Matt Mullenweg Overrules Core Committers; Puts Akismet on WP 7's Connector List

Matt Mullenweg has directed core committers to proceed with registering Automattic’s Akismet spam plugin on the new Connectors screen that’s shipping in WordPress 7.0, overruling a revert backed by several core committers.

“I did say that, and have changed my mind and we’re doing this,” Mullenweg wrote on Trac ticket #65012 last week.

The ticket was opened on April 1 by Automattic-sponsored core committer Jorge Costa, following a private conversation with release lead Matias Ventura. It proposed registering Akismet as a default connector in WordPress core, appearing on the Connectors screen even before the plugin was activated, alongside AI service providers OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

The ticket was committed 36 minutes after it was opened.

Fueled-sponsored core committer Peter Wilson submitted a revert pull request the same day. His argument was that Akismet should register its own connector via the plugin API, as any other plugin would be expected to. He also noted that Mullenweg had previously written that plugins should register their own keys on the page, a position Mullenweg has since reversed.

“Akismet can easily be removed from an install and replaced by another anti-spam solution,” Wilson wrote.

Wilson also flagged that Akismet’s development branch had already added its own connector, raising the prospect of duplicate entries on the screen.

Bluehost-sponsored core committer Jonathan Desrosiers questioned what it would mean for the Connectors screen if installed-but-inactive plugins could appear there. Human Made-sponsored core committer John Blackbourn called out the process, noting no public discussion had taken place, no formal PR approval had been given, and the commit had been made during the release candidate period.

“It is inappropriate to make this sort of change during RC, especially within such a short period of time and with no public discussion,” Blackbourn wrote.

Independent core committer Aaron Jorbin said no additional connectors should ship with core until there were published guidelines covering what warranted inclusion.

Costa defended the change. He said the UI didn’t allow a key to be set without activating the plugin first. The entry was a discovery mechanism, letting users activate Akismet and enter their key from the Connectors screen without navigating to the plugins page. He said the approach was consistent with how the existing AI providers were handled.

The revert was committed on April 5.

On April 3, developer Earle Davies, who goes by elrae in WordPress Slack, posted about the ticket in the #core channel.

“When people complain about WP issues a common response I see is ‘WP is open source, anyone can contribute,’” Davies wrote. “Sure, anyone can contribute. But that doesn’t mean their issue/PR won’t sit there for years before being merged. Meanwhile a trac item got created by an a8c employee and merged during an RC with 0 public discussion.”

Davies also tagged Mullenweg, Ventura, and WordPress Executive Director Mary Hubbard directly. “You’re leadership, do better than this,” he wrote.

Ten days later, Mullenweg saw Davies’ ping on his return flight from WordCamp Asia, after catching up on Slack messages via the plane’s Starlink connection.

He responded in #core-committers, where he took the committers to task for the handling of the dispute before turning it into a broader critique of the project’s culture and processes.

On the ticket itself, Mullenweg called it “a microcosm of all the ways we’ve undone everything that made us successful, made contribution incredibly painful, and end up shipping boring or mediocre crap.”

He said core committers had treated Akismet’s inclusion as “an existential moral crisis we need to draw a line in the sand and say THOU SHALL NOT PASS.”

“Akismet has been in core for 20 years,” he wrote. “And the world hasn’t ended.”

He pointed out that the Connectors page featured OpenAI and Anthropic, two companies that hadn’t contributed to the WordPress project and nobody had complained about their inclusion. He said Google had contributed in the past but had stopped.

“… how ridiculous is it attacking Akismet, and Automattic, and blocking the thing the person who is our [release] lead asked for,” Mullenweg wrote.

“It is pathological that we keep attacking me and Automattic who have by any measure given the most.

“And if you want me to justify why Akismet is in there… how about BLOCKING 569,403,129,437 SPAMS FOR WORDPRESS SITES, ALMOST ENTIRELY FOR FREE… for 20 years!

“If you would like to build a hosted SaaS service doing sophisticated adversarial operations serving thousands of requests a minute for no charge and with a business model that is basically the honor system, please go do it and come back in 20 years and I’ll put your plugin in.

“We should be embarrassed how little we recognize these contributions and instead attack them all the time.”

He also pushed back on Jorbin’s call for published guidelines before any new connectors were added.

“You are living in fantasy land if you think that is remotely possible,” Mullenweg wrote.

The broader policy question, covering how non-AI plugins should register connectors going forward, has been deferred to the 7.1 cycle.

One detail remained under discussion at time of publication. Plugin reviewer Luke Carbis proposed registering Akismet permanently, as per Mullenweg’s request and as the AI providers are listed, regardless of whether the plugin is installed. Costa said the direction from Ventura was that the entry should only appear when Akismet is present on the filesystem, on the basis that a user who had removed it had likely done so deliberately.