Sorry, who are you?

What’s this again? We are tired!

On 9 October 2024 Mr. Mullenweg made two additions to the login screen of WordPress.org: a link and a checkbox.

The link read “WP Engine has filed a massive lawsuit” and pointed to WP Engine’s tweet about their complaint, which, in turn, linked to the complaint in PDF format.

The checkbox was a required field and read as follows:

I am not affiliated with WP Engine in any way, financially or otherwise.

The link was soon removed but the checkbox remained. It’s still there.

Some WordPress contributors didn’t know how to interpret the past participle in the text. It could be interpreted in a loose sense (e.g., a person who is a WP Engine customer is affiliated with WP Engine) or in a strict sense (e.g., an employee or a business partner is affiliated but a customer is not). They didn’t want to check a box whose meaning was unclear to them.

They went to Slack (the team communication software that the teams of the WordPress project use to communicate and coordinate) to seek clarity.

Javier Casares, a WordPress contributor, made a thread on Twitter with screencaps of questions people asked there and answers Mr. Mullenweg gave. View the thread on Threadreader

Mr. Mullenweg was unable to provide clarity. His final answer to the questions he was asked was:

Please consult an attorney to see whether that’s true for you.

But it seems that consulting an attorney before checking a stupid checkbox on a login screen is not something people find a reasonable thing to have to do. So, some decided they were simply not going to bother, especially if there was a sense of the word in which they could be said to be affiliated with WP Engine.

It seems Laura Elizabeth was among those. On 12 October 2024 she made a tweet with an screencap of a message she received from WP Engine after a transaction, along with a few words and an emoji:

Guess I can’t contribute to WordPress 🤷‍♀️

Mr. Mullenweg found out about the tweet and, using the official account of the WordPress project, replied to Laura Elizabeth:

Sorry, who are you?

EDITOR’S NOTE. It is possible that Mr. Mullenweg was genuinely curious to know who Laura Elizabeth was. But, if that was the case, he could simply follow the links on her profile and find out. He knows what hyperlinks are.

EDITOR’S NOTE 2. It’s also possible that Mr. Mullenweg was unhappy about another tweet and that this reply was just channelling that unhappiness from that other tweet. A possible candidate is a tweet from 26 October 2024 where Laura Elizabeth attempted to summarize Mr. Mullenweg’s messaging since the launch of his campaign against WP Engine:

Matt: WPE don’t contribute enough. I will destroy them.

People: Sure, but they aren’t actually required to, right?

Matt: It’s a licensing issue! My mum’s confused!

People: What exactly are they doing that’s against the license?

Matt: They’re not contributing enough!

Source

EDITOR’S NOTE. My mum’s confused! is something Mr. Mullenweg actually wrote (in more formal language and without the British spelling). It’s the second sentence of his WP Engine is not WordPress essay, which was published on the official WordPress News website on 21 September 2024.

Unlike some other things that Mr. Mullenweg posts or tweets, Sorry, who are you? has not been taken down or deleted. You can still view it on Twitter.