W-Shadow.com

In this post I will explain what the “Viralogy.com script” thing mentioned in the Broken Link Checker survey was all about, discuss the user response and attempt to verbalize my rather unclear thoughts on the issue.

Viralogy Script

About two weeks ago, I received an offer to bundle a social media tracking script from Viralogy with my Broken Link Checker plugin. This script, which is properly called the “Dynamic Insights Tracker”, tracks the flow of visitors and analyses their preferences and social media activity. If installed on your blog, it would record various data about your visitors and report it back to Viralogy. In turn, this information could then be used to present the tracked visitors with a personalized experience on other sites.

Here’s a simplified example :  say you have a  blog about the Kindle and other e-ink devices, and you’ve got the tracker script installed. When someone reads an e-book reader review on your blog, the tracker script will take note of that. If the same person later goes on to visit an e-commerce site that deals in a variety of gadgets, the Viralogy API will enable that site to find out that the visitor might be interested in e-book readers, and present them with a dynamically optimized store page that puts the Kindle front and centre.

Naturally, I have been assured that privacy matters a lot to the people at Viralogy Inc, and that nothing untoward would happen to anyone’s personal information. This seems about as believable as the Google Analytics privacy policy.

What’s In It For Me?

Money. Well, duh.

According to Viralogy, I would receive a small bi-annual payment per each blogger who installs my plugin(s) and enables the script. Given that I still don’t have any reliable statistics on how many people actually use my plugins, it’s not really possible to tell how much cash that would amount to. By a very rough estimate, it could be anywhere from $50 to $5000. This uncertainty vexed me.

What’s In It For You?

Not much.

I’m sure I could make up some plausible-sounding bulshytt about how installing the script demonstrates your gratitude towards the plugin developer, and how having the script installed allows you to express that gratitude without actually giving the dev. any money yourself. And it does sound plausible, now that I think of it. But in the end, the tracker script wouldn’t give you any direct benefits.

The survey results also show a general lack of enthusiasm for third-party scripts :

Q : I have received an offer to bundle a social media analysis script from Viralogy.com with Broken Link Checker. Your thoughts?

People who chose “Other” mostly asked for more information about the script, or said they would be okay with the script being included if actually enabling it was optional. Of course, it would definitely be optional – that’s the only non-evil way to include the script.

Q : If the aforementioned script *was* included, would allow the plugin to install/enable it?

Conclusions

Tricky tricky. My gut says “maybe”, so let’s do it the hard way and evaluate the pros & cons of this offer.

Pros :

• Me : A vaguely defined amount of cash.
• Users : None.
• Everyone else : The beginnings of personalized web-browsing. Yes, this is a good thing. It’s also pretty much inevitable in the long-term – if not by Viralogy, then certainly by the future efforts of Google/Amazon/Microsoft.

Cons :

• Me : Potential for negative publicity. That could even be useful, but meh.
• Users : None that I can see. The script would be optional anyway, so those who don’ t like it could simply not enable it. Perhaps a minority would have some ideological objections? Either way, the user response was generally unenthusiastic.
• Everyone else : Another tracking script for paranoid Internet users to worry about. Compare with Google Analytics & co.

The costs are relatively small, and the benefits are likewise not very impressive. Conclusion : Not worth it.

Perhaps some other time.

And now for something completely different.

Quantum immortality is a controversial speculation supported by a handful of quantum physicists and abused by many science fiction authors. In essence, it states that the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that conscious beings are immortal. In this post I’ll attempt to show that quantum immortality is completely useless, even if it really works as described.

You Are The Cat

The idea of quantum immortality was derived from the quantum suicide thought experiment, which is a close cousin of the famous “Schroedinger’s undead cat” experiment. Instead of a cat in a box + poison triggered by radioactive decay, the quantum suicide thought experiment involves a mad scientist and a lethal weapon (which I will refer to by the unscientific name “gun” from now on). This gun has been cleverly modified so that when one pulls the trigger, it will measure the spin direction of a passing photon and fire only if the direction is, say, “up”. This amounts to a 50% chance of the gun actually firing.

So the mad scientist points the gun at his head and pulls the trigger. Depending on the spin direction of a random photon, either the gun fires and kills the scientist, or it just goes “click” and leaves him unharmed and free to go on doing what he must because he can.

According to the Everett many-worlds interpretation, each run of this experiment will cause the Universe to branch into two alternate world-lines – one where the scientist lives, and one where he dies. However, the scientist will only experience the world where he survives, because he obviously won’t have any conscious experiences in the worlds where he’s dead. Even if the experiment is repeated an arbitrary number of times, the scientist will only experience the world(s) where he survives.

From the point of view of the surviving copy (or copies), he’ll be immortal.

That’s the essence of the quantum immortality argument. You can’t experience the world-lines where you die, so you can expect to experience only the one where you survive – indefinitely.

Who Wants To Live Forever?

As a matter of fact, I do. Unfortunately, quantum immortality is unlikely to help me achieve eternal life. In fact, the concept is pretty much useless, except as a quaint “what if?” brain-tickler. Lets look at that quantum suicide thought experiment again :

Gun stock photo credit: Fastfood @ sxc.hu

If the many-worlds interpretation is correct, there will indeed always be at least one world-branch that avoids the fatal outcome, one copy of you that survives. Even if you get thrown into an active volcano, there will be an Everett branch where Harry Potter swoops in at the last moment and carries you to safety on his magical flying broomstick (depending on your cultural preferences, this may or may not be worse than being burnt alive by magma). The proponents of quantum immortality will point at that lucky branch and clap their hands giddily.

But – and here’s the kicker – you don’t get to choose in which Everett branch you end up. Yes, there may well be a world-line or two where you live forever, but what are the chances that you – this particular version of you, reading this blog post – are in that world-line? It would be extremely generous to say they’re rather slim.

As for the “you can only experience the worlds where you survive” thing, it’s just plain fallacious. It’s like a sales-person asking you “Will you be paying by check, cash, or credit card?” when you haven’t even decided if you actually want to buy their product. The question intentionally leaves out a valid option – not buying anything – and tries to make you pick one of the options most beneficial to the sales-person.

Similarly, the idea that you can only experience the Everett branches where you are alive incorrectly implies that being dead is somehow not a valid option. Unfortunately, it is. Magic aside, there is no overriding reason why a conscious creature couldn’t just… die, and thus stop being conscious (though that might change sometime this century).

Even if Everett was right and there are numerous alternate worlds, and in some of them a version of you is subjectively quantum-immortal, that doesn’t change your chances of survival one bit.

Last week I invited everyone who uses my Broken Link Checker plugin to answer a user feedback survey. The survey consisted of 11 questions covering a number of topics from overall user satisfaction to feature suggestions, monetization options and questions about the user’s server configuration. In this post I will summarize the results and maybe add some comments of my own.

In total, there were 761 responses to this survey. I don’t know what response rate that amounts to (WordPress.org doesn’t disclose the number of active plugin users even to the author of  the plugin), but the sheer number of responses was very impressive and much more than what I expected

Okay, lets move on to the actual results.

Q1 : How long have you been using Broken Link Checker?

According to the survey, 66% of people who have BLC installed have used it for 6 months or less. Taken alone, this is a rather ambiguous result. When you consider that the first version of Broken Link Checker was released more than two years ago, the large number of recent users can have two wildly different interpretations – either the plugin has a nasty attrition rate, or it has really gone up in popularity during the last 6 months.

Q2 : How satisfied are you with the plugin?

So it seems I needn’t have worried about the attrition rate – 74% of users said they were either “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with the plugin. I’m going to assume this means “good, but needs a bit of work”.

Then there’s the puzzling fact that 12% picked the “Very dissatisfied” response to this question. For one, this result is an obvious outlier. But what really puzzles me is this : the majority of users who answered this question with “Very dissatisfied” gave the plugin rather good ratings in other parts of the survey (like Q3 below). Some of them even said that “it’s already perfect” when asked what they’d like to change about the plugin. There were only 5 or 6 users who picked the “Very dissatisfied” answer here and gave similarly negative feedback to other questions.

I’m inclined to think some users just mixed up the “Very satisfied” and “Very dissatisfied” options. Something more distinct like “It sucks”/”It’s great” would probably work better and be less prone to confusion.

Q3 : How would you rate the plugin in each of these categories?

The user was also asked to rate Broken Link Checker on a 1-5 scale in five different categories. Here are the results for each category (average vote & answer distribution) :

• Ease of use (4.35)
  
• Performance (4.13)
  
• Configurability (3.85)
  
• Features set (3.89) 
  
• Documentation (3.70)
  

Hmm, apparently I’ll have to buckle down and produce some actual documentation for the plugin. [Insert the standard joke about how programmers hate writing documentation.]

Q4 & Q5 :  What new features would you like to see added? / What other changes and improvements would you make to the plugin?

In total, I received more than 70 distinct feature suggestions/change requests/bug reports. That’s too many to list here, so I’ll only discuss the Top 15 of those that were suggested by more than one person.

1. Keep it simple (26 users)

A lot of users think the plugin is actually plenty good already and shouldn’t be bloated with more features. But they’re still a minority compared to the number of people who do want something changed/improved, so new features (and bug fixes!) there shall be.

2. Fix false positives & false negatives (22 users)

Okay, I get it – false positives are bad and annoying. I’ll do my best to fix them.

However, there is something that needs to be said here : for a plugin like this, it’s almost impossible to eliminate false positives. Many sites intentionally block any automated scripts (which includes the link checker) from accessing them. As a result, all links to those sites work normally when you click them in your browser but appear broken to the plugin.

Sure, I could probably fool some script-detectors by modifying the plugin to emulate a normal web browser. However, down that path lie nasty programming tricks, reduced performance and an increased potential for bugs. There’s an ongoing arms race between people writing site-scraping bots  and people trying to stop them, and sometimes it seems the only winning move is not to play.

But I might give it a shot anyway.

3. Email notifications about broken links (14 users)

It shall be done. Probably in the next major release.

4. Limit how much CPU/memory the plugin can use; fix freezing (9 users)

This is a rare bug, but it’s also a highly annoying one. To mitigate it, I’ll add an option to suspend link checking when the server is overloaded. Maybe some finer-grained controls over how and when the plugin runs would also help.

5. Improve documentation (8 users)

It shall be done, too – but don’t hold your breath. Writing documentation is… not an exciting pastime.

6. Add an option to recheck individual links (5 users)

This should be pretty straightforward to add; you can expect to see it added in the next release.

7. Ability to add rel=”nofollow” to certain links/posts/users (5 users)

Eventually.

8. Make fixing broken links easier (5 users)

There were several suggestions that amounted to this. Specifics ranged from sensible stuff like “add an option to replace the link with a cached page from web.archive.org” to things that would require a human-level artificial intelligence, like “figure out if the site is gone/down temporarily/moved to another address and offer suitable replacement links”. I’ll put the more practical suggestions on my to-do list.

9. Check comment links (4 users)

It shall be done; probably in the next major release or the one after that.

10. Add a way to mark some links as “broken, but that’s fine” (4 users)

Some users asked for a way to deal with false positives and links that really are broken, but might become live again after some time. The “Discard” button that can be used to manually mark the links as “working” might be a small step in the right direction, but it’s too much of a hack. I’ll look into ways to improve the situation.

11. Check YouTube/DailyMotion videos and other embedded media (3 users)

This is tricky. Perhaps in a future version.

12. Add an option to run the link checker manually (as opposed to periodically) (3 users)

It shall be done.

13. Display context in which the (broken) links appear (3 users)

Eventually.

14. Check links to file sharing sites like RapidShare and MegaUpload (2 users)

Tricky. See the comment about YouTube and embedded media above.

15. Add an option to edit link text from the plugin’s screen (2 users)

Eventually. Could be tricky – the same link can be used in multiple posts and thus have multiple anchor texts.

Q6 : If this plugin had a premium version, how much would you be willing to pay for it?

While I’m not currently planning to create a premium version of Broken Link Checker, it is something that I might consider doing in the future. So I wanted see if there was any interest and how much (if anything) people would be willing to pay for a premium WP plugin.

As could be expected, most WordPress users care not for commercial plugins. Still, it looks like there might be a market for premium plugins in the $1 – $5 (16%) or the $5 – $10 range (11%). In total, 39% of users said they’d be willing to pay something for a premium version.

Q7 & Q8 : The Viralogy.com script… thing

I will discuss this one in a separate post later.

Q9 : Your PHP version?

Well whad’ya know, WordPress might even be able to ditch PHP 4 support by 2015 or so.

Q10 : CURL library?

Q11 : Your WordPress version?

Note that this chart is biased by the fact that Broken Link Checker is only officially compatible with WP 2.8 and up. As a result, the chart may not represent the overall distribution of WordPress versions in the blogosphere.

Well, that’s it for today. Comments?

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