I'm aware of trac, before making a feature request there I'd figure I'd get the temperature here. Simply - so many sites these days turn comments off, and there's a cottage industry around blocking comment spam besides, does WordPress even need comments as a core feature? I feel it might be better to move the functionality off into a plugin that ships with WordPress in 8.0, and then maybe even remove it entirely from core in 9. Thoughts?

Hi all WordPress peeps. quick question, have been runnning askimet plugin for about 3 years. I dont run a blog website and any forms I have are created by elementor. do i really need askimet.

I run WooCommerce and an lms

The default theme editor does not have the option to upload an icon.

Hi all WordPress peeps. quick question, have been runnning askimet plugin for about 3 years. I dont run a blog website and any forms I have are created by elementor. do i really need askimet.

I run WooCommerce and an lms

I'm a dev at Tide and I've been building out a WordPress plugin in my spare cycles. Before I sink some more time into it I'd rather find out whether I'm solving a problem anyone actually has, so I'm posting the plan here while it's still cheap to change.

Quick context on Tide if you haven't run into it: it's threshold cryptography, meaning keys get split across a decentralised network of nodes (we call them ORKs) so no single party, including us, ever holds a whole key.

What the plugin does right now: you pick which post meta keys are sensitive, and those get encrypted and decrypted in the browser. WordPress never sees the plaintext. Neither does MySQL, your host, your backups, or the 23 other plugins you've got installed. Whether a given user is allowed to decrypt is decided by a Tide policy enforced across the ORK network, so it isn't a current_user_can() check sitting in PHP that an attacker can just walk around once they've got admin.

The honest downsides, because I'd rather you hear them from me:

• You can't search, sort or filter on encrypted meta. meta_query on those keys is dead.
• WP-CLI and any REST consumer that isn't going through the browser path sees ciphertext and nothing else.

So my actual question. Post meta felt like the natural first target because it's where custom fields and ACF and half the plugin ecosystem park their data, but I'm not convinced it's what people are losing sleep over. Would you rather see this applied to:

• form submissions (CF7, Gravity, WPForms entries sitting in the DB in plaintext forever)
• WooCommerce customer and order fields
• private uploads and media
• user profile fields
• membership or CRM style plugin data
• something I haven't listed

It'll be open source, and there's a free tier so you can run it without talking to anyone in sales first.

Two things I'd genuinely like answers to: what data on your sites do you wish WordPress simply never held in readable form, and what would stop you installing something like this even if it were free?

Happy to go into the crypto in the comments if anyone cares about that part.

Getting meaningful customer feedback feels harder than ever.

Let’s say you have 10,000 customers, but only 1 or 2 people mention on Reddit, Facebook, or another platform that they dislike a feature or want something changed.

How do you decide whether that feedback represents a real product problem or just a personal preference?

For example, many WordPress companies place promotional or sale banners inside the WordPress dashboard.

Some users find those notices annoying and feel the dashboard should stay clean.

But other users may actually benefit from them because they discover a discount they would otherwise have missed.

So one feature can create value for one group while frustrating another.

I’m curious how product teams handle situations like this.

Do you look mainly at:

• Number of similar complaints?
• Percentage of affected users?
• Support tickets and feature requests?
• Usage or behavioral data?
• Revenue/business impact?
• User interviews or surveys?
• How easy or risky the change is?

And how do you avoid overreacting to a few loud users while also not ignoring valuable early feedback?

Would love to hear how other product teams approach this.

I'm a dev at Tide and I've been building out a WordPress plugin in my spare cycles. Before I sink some more time into it I'd rather find out whether I'm solving a problem anyone actually has, so I'm posting the plan here while it's still cheap to change.

Quick context on Tide if you haven't run into it: it's threshold cryptography, meaning keys get split across a decentralised network of nodes (we call them ORKs) so no single party, including us, ever holds a whole key.

What the plugin does right now: you pick which post meta keys are sensitive, and those get encrypted and decrypted in the browser. WordPress never sees the plaintext. Neither does MySQL, your host, your backups, or the 23 other plugins you've got installed. Whether a given user is allowed to decrypt is decided by a Tide policy enforced across the ORK network, so it isn't a current_user_can() check sitting in PHP that an attacker can just walk around once they've got admin.

The honest downsides, because I'd rather you hear them from me:

• You can't search, sort or filter on encrypted meta. meta_query on those keys is dead.
• WP-CLI and any REST consumer that isn't going through the browser path sees ciphertext and nothing else.

So my actual question. Post meta felt like the natural first target because it's where custom fields and ACF and half the plugin ecosystem park their data, but I'm not convinced it's what people are losing sleep over. Would you rather see this applied to:

• form submissions (CF7, Gravity, WPForms entries sitting in the DB in plaintext forever)
• WooCommerce customer and order fields
• private uploads and media
• user profile fields
• membership or CRM style plugin data
• something I haven't listed

It'll be open source, and there's a free tier so you can run it without talking to anyone in sales first.

Two things I'd genuinely like answers to: what data on your sites do you wish WordPress simply never held in readable form, and what would stop you installing something like this even if it were free?

Happy to go into the crypto in the comments if anyone cares about that part.

Getting meaningful customer feedback feels harder than ever.

Let’s say you have 10,000 customers, but only 1 or 2 people mention on Reddit, Facebook, or another platform that they dislike a feature or want something changed.

How do you decide whether that feedback represents a real product problem or just a personal preference?

For example, many WordPress companies place promotional or sale banners inside the WordPress dashboard.

Some users find those notices annoying and feel the dashboard should stay clean.

But other users may actually benefit from them because they discover a discount they would otherwise have missed.

So one feature can create value for one group while frustrating another.

I’m curious how product teams handle situations like this.

Do you look mainly at:

• Number of similar complaints?
• Percentage of affected users?
• Support tickets and feature requests?
• Usage or behavioral data?
• Revenue/business impact?
• User interviews or surveys?
• How easy or risky the change is?

And how do you avoid overreacting to a few loud users while also not ignoring valuable early feedback?

Would love to hear how other product teams approach this.