You know, I may feel many things in my life are beyond my control, but my blog is not one of it. Nope, my blog is mine, completely under my control.  What I say goes, what I say stays.  My blog is my country and I’m the dictator.

I therefore feel not unlike Robert Mugabe when Morgan Tsvangarai went all democratic on his ass, when something that I didn’t explicitly OK’ed appears on my blog.

So it was then, quite by accident, that I looked at my own RSS feed and saw some new stuff that I didn’t rubberstamp appear there.  Sneaky YARPP (Yet Another Related Post Plugin) had unilaterally decided to not only insert some related posts into my feed (new feature!), but also to reward itself with a promo link back to its own website below every single entry – without asking or even telling me!

YARPP is a free piece of software from the Wordpress Plugin Repository.  It doesn’t require me to pay for it, it doesn’t even require me to link to it in exchange for using it.

Of course, it’s a great piece of software and we all have to eat, so donating a link is the least I can do to thank the creator for his hard work, right?

But for crying in a bucket, ask me first! Don’t go and be clever and write yourself into my country. Subverting a dictator will cause heads to roll.

When I auto-upgraded YARPP it came with these new features. One’s automatic inclusion in your RSS feed and two is an automatic link underneath every entry (which on an RSS feed with 10 items listed means 10 links to YARPP).  And it’s on by default – disable it in the plugin settings.

Here’s a link mitcho, please don’t take liberties on my blog like that again – there are other plugins that does that same thing out there.

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