Every goddamn time I log into WordPress, there’s another update for wpDiscuz waiting for me.
I swear I just updated this fucking thing. I’ll clear the update notice, go about my business for a couple days, log back in, and there it is again. wpDiscuz has an update. At this point I’m starting to think the plugin is lonely and just wants me to click on it.
I finally looked into it because I thought maybe I was imagining how often this was happening. Nope. Between August 25 and September 11, wpDiscuz released six updates. Six updates in eighteen days for a comment plugin. That works out to a new version roughly every three days.
Look, I’m not one of those people who gets mad because software is maintained. An abandoned WordPress plugin is a much bigger problem than one that gets regular updates, especially when that plugin touches something like the comment system. One of those recent wpDiscuz updates fixed an actual security vulnerability, so yes, obviously, push that shit out immediately. I’m not asking them to sit on a security fix for three weeks because I’m tired of seeing the little red circle in WordPress.
But they can’t all be emergencies.
There’s also a point where updating too often starts working against you. If a plugin needs another update every time I open the dashboard, eventually the update notice becomes background noise. You stop looking at what changed and just think, “Oh, this fucking thing again.” That’s not really where you want your users to end up, especially when one of those updates eventually might be important. Update fatigue is a real thing when you’re maintaining a WordPress site full of plugins.
Some of these updates are fixing shit like voting behavior or social login. Then another update comes out a few days later fixing something else. wpDiscuz itself tells you to clear your caches and purge your CDN after updating, so this isn’t even necessarily a click-the-button-and-forget-about-it deal if you’re trying to maintain a website properly. That’s what makes it so fucking annoying. I maintain multiple websites. I already have WordPress itself, themes, security plugins, SEO plugins, caching plugins, and whatever other shit I’ve installed demanding attention. I don’t need the fucking comment plugin acting like Firefox and deciding it needs a new version every time one of the developers changes a semicolon.
And apparently I’m not completely alone here. Looking through the wpDiscuz support forum, you can find people complaining about bugs showing up after updates, old problems returning, and newer versions breaking things that worked before. When I see another wpDiscuz update now, I’m not thinking, “Oh good, improvements.” I’m thinking, “Alright, what did this one fix, and what might it fuck up?”
Maybe the developers are just extremely active. Maybe they’re trying to fix problems as quickly as possible. Cool, I’d rather have that than a plugin that hasn’t been touched since 2021 and can be exploited by some 13 year old skiddie from the Eastern Bloc.
But holy shit, batch some of this stuff.
Unless it’s a security issue or something seriously broken, do we really need another release every few days? Put the smaller fixes together, test the damn thing, and give us one decent update instead of turning the WordPress dashboard into a wpDiscuz notification service.
I like wpDiscuz, and I’m going to keep using it. But I’d just like to go one fucking week without updating the damn thing.
Update: Before I could even publish this rant, wpDiscuz released another fucking update. I rest my case.
