Recently, we mentioned that the moderation of the WordPress Support Forum seemed to be moving in a better direction, but things still were not in great shape. We noted yet another problem last week. In the latest instance, we noticed they removed a negative review of a company that the moderators have frequently promoted.

One of the problems with the reviews of WordPress plugins on the WordPress website, which falls under the support forum’s moderators purview, is that they often are not reviews of plugins at all, but of paid services connected with them. That often is rather unhelpful. For example, many five-star reviews of a security plugin touting how responsive the paid support is, doesn’t help to determine if the security plugin actually provides the protection it claims to. The justification given for allowing this is:

While support of commercial products is not permitted in the forums, reviews are permitted if any of the following is true.

The plugin or theme author upsells on this site.
The plugin or theme itself links or has an option to upgrade to a commercial or “pro” version.

When a developer who is publishing a plugin or theme does that, that becomes part of the user’s experience and is a valid subject for a review on this site.

If you look at the reviews for the Wordfence Security plugin, many of them reference having gotten good paid support, so WordPress clearly doesn’t have an issue with positive reviews of their paid services, but it turns out things are different for a negative review.

As of late in October, you could read a review from June titled ‘Emergency “Fast” Response a Complete RIP OFF’, at https://wordpress.org/support/topic/emergency-fast-response-a-complete-rip-off/. Since then, it has been wiped out. There is no explanation for why it was removed, which would seem like something that would be explained if there was a legitimate reason for the removal.

We mentioned that review in discussion on Reddit on October 20, when it still existed, so that might have brought it to someone’s attention that wouldn’t like people to see that, as it was removed shortly after that.

The moderators of the WordPress Support Forum have repeatedly promoted using Wordfence’s clean up service and claiming they are a “reputable organization”, for whatever that is worth.

Here is the full review that someone on the WordPress Support Forum moderation team made sure you couldn’t see:

Horrific (and non-existent) “emergency response”. We had two sites protected with the WordFence premium plugin. Both came up with white screens of death this morning, so we went to WordFence as a ‘trusted’ provider to hopefully help us get back online.

We fell for their $950 (NINE HUNDRED AND FIFTY) dollar “emergency” response plan where they are supposed to dedicate some urgent resources for “mission critical” websites to get you back online fast.

It look over an hour for the representative to come back and tell us that because we had 4 other subdomains completely outside of public_html on the server, that we would have to pay FOUR MORE TIMES (yes, $4000 more) to get them to even start looking at it. We proposed a counter offer, and several HOURS later they came back with another offer. At the end of the day, because time was of the essence, we fell for their trick and paid the additional $4000 thinking at least they would urgently start resolving the issue.

SEVERAL HOURS LATER (now NINE HOURS) after the emergency ticket was crated, a new “Director of Information Technology” sends us an email that they can’t help us at all because there are plugins that have “obsufated code” in them and so they can’t help us. They don’t bother to even tell us what plugins (we suspect Membermouse, some plugins do this), or even offer to simply remove that plugin and continue their search and help.

Instead, they send that email and then ignore us. So now $5000 and 9 hours later we still have a broken site and no emergency response from Wordfence.

Their plugin is decent, but don’t fall for this “emergency response’ baloney. We lost a day of revenue and wasted time for their runaround. In the end, we found my.fixed.net and for $65 they had us back up and running in 40 minutes! OMG, WordFence you should bet ashamed. What a sham.

That hardly reads like it was made up and the account that left the review has been around since 2011, so it seems like a real negative experience. The author has other reviews of paid support experience that haven’t been removed as well.