If you have any Yoast product and signed into the WordPress admin in the last few days I’m sure you know that they were having a Black Friday sale. How do you know this…because they added a stupid huge banner to your site that told you on every page.

Are you kidding me @yoast? An ad on literally every page of the WordPress dashboard? ColinNewcomer

Here is an image of that ridiculous banner from the tweet above.

Now of course with a huge backlash they said sorry and removed it if you updated your plugin.

That BlackFridayBanner was not the best idea. We’re truly sorry for the annoyance and difficulties it may have caused. We did not think this through properly. If you want, you can update to a new version of our plugin without that banner. #blackfriday #neveragain #apologies – MariekeRakt

I’m sure they feel sorry …. that people complained and they had to change something but I have no faith that anything with change with Yoast, or almost any bigger WordPress plugin shop because they do crap like this all the time.

Back in April I complained about Jetpack and WooCommerce pulling crap like this. They also said “oops sorry” and pulled it back.

Yoast is one of the worst plugins for injecting itself all over your WordPres admin. I have a script that’s dedicated to Yoast, that stops plugins from adding admin boxes to any custom post types I want unless they are specifically whitelisted. Otherwise I have clients with 18 meta boxes for crap they don’t even need and don’t know how to use anyway. But the plugin had a single feature they did need so it figures that it should inject itself all over the WordPress admin.

Here’s the thing, I don’t trust any of the bigger WordPress shops to stop this crap. They’re going to put ads in again in the next few months and hope that no one notices or complains. If people complain, someone else will do it again. The end goal is that no one complains and they get to put ads in your admin.

I’m sure the ads will grow to be so big that you’ll need to scroll for 2 minutes so that you can even see the WordPress admin.

At this point, every time I open WordPress I feel a bit more dead inside because some other stupid thing like this greets me. I missed this bullet because my clients upgrade late and didn’t get a version of the plugin with the ad. I’m sure I’ll get hit by another bullet soon enough.

One of these bullets is going to push me far enough that I just stop doing WordPress work because much of it sucks these days as I navigate crap plugins are adding to my client experience that makes it nothing short of terrible.

I’m happy in Statamic land, and as I roll out client sites with Statamic, they’re happy too.