Let’s just say, I’ve been a victim for an unnoticed, checked-by-default, Subscribe to Comments option. Oh, the endless deluge of new emails! It wasn’t pretty. So I applaud Mark Jaquith for no longer allowing such behavior:

In short, having the box checked by default was causing people to subscribe unwittingly, as it was an opt-out thing. [...] A lot of users see if as being sneaky. Obviously if you want to edit the plugin to re-enable this option, I can’t stop you — but I no longer wanted to be encouraging use of this option.

Here’s the plugin page if you want to grab it.

The technique works for WordPress 2.5 and above, and it’s better on a SEO perspective. For those using older version of WP, there are some plugins that could do that for you. Here’s one.

Some WordPress-bashing ahead, but read it up. Still a valuable source for the future of WordPress development. Really.

Congratulations, everyone!

There was apparently quite a story behind the adaptation of Kubrick as WordPress’s default theme. Also read Matt’s response on this.

PS: I do enjoy reading the history of WordPress, so expect to find more posts like these in the future.

By Charles Strickin. The link above goes to part 1 of the post, and here’s the second part.

Admin changes plus offering different color schemes; my favorite part is how it groups the tags and categories area of the Write Post panel into one column. Less scrolling FTW. I might create a plugin that columnize the Advanced Options stuff as well, let’s see…