I’ve been using the Sociable plugin for adding easy “share” links to the bottom of my posts. Up until yesterday I’ve been using the 2.x versions of the plugin, but yesterday I’ve upgraded to 3.4.4. Today I’ve noticed to my surprise that the plugin automatically adds a box to my admin dashboard with “The Latest news from Yoast”, Yoast beeing the plugin’s maintainer, Joost de Valk, blog. The plugin itself doesn’t feature any way to completely disable this “feature”. One has to hide it using the dashboard settings. While this may seems benign, in my opinion its pushing the limit. If I’m interested in getting updates from that blog, I would sign up to its RSS feed. I don’t like getting “free” functionality not advertised in the plugin description.
I must add that as a user of the Sociable plugin, I’m more than satisfied. I probably won’t stop using the plugin just because of this issue, but it still seems to me like improper manners.
All my other plugins feature the same dashboard widget, although I see that I’ve missed one thing in migrating it to Sociable that’s quite important: the “disable completely” x button on the widget, will do that in the next release again, thanks for pointing it out, and glad to hear you’re loving Sociable.
Hi Joost,
Thanks again for the plugin, and I’m happy to hear that it will receive the “disable completely” button.