um, so there you go. And before we go, um, it's Thanksgiving for me. So let me say, let's see, what am I thankful for? I'm thankful for my wife, I'm thankful for smoky and thankful for medication that works for anxiety attacks. I'm thankful for all of the people out there who check up on me on a regular basis on Twitter. And, uh, so on the various social media, I'm thankful for Malcolm for being able to put up with me and my jokes and co-hosting the show with me on a weekly basis. And, uh, what else am I am thankful for WordPress and its community and everyone who is, uh, been able to financially support me or just support me in general. Thank you very much. And I'm thankful for what else am I thankful for? Oh, heated car seats. Those things are awesome. Speaker 1 00:52:47 Do you ever have a heated car seat? Oh my God dude. It's so nice. I live in Canada. Speaker 2 00:52:51 You kind of have to, Speaker 1 00:52:54 And I know your Thanksgiving was in is, uh, was a month ago, but, uh, I don't think I ever asked you what you were thankful for. Well, off the top of your head for my wife. Yes. Okay. Speaker 2 00:53:10 We have a wonderful house with a wonderful dog. My mom lives with us and uh, she takes the lion's share of cooking dinners for us that are just absolutely amazing. I mean, otherwise we'd really be just kind eating a lot of like frozen. Um, Speaker 1 00:53:23 They spent so much time to work and everything else have work, food cooking. I mean, you gotta, you gotta have, you gotta have time. Speaker 2 00:53:29 So the, the support that we get is amazing, um, where we live right now, my, my, my jobs like, uh, press Titan and Cambra creative, and the people there have been so supportive. Um, you know, the, the societal change, my, you know, the biggest thing I'm thankful for actually this year is the societal change that we're seeing in terms of being able to talk about mental health. Um, you know, I never thought as a teenager, that the world that we lived in would get to the point where we could talk about this stuff without being shamed for it, or just told to like, you know, just think positive. And so I'm, I'm most thankful for that change, um, because it's meant a lot to me and I hope it has meant a lot to you as well. Speaker 1 00:54:10 Yeah. It was kind of weird when I made the announcement on Twitter and I apologized and I said, this is what happened. You know, I had quite a few people liking that tweet and telling me, Hey, that was really, um, uh, strong or it was really, um, what's the word I'm looking for a brief. It was really brave of you for, to come on and to say that. And I said, it doesn't even feel brave to me. I'm just telling you what happened. No, but I don't know for a lot of other people, I guess they didn't, they, I guess they don't expect people to just come out and say, this is what happened and, and attack and no show this, uh, I don't know. You know, that's just, I mean, that's just what happened. So, but if it helps others, if it inspires others or if it makes others feel as though they can say these things and, you know, I guess that's a positive thing. Yep. So with that, that's going to do it for this Turkey edition of, uh, the WP and mainline podcast. You can find show notes for this episode and all other episodes on WP mainline.com. And you can follow me on Twitter at Jeffrey, J E F F R zero and Malcolm, sir. Speaker 2 00:55:21 Uh, you can find me at find purpose on Twitter and if you need anything, you can always find me through press titan.com or Canberra creative. Speaker 1 00:55:29 So everybody have a safe, enjoyable holidays, uh, sucks from Malcolm. He already had his, so it's our turn. But think of it this way, Malcolm you'll have at least three or four, maybe five days of quietness from the us side of things, which, you know, maybe you'll appreciate. We'll all be well, we'll all be quiet for the next few days, maybe. Yeah. Speaker 2 00:55:53 Uh that's. I mean, it is what it is. I'll make it work. Speaker 1 00:55:58 All right, everybody, we'll talk to you again next Friday afternoon. So long everybody

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