When WordPress contributor and developer Nick Diego released version 3.0 of his Block Visibility plugin earlier this year in March, he made all the Pro features available in the free version, with the exception of a few that would take more time. The plugin, which is used on more than 10,000 WordPress sites, allows users to conditionally display blocks based on specific user roles, logged in/out, specific users, screen sizes, query strings, ACF fields, and more.
In the latest 3.1.0 update Block Visibility has added the missing WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) controls. These features were originally planned to be merged into the free version in April but required more development to improve how they work on sites with large product/download catalogs.
The WooCommerce controls include 18 conditional visibility rules with full support for products with variable pricing. It allows users to show or hide blocks based on products, cart contents, customer purchase history, and more.
“There is one notable change to the product-based rules,” Diego said. “Previously, you had to select which product you wanted to target with the visibility conditions. While this is still possible, Block Visibility can now detect the current product.
“This functionality is extremely useful on product pages, single product templates, and product grids (Query blocks).”
The EDD controls allow users to show or hide blocks based on downloads, cart contents, customer purchase history, and more. Since EDD doesn’t have as many block-powered layouts as WooCommerce, Diego did not include the “Detect current product” feature.
“The EDD visibility control currently has no product-based rules,” he said. “If greater block support is added to EDD in the future, such as an EDD Products block that supports inner blocks, expect more functionality.”
Block Visibility 3.1.0 also adds a new Command Palette command to “Manage Visibility Presets,” which requires WordPress 6.3+.
Diego said he doesn’t plan on adding any new integrations to the plugin but will continue improving existing controls. Now that all the features from the Pro version have been merged into the free plugin, users who have the Pro version installed can deactivate it after upgrading to version 3.1.0.
WordPress’ Plugin Review Team continues to dig out from under a massive backlog that has grown to 1,260 plugins awaiting review. Developers submitting new plugins can expect to wait at least 91 days, according to the notice on the queue today.
“Currently there are 1,241 plugins awaiting review,” Automattic-sponsored Plugin Review team member Alvaro Gómez said earlier this week.
“We are painstakingly aware of this. We check that number every day and realize how this delay is affecting plugin authors.”
Although the backlog seems to be getting worse, Gómez published an update outlining new systems the team is putting in place to get the situation under control. He likened it to patching a hole in a boat, as opposed to simply prioritizing bailing out the water.
“During the last six months, the Plugin review team has worked on documenting its processes, training new members, and improving its tools,” he said. “Now, thanks to your patience and support, the tide is about to turn.”
The team has now onboarded two rounds of new members, with three more reviewers added recently, and has a system in place to make this easier in the future. After receiving more than 40 applications to join the team, the form will be closing at the end of September.
They also sent plugin authors still waiting in the queue an email asking them to self-check their plugins to meet basic security standards, as another effort to mitigate the growing backlog.
“We find ourselves correcting the same three or four errors on +95% of plugins and this is not a good use of our time,” Gómez said. “Once authors confirm that their plugins meet these basic requirements, we will proceed with the review.”
A new plugin called Plugin Check has just been published to WordPress.org for plugin authors to self-review for common errors, which will eventually be integrated into the plugin submission process.
“In the short term, we are going to ask authors to test their plugins using the PCP before submitting them, but our goal is to integrate the plugin as part of the submission process and run automated checks.”
So far plugin authors have reported a few bugs and issues with the plugin not recognizing files or giving unintelligible errors. These issues can be reported on the GitHub repo, which is temporarily hosted on the 10up GitHub account but will be moving to WordPress.org in the near future.
WP Accessibility Day (WPAD), an independent 24-hour virtual conference, has published its schedule for the upcoming event on September 27, 2023. Co-lead organizer Amber Hinds reports that more than 1,248 people have registered for the event so far with attendees across 30 different countries. Approximately 50% of attendees are from the U.S.
WPAD has attracted an influx of new voices this year. All speakers, excluding sponsored sessions, are first-time speakers at the event.
“We were nervous initially about speaker applicants, but we actually received a lot more speaker applications than last year and also more applications that were higher quality than in previous years,” Hinds said. “It was hard to decide!”
The keynote address will feature a conversation between Jennison Asuncion, co-founder of Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), and Joe Dolson, an accessibility consultant and co-founder of WordPress Accessibility Day. Attendees will learn how to perform usability and accessibility tests on their websites, how to build an accessible WordPress pages and posts using the block editor, simple ways to make email more accessible, how to understand color and contrast requirements in WCAG 2, and more.
Based on the stats for speakers (of people who opted to give the info), WPAD’s organizers have succeeded at recruiting a diverse lineup for the event:
10 countries
67% female, 30% male, 3% Nonbinary
14% LGBTQ
41% non-white identifying
2 first time speakers who have never spoken at any event.
11 of the 27 speakers identify as having a disability. (41%) – There are speakers who identify as blind/low vision, deaf or hard of hearing, have limited mobility, and learning disabilities.
“These were the hardest decisions we’ve had to make yet in selecting the WordPress Accessibility Day speakers,” Speaker Team lead Joe Dolson said. “There were so many truly excellent ideas proposed. As a result, our speakers include people who work across many different aspects of the web – inside and outside the WordPress community. I feel like we’ve ended up with an excellent cross section of topics, so we have something to offer for developers, policy makers, content creators, or community organizers.”
WPAD secured non-profit status earlier this year through a fiscal sponsorship partnership with Knowbility, an Austin-based digital accessibility advocate and services provider. One of the reasons the organizers wanted to manage it independently of the WordPress Foundation was to reserve the option to do things like pay speakers for their time and expertise. Speaker pay is one expenditure for the event, which is supported by corporate and community sponsors.
Hinds said it was easier to attract sponsors this year and that the sponsors team received positive responses fairly quickly. They also added a microsponsorship option earlier this year (previously it was only on the registration form) and were able to recruit more businesses as microsponsors.
The team’s goal this year was to get enough sponsorships to cover the cost of the event itself, make a donation to Knowbility (part of the event’s fiscal sponsorship agreement with them), and have enough leftover to cover year-round expenses, such as Google workspace, Buffer, domain registration, and hosting.
Hinds said the organization met its sponsorship goals at most tiers, due to the hard work of the Sponsors team leads Bet Hannon and Joe Hall, along with the generosity of the community in supporting the event.
“We are thrilled to have doubled the number of sponsors this year over last year,” Hannon said. “I think this reflects the increasing awareness about accessibility as an issue to be addressed, as well as the wider WordPress community coming together to sponsor an event providing high quality accessibility education.”
New in 2023: WPAD to Broadcast via Zoom
In addition to a whole new crop of speakers this year, WPAD is offering t-shirts for the first time as a thank you gift to attendees who want to make a donation when they register.
“We had a lot of people ask us last year how they could get a t-shirt, but they were only available to organizers, speakers, and volunteers,” Hinds said. “This year they’re available during registration so anyone can get one.”
Last year the event was broadcast via an embedded YouTube video on the WPAD website with third-party embeds for chat/Q&A and the live transcript.
“We got feedback from attendees that this did not work well because they didn’t have control of the layout of the video,” Hinds said. “It was particularly limiting for attendees who rely on the sign language interpreters; they needed the interpreter video to be larger. Other people said that they found the interpretation to be distracting or they needed the slides to be bigger so they would be easier to read.”
The 2023 event will be live streamed using Zoom, which recently introduced a sign language interpretation view that allows hosts to assign interpreters.
“Attendees can choose to view the sign language interpretation in a separate window,” Hinds said. “With this new feature available, we decided to change to Zoom webinars. We have one long 24-hour webinar that people can jump in and out of as they see fit, and each attendee can set a view for speakers, slides, signers, and captions that works best for them.”
Registration for the event is free and it’s still open. Attendees have the opportunity to receive virtual swag and win prizes from the sponsors. Organizers have also gotten the conference pre-approved for continuing education credits for the International Association of Accessibility Professionals Web Accessibility Specialist (WAS) and Certified Professional in Core Competencies (CPACC) certifications.
Attendees of NextGen WordCamp Bengaluru – image credit: WordPress.org
WordPress’ Community team is evolving the WordCamp format to promote adoption, training, and networking for professionals, leaving the flagship events to focus more on connection and inspiration. This change opens the door for more creative concepts around the events’ new mission:
WordPress events spark innovation and adoption by way of accessible training and networking for users, builders, designers, and extenders. We celebrate community by accelerating 21st-century skills, professional opportunities, and partnerships for WordPressers of today and tomorrow.
A group of eight pilot events were confirmed in June, and two recent “NextGen” WordPress events have already happened, including a community-building workshop in Japan, and WordCamp Bengaluru, a one-day event featuring the local culture and a walking tour of the city.
The Community team has compiled a list of more than three dozen concepts to inspire NextGen event organizers. The list spans a wide range of ideas, such as college campus based groups, sponsor networking days, show and tell night, job fairs, events for agencies, WordPress retreats, and many more.
Anyone who is interested to host one of these new event types is invited to fill out a form that the Community team has created to capture ideas for future events – either before the end of 2023, or during the first half of 2024. Organizers will be asked to identify a category for their proposed event from among the following:
Content topic focused (designers, block development, SEO, etc)
Although the form is presented as a survey, it’s more of an interest form, which is why it collects the respondent’s contact information. Respondents who indicate they are willing to have a discussion about their ideas may be contacted by the Community team.
WordPress.com plugin pages have been updated to include a download link for WordPress.org plugins listed in the .com directory. These are the listings that are scraped from WordPress.org. The plugins are available for free on WordPress.org for self-hosted sites but can only be used on WordPress.com with a paid subscription.
Logged out view of WordPress.com plugin pages
The text in the sidebar includes a link to an article explaining the difference between WordPress.org and WordPress.com. It appears on both the logged-out and logged-in views:
This plugin is available for download to be used on your WordPress self-hosted installation.
Themes hosted on WordPress.com have a similar notice with a link to download the theme and use it on a self-hosted site.
This change comes as the result of developers raising concerns about WordPress.com plugin listings outranking WordPress.org on Google Search in some instances. During that discussion, many developers were surprised to learn that their plugins created for WordPress.org were also listed on WordPress.com as only available with a paid subscription. Patchstack responded by updating its readme file to ensure that WordPress.com users and visitors are made aware that the plugin is available for free in the official WordPress plugin repository. This response may not be necessary now, unless developers want to include a direct link to their plugins.
In a discussion on Post Status Slack, some plugin developers said they would prefer a link to the actual plugin page where they can see and participate in reviews. The omission of a link back to WordPress.org may be intentional, as it would take users off of the .com site, which does not facilitate customers upgrading to paid plans in order to use plugins.
Some developers had also asked Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg to noindex those pages, but he said that WordPress.com users should also be able to search Google for the listings.
I think it should show up for .com users who are Googling, and Google appears smart enough prioritize correctly. That’s a SEO benefit, and not at the expense of any plugin authors.
Some developers have asked to know what percentage of their active installs come from WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org, or other hosting platforms. Mullenweg said there are currently no reports for this but that the data could be interesting.
There are no reports currently for plugin installs by web host. I could see that being interesting, though, especially with how some hosts bundle.
“If people are providing more distribution to unaltered plugins, I think that’s great,” Mullenweg said during the discussion last week. “Happy for all our plugins to be duplicated and distributed by every host and site on the planet.”
When asked if WordPress.org could extract the data for known plugin distributors, like WordPress.com, Mullenweg said, “.com or any other host could share plugin info if it’s allowed by their privacy policy. Also it’s fairly trivial to get plugin info from crawling sites.”
WP Tavern is launching forums today. If you have ever sat up all night with a feverish infant, searching for answers on a mommy messaging board, hunted down solutions for obscure bugs, or wasted an entire afternoon on a subreddit, then you know that forums are not dead.
Since the early days of BBSes (Wikipedia link for you young whippersnappers), which housed prototypical forums before the advent of the World Wide Web, modern forums have evolved and established themselves as a stalwart, timeless medium for asynchronous communication, fostering communities, and sharing knowledge among individuals with diverse interests and needs.
Today we will begin exploring how forums can help expand conversations that originate on the Tavern, especially within the comments of a post. Our new forums are powered by bbPress, which enables readers to create discussions by visiting the comment section of an article and clicking on “Create forum topic from comment†based on comments that you find particularly insightful.
Under the forum called “Discussion†you will find topics that have been created based on article comments. This offers readers a way to engage further with comments that spark larger discussions, long after the article has been published and comments have closed. This feature is available alongside traditional bbPress forums where logged-in users can create topics.
If a forum topic already exists for a comment, a link labeled “Continue Discussion in Forum†will appear on that topic, leading to the ongoing forum discussion. This prevents people from creating multiple forum topics from a single comment. These topics will include a link back to the original comment at the top of the thread. It is also still possible to add regular (non-forum) replies to comments as usual.
Readers must be registered and logged in order to post on the forums. At this time, topics and replies will continue to be moderated before they are published. We have tried wild west commenting style in the past and it doesn’t work well for raising the level of discourse and engagement that we hope to have in our forums. Come join us, introduce yourself, and start some new topics.
Openverse has landed an Open Education Award for Excellence in the Open Infrastructure category. Open Education Global (OEG) is a non-profit organization that supports the use of open education to expand education access and affordability. Its annual awards recognize outstanding contributions to the Open Education community and its network of resources.
Openverse is one of 16 winners selected from more than 170 applicants. The award reviewers suggested Openverse “should be the primary recommended search for OER development,” due to its clear licensing and easy, one-click attribution, among other features:
That easy attribution feature (one-click copy for a full formed Creative Commons attribution) might be reason enough for an award, but the features to filter searches by source collections and other parameters (image orientation, specific license) provides seekers of open content important affordances to find clearly licensed media they can reuse.
Openverse should be the primary recommended search for OER development, as the licensing is explicitly clear, not subject to third party owners writing their own license), being of great value for projects that mix content from multiple sources.Â
“This project thrives on collaboration, and as we begin plotting our course for 2024, we want to hear from you,” Automattic-sponsored Openverse data engineer Madison Swain-Bowden said. “Have an idea that could improve Openverse? Noticed a feature gap we haven’t addressed? Have suggestions to improve existing features? We are eager to hear all about it!”
Anyone who wants to contribute a proposal regarding Openverse’s future can publish a comment to the team’s blog post requesting feedback. For more information about Openverse’s current projects and those that are on hold, check out the notes from the team’s most recent monthly meeting.
Citations is a new plugin created by WP Munich and the team at Luehrsen // Heinrich, a German WordPress agency. It makes it easy to create in-text citations and assign them a specific source. Most of the existing plugins that do this are for older versions of WordPress. This one is created specifically for those using the block editor.
Citations introduces a new menu item to the rich text formatting toolbar. Users can highlight the text they want to cite, click ‘Cite’ in the toolbar, and then define the source in the pop-up by inputting the source information into the fields provided.
The Citations plugin includes one Bibliography block, which will be automatically populated with all the sources of the in-text citations added in the content. Citations are linked to the corresponding source inside the Bibliography block. The block can be positioned anywhere in the document, although readers likely expect it at the bottom.
Users can edit the citations and the sources in the Bibliography block by clicking on them.
What’s the difference between citations and WordPress’ core Footnotes block? Although both are used in academic and scholarly writing to provide references and additional information about sources used in a document, there are a few key differences.
Citations credit the original source of the information with all the source details in the bibliography at the end of the document. Footnotes are more flexible in that they can include additional context or comments at the bottom of the document, to keep the text from becoming too cluttered with explanatory notes. They may also be used to source citations with the author, title, and publication details, but do not always follow the bibliography format.
The Citations plugin also includes a pattern that will insert some Lorem Ipsum paragraphs with citations and a sample bibliography with sources at the bottom. This gives users an idea of how the plugin can be used to structure a document for citing sources, if they are just getting started. Users can search for “Citations Demo” in the pattern search bar to find it.
Developers expressed concerns about the SEO impact of the practice of cloning WordPress.org’s plugin directory for use on WordPress.com, with no backlinks to the original plugin. Another concern is that it perpetuates the longstanding confusion between WordPress.org and WordPress.com.
“I don’t think the SEO concern is real, and by that I mean that besides John’s screenshot, which I think is related to the .org en-gb subdomain decision/bug,” Matt Mullenweg told the Tavern when asked whether WordPress.com will considering not indexing these pages that duplicate content from WordPress.org.
“For general searches I’m seeing .com 5 pages down,” he said. “Just looking at traffic to those pages, they don’t seem to be getting much if any from search engines! So I’m not really concerned about SEO of those pages.
“The vast majority of the traffic to those is to logged in users. When they click ‘manage’ they can easily install it across multiple sites or see where it’s already installed, which actually works across .com and Jetpack sites.”
He offered a similar explanation to Freemius founder Vova Feldman on X, who claimed that WordPress.com has an SEO advantage over independent plugins.
I think you're built on an assumption which is easily testable and false in my tests so far: "DOT com has an SEO advantage…"
As an easy one to look at, I did a logged-out search for [seo plugin for wordpress]. First page of results is now ads, from WP Engine, SEMRush, AIOSEO,…
Plugin developers also expressed concerns about new users arriving to a plugin’s duplicated page on WordPress.com and seeing that the plugin is Free only on the (paid) Business plan. This gives the visitor the impression that the plugin isn’t available for free elsewhere, because there is no link back to WordPress.org with an explanation.
Many WordPress.org plugin authors were not aware until recently that their plugin pages are being scraped for use on WordPress.com. Yesterday, Patchstack updated its readme file to ensure that WordPress.com users and visitors are made aware that the plugin is available for free in the official WordPress plugin repository, using the following text:
“I was at a Python conference last week and a guy came to our booth and said he has a WordPress site but he hasen’t been able to purchase any plugins yet,” Patchstack CEO Oliver Sild said. “I told him that they are all free, and then it turned out he had a WordPress.com site where he has to pay to install any plugins. These people think that THIS IS the WordPress.”
When asked if WordPress.com could at least link back to the .org plugin for logged-out views to eliminate some of the confusion, Mullenweg confirmed that he told Sild that WordPress.com would work on adding links to the .org equivalent page this week.
“But that confusion that people claim is causing huge issues for WordPress isn’t supported by the numbers or growth of non-.com solutions over 17 years now,” Mullenweg said.
“So at some point we should stop accepting it as within our top 100 issues for WordPress.
“It’s much more likely like a road bump for some newbies, than an actual blocker, not unlike learning the difference between categories and tags, or how to identify a normal-looking comment that’s actually spam.”
In response to WordPress developer Daniel Schutzsmith saying that WordPress.com is causing confusion for OSS, Mullenweg contended that it “creates a false dichotomy between WP on .com and ‘open source software.’ Every site on .com is part of the OSS community as much as on any other host.
“When there is confusion, it assumes that it’s a top issue for WordPress. Nothing about WP’s growth, including vis a vis other projects, indicates that the existence of a .com and .org with the same name has held us back.”
In support of his claims about the growth of non-WordPress.com solutions, he cited a W3Techs report on hosting company usage stats with extrapolated revenue on Post Status Slack.
“On revenue: If you extrapolate out public domain numbers with plan pricing, and look at public filings like the amount GoDaddy makes from hosting and what % of that hosting is WP-powered, you pretty quickly see that GoDaddy, Newfold/Bluehost, Siteground, Hostinger, and WP Engine make more than .com from WordPress hosting.,” Mullenweg said. “You can check out those companies on the five for the future page.”
Mullenweg has previously criticized large hosting companies for what he perceives to be a lack of support for the open source WordPress and WooCommerce projects in proportion to how much they benefit from the use of these platforms. His comments in Post Status yesterday indicate that while he is still unsatisfied with their core contributions, he acknowledges these companies as important to WordPress’ overall growth.
“By the way, despite not looking great for core contributions, I think each of those companies has been essential for the growth of WordPress, and particularly the work they invest into upgrade PHP, MySQL, core auto-updates, plugin auto-updates, and security are crucial for the health of our ecosystem,” Mullenweg said.
“It’s ‘cynically cool’ to hate on some of the bigger ones, but it’s a free and open market, none of their WP users are locked in and could easily switch to other hosts if they weren’t happy with the price and value they were getting. In fact by that measure, you could argue they’ve all done a much better job than .com at connecting with customers. Maybe I spend too much of .com’s engineering and investment on things like 2fa/passkeys, reader/notifications, stats, the mobile apps, Gutenberg, and Calypso and not enough on marketing or paying off affiliate host review sites.”
The Damaging Community Impact of Public Confrontations
Some perceived him blocking Reed as him shutting down criticism, despite the fact that he said this is the first person he has ever blocked on Twitter. Although her comments were tangential to the original issue (the impact of the WordPress.com plugin listings), they became a focal point after Mullenweg lashed out at developer and product owner Dan Cameron who accused him of “actively doing more harm than good.”
Dan, you've built the Search Everything plugin which was popular early on, at some point got sold to Zemanta and abandoned. Hasn't been updated in 6 years.
You did "Smart eCart" for five years which lost to WP-eCommerce and Woo.
I reached out to Automattic-sponsored WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden-Chomphosy who said she did not have additional comments about what has happened with the recent confrontational exchanges, nor the impact on the community.
“I find it kinda refreshing to see Matt throw an elbow or two and stick up for himself,” WP All Import Product Manager Joe Guilmette said in Post Status Slack.
“It’s not the greatest look, but that’s for his PR people to sort out. I don’t have any idea how I’d handle being criticized so heavily for years by the people who built businesses and careers on a project that I helped bring in to the world, but it probably would be a lot worse than calling a few people out on Twitter.”
Others who gathered in various Slack instances, watching things play out on Twitter, felt collectively traumatized by witnessing the interactions between Mullenweg and different community members.
“I think Matt did way more damage this time than ever before,” one prominent WordPress consultant said, requesting to remain anonymous. “It generated good but quite wearied and sad expressions of grief and anguish in my company Slack and no doubt many others.
“The instantly and deeply (however crudely researched) personal nature of Matt’s attacks leads people to paranoid fears that he has a shitlist of enemies who are just regular people, not giant companies etc. It’s a fearsome kind of punching down where the community gets stuck in the psychological position of the children of an abusive parent. Different personalities and different perspectives based on our own experiences lead us to different coping responses. But it’s very ugly now to have the paranoia confirmed as Matt basically taunted the fact that he feeds on what he’s told second or third hand about things others say about him in private.”
Matt Cromwell, Senior Director of Customer Experience at StellarWP, said that discussions that start and stay on X/Twitter generally have very little fruit, especially when resolving something as complicated as the WordPress.com plugins SEO issue.
“The community keeps leaning on this platform for these discussion but things like the impact of duplicate content on two sites both called ‘WordPress’ requires more nuanced and trusting conversations which Twitter can’t provide,” Cromwell said.
“Mullenweg used the whole thing as an excuse to make so many of the plugin owners that drive WP adoption feel small. It was extremely hurtful to the trust product owners put into the leadership of the WP project. I expect to see more product owners prefer to build SaaS integrations with WP rather than dedicated products because they don’t trust that Mullenweg has their mutual interest in mind at all anymore – and I don’t see a way for him to ever put that genie back in the bottle after this behavior both on Twitter and in Post Status Slack.”
WordPress developer and contributor Alex Standiford said Mullenweg’s public confrontations yesterday are “a bad look for WordPress, and deflate the passionate contributors who genuinely believe in WordPress.” Despite recent events, he continues to believe in the larger impact of people building open source software together.
“I believe that WordPress isn’t software,” Standiford wrote on his blog. “It’s not community. It’s not a single person, no matter how significant that person thinks they are. I believe that WordPress is the manifestation of a belief that the web is at its best when it’s open. If I genuinely believed that forking WordPress would be good for WordPress, and the web, I’d contribute to it over the existing platform in a heartbeat.”
WooSesh 2023, the virtual conference for WooCommerce store builders, will be broadcast live on October 10-12. This year’s theme is “Next Generation Commerce.” Registration is not yet open, but the speaker lineup and broadcast schedule have just been published. Over the course of three days, WooSesh will feature 31 speakers across 23 sessions.
The event will kick off with the State of the Woo address, delivered by WooCommerce CEO Paul Maiorana and other product leaders from the company. Speakers will cover a wide range of topics like complexities of sales tax and product taxability, accessibility, block themes, security, AI tools, and automation, with case studies and workshops mixed in.
New in 2023: The Seshies
WooSesh organizer Brian Richards is launching “The Seshies” this year, a community awards ceremony that will recognize the best examples of the WooCommerce ecosystem across six categories: Innovation, Store, Extension, Agency, Developer, and Community Advocate.
The Seshies will include a community awards ceremony that will celebrate the winners. Anyone can nominate candidates for the awards, and participants can even nominate themselves and their own WooCommerce projects.
“These awards are something that have been on my heart for quite some time,” Richards said. “And now, after 6 years of hosting WooSesh and 10 years of running WPSessions, I think I’ve amassed enough authority and (critically) a wide enough reach to deliver awards, on your behalf, that have real meaning.”
The week before the event, Richards plans to publish the top three nominees in each category. The community will vote throughout the first two days of WooSesh and the winners will be announced on the final day. Winners will receive a digital badge of recognition and Richards said he is also working on producing physical awards to ship to winners anywhere in the world.
