The end story of the weird messages.

As most of you know already I freaked out when the first message appeared asking, “What are you wearing”?   I tore my computers apart looking for a problem that was not there.   I changed passwords and instituted two form authentication.   I wrote a post on it and a lot of you told me you had it also.   So I wrote word press support.  

The first response I got was clueless.  

Thank you for contacting WordPress.com support. I’ll be happy to help you out! 

In the editor when I am creating a post the first block under the ”Add title’ has weird messages in it. Day before the message was ‘What are you wearing’, this morning it says ‘What are your feelings about eating meat?’

This is very unusual, we’ll do everything we can to help you with this problem.
Does this happen when you create a new blog post? Or does it appear in an old one?
Can you share the name and the link to the post where this happened?
Can you also take a screenshot of the post with the message and send it to us?

 I did that.    Yesterday I got a response that cleared it up.  

Carol M. (Automattic)

Dec 4, 2022, 14:25 UTC

Hey there! Happy to help. 

I only noticed it about three days ago now. But I contacted several WordPress bloggers and they say it showed up on their write / create a post page before mine. Everyone assumed it was from WordPress. One blogger said the code implies it is a placeholder. I have included a picture of what I am talking about in this reply. I don’t see any unusual activity, and the blog seems to be working fine. If this is something WordPress added I wish they had told people

This is indeed just a placeholder, and it was something we did, your website is safe.
I understand your concern and apologize for the inconvenience this has caused.

Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions, we’ll gladly assist you.
Let us know if there’s anything else we can do to help!

---

I wrote this back

Scottiestoybox

Dec 4, 2022, 18:15 UTC

Hello Carol. It really would have been great if WordPress had bothered to tell people. See I tore my two computer systems down when I couldn’t find where it was coming from. In the process I lost a 1TB hard drive and the recovery potion of an SSD. Plus I have to say I don’t want it on my page when I go to create a post. The first one I seen was “What are you wearing?” and as a sexual assault survivor that is pretty damn scary. My question now is there a way to remove it so it doesn’t ever show again! If so please do so! Thanks.

Best Wishes,

Scottie

This morning I had this in my email.   

Shaun (Automattic)

Dec 5, 2022, 03:34 UTC

Hello there,

We’re very sorry to hear the difficulty this has caused. 

The idea behind the feature was to help people with inspiration for writing blog posts but I have passed this feedback on directly to the team behind the feature. 

Right now the new blog writing prompt that appears in the editor can’t be removed. You can certainly overwrite it or leave it and won’t appear on your page when you publish the post.

You can turn off the notifications this feature has also added by heading to your notification settings here – https://wordpress.com/me/notifications

It’s also possible to stop showing the writing prompt on the My Home of your WordPress.com dashboard by clicking the 3 dots in the top right corner of the card which shows it and then clicking “Hide daily prompts”.

Thank you again for sharing this feedback on this and we’ll relay this to the development teams immediately. 

Thanks again for getting in contact.

Best, Shaun

Happiness Engineer @ WordPress.com

Looking for more help

*Every day we have free live webinars for your WordPress.com site, including audience Q&A, visit wordpress.com/webinars for details on webinar topics, schedule, and registration. *

There is it, days of wasted effort, lost productivity all so WordPress can play around more with the product.   The first people made it worse by not even understanding what was going on.   Hugs