if you open up the chat you will find the link for all the things today. Oh wait, this is the audio wrong. Let's see. Ah, yes. All right, that should be much better. Thank you Doug. For some reason zoom didn't swap over the microphone properly. Welcome, welcome, everybody we're about five and a half minutes away from getting started captions should be now working for everyone as well. Links are in the chat if you would like to have the slide download with all the links. It is there waiting on you. Hope your week has started off. Well. What do you been working on this week? Let me hear from you in the chat. What has occupied your time so far this week? Here in the States like me, maybe you had a long weekend. I had a long ish weekend. tried not to do too much on Friday but
yet we have a lot to talk about today. In WordPress news, many, many things to talk about. We're February. Several new events have been added to the solid Academy calendar as well. So if you haven't taken a look over there recently, I'd invite you to do that. I'm going to drop the link in in the chat
take a look there and see some of the new things that have been added including details for disaster week, which is going to be coming up in about a month. Hey yocan welcome Glad you're here. We're about four minutes away from getting started folks if you're just joining us in zoom open up the chat say hello there in you will find the link to today's slides as well as the replay link. A Jeffery from Guatemala. Yes, Kathy Zant. Will be back with us for disaster week this week. I'm at our this next month. I'm absolutely thrilled about that. Kathy is one of my favorite people in WordPress. That deal will give you didn't even need a qualifier Kathy is one of my favorite people in the statement. So it'll be great to have her back. Welcome Deb. Good to see you. So Doug just switched ISPs. So Doug post the bandwidth man post your bandwidth Hey, Vern. Hey, Paul. Alright folks, we are oh not Oh, we got the gig. Man. I tell you what, gigabyte uploads are life changing. Yes, yes. If you're just joining us in zoom, open up the chat the slides. The slide link is there if you want to download the slides to follow along. Also the replay link if you want to go back and rewatch or share with somebody that's there in the chat, waiting on you. Many, many things to talk about today in the world of news Yes, yes. So many things to talk about.
Ah, let's see a couple of minutes just two minutes to go before we get started.
If you ever saw I run these slides out of PowerPoint. And there is just this random thing stuck in the presenter notes on the title screen, which I think was something I was paid trying to pay somewhere else and it just ended up in my presenter notes, which is just random Yes, Paul, many news. Many many news today. I'm glad you're all here. We're about a minute and a half away from getting started. It's great to see everybody coming into the Zoom Room. Link is in the chat if you would like the slides to download and follow along. Where to save these will be worth something someday, right? Yes, yes. All right. If you're just joining us, open up the chat and say hello. Tell us where you're logging in from today. Yeah, Paul, you should absolutely frame these and put these on your wall. I mean, a lot of work goes into this actually. Yeah, so it's.
A Kay Good to see you. Yes, Vern? Absolutely. So, you know, my wife constantly makes fun of my cable collection. Which you know, you must have a cable collection. Because the minute you throw away a certain cable, you're gonna need that cable the next week. So you know, you must have a cable collection. As you know, you might need those scuzzy cables one day you never know Oh, goodness, Hey, Stephanie. Oh, no 10 days T I've gotten rid of. Yeah. Hey, Beth. Hope you had a good trip down to the Dr. All right. It's just about a turn 3pm Central. I'm going to drop in the link in the chat. You want to download today's slides. It's three minutes after and we are about to start. Well, good afternoon, everybody. Good evening. Good morning, wherever you happen to be around the world. Welcome to another solid Academy live stream. It is WordPress news roundup today. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here at solid Academy. And every month we take a look across the WordPress landscape and bring you the news that we think is most important to those of you that are building and managing websites especially. But lots of just general WordPress news and things I personally just thought was interesting. So we've got a lot to share with you today. If you are just joining us in the chat. Welcome. Glad you're here. Open up the chat. And you'll see right there added the link to download today's slides if you're watching this on the replay just below the video is the download slide link. The replay link is also there if you want to share this out with somebody else you can do so but let's dive right in. Shall we will start where we always do with news from core WordPress. WordPress six dot 4.3 was released a few weeks ago January the 30th with 21 bug fixes and two security fixes. And soon after, users globally noted that there were some problems when he tried to up manually upload zip files for themes and plugins through the Add plugin or add theme interface. Sometimes you would get this error that says incompatible archive. I actually got one of those and I was thinking my goodness, I've been working with WordPress since 2008. And I have never seen this error before. Well, it turns out that for some reason, some code was added that was checking these zip files apparently and zip files that were created in the MacOS just using the right click and compress function that's native to MacOS resulted in these incompatible archives. Now, if you know anything about Mac OS, then you know Mac put some little files like a DS store and an underscore mat Mac OH S X folder inside zips. They're hidden. They're just for system. But that was throwing WordPress off. So that was the issue and a debate ensued on core channels over whether this should be a priority fix or not. And as you can imagine the people who don't use Mac didn't think it was a very high priority. But so basically, it's been tabled. It's set as a normal priority, not a high priority, and it should be fixed in an upcoming six dot 4.4 release sometime. So I don't know, there are workarounds, where you have to if you're a Mac user, just don't use the regular compress native to the OS or download you'd need to download a different kind of app that would create a zip file for you. It's just not a lot of fun. I've actually you know if I want to, if I've done something in a plug in that we created, for example, for client work, I can't just zip it like I used to and upload it in Mac. It's frustrating, but it will be fixed. And we'll just have to see when 644 drops all right. The WordPress roadmap for 6.5 is out in right on track February 27 A week from today actually, beta three for WordPress six five will be released. Then followed by the three release candidates
are made army dry run on March 25. And scheduled to drop March 26. For WordPress 65. We will be scheduling a release party like we usually do to walk through all those new features of WordPress six, five, although we've done this quite last couple of months actually giving you a really good overview of what's coming in six, five, we'll actually be able to have hands on with it though, in just over a month from today. Some new news that about a feature that's going to be included in WordPress six, five is something that's been discussed for a long time now. And that is this topic of plugin dependencies. So core WordPress will finally add this long requested plugin dependencies feature in WordPress six, five. What are plugin dependencies you ask? Well, have you ever just tried to install a WooCommerce extension without WooCommerce being present? Sometimes if the extension isn't coded well that can break your site. Or you know certain plugins require other plugins to be active and so that's what this is all about. It will now be officially supported in core so plugins can specify this plugin must be active in order for this my plugin to be active, right. So it's really good. The feature will block incompatible activations and D activations. So if you deactivate the core plugin, then the extension of that plugin can tell you hey, it's there's a problem here. You might have seen messages like that pop up in your plugins list, but that's based on the individual plugin developer to do it, and everybody does it different. This is now a systematized consistent way to do this in core. It's only been discussed since 2009. And finally they're going to bring it to WordPress 6.5. So that's a good thing. Something else it's coming to the WordPress plugin directory, our commercial Plugin Reviews. So earlier this month the WordPress support team updated their guidelines on how they were going to handle reviews of paid plugins. So reviews they say are going to be restricted to features and functionality and they will not allow reviews that talk about payment issues to the premium plugin or subscriptions or support quality. Now that piece stuck out to a lot of folks. And there's a lot of debate that has occurred around that, you know, if the plugin developer provides awful support, I don't want to know that in the review on wordpress.org. But as of now that's the rule. Hopefully they'll change that. I mean, I think we should be able to talk about support quality. I certainly don't want people talking about my payment didn't go through and reviews. I understand that piece. But support quality is an important feature of a paid plugin. So we'll see if that discussion that actually makes any change occur. All right, the WordPress performance team has been hard at work and they've released a couple of new plugins that are supposed to help improve site speed. The first is a plugin called Auto sizes for lazy loaded images. We'll feature both of these plugins in the plugin roundup in a couple of weeks, by the way, but auto sizes for lazy loaded images sets the sizes attribute to auto for deferred images now that just basically speeds things up. It's an under the hood stuff, but it should help the browser pre render the page a lot better. Also, they've released a plugin called speculation rules that allows visitors it basically pre renders the page before a user actually clicks the link. So hovering over something that links to another page on the site, the page preloads in the browser behind the scenes and that makes everything feel faster. So this is a good thing. A couple of new plugins from the good folks at the the WordPress performance team who just continue to improve WordPress performance so excellent, excellent stuff. All right, let's turn the page and start talking about Gutenberg and what's going on in the future developments of WordPress, Gutenberg 17.6 dropped a few weeks ago January the 31st 200 to 64 Pull requests. That's a lot. Mainly all focused on code quality, so not a whole lot of things. happening on the front end of Gutenberg and the the the interactive side in 17. Six. There are some under the hood improvements made to the interactivity API and the Fonts API, all of which is working towards WordPress 6.5 and the rollout there. One thing that they have done and if you're using Gutenberg the actual plugin and have that activated and you're using a block theme, and you played around a little bit with the side editor and the pay the block editor. Sometimes you get lost, like some things are available in the post block editor and some things are available inside editor. Now they have unified that whole experience so that all the options are the same in both places, which is really, really good. They've also done some other things with providing shadow support. So like if you're in a column block, you now have the ability to add a drop shadow that's kind of nice. This again is in the Gutenberg plugin, but it is scheduled to be rolled into core in the core block editor coming in WordPress 6.5. They've also made some changes here. This is Gutenberg 17.7. They've made some changes on Data View enhancements. So if you're looking at a grid, you can now execute some bulk action action. So especially when you're looking at templates, for example, this is in the site editor. You can select multiple like here's a shift select for example. I click this and click this and now you can do like a bulk action. You couldn't do that before. So this is a great little interface improvement. That's kind of nice. You can also more easily switch in the patterns view between synced or unsynched patterns. So now they've got this status is and you can filter that I want to see all my sync patterns and all my unsynced pattern. So that's really, really nice. They've also focused on making the font library ready for core I am really, really excited about this. This is a feature that I think is needed to be in core WordPress or some time. This will bring lots of themes, for example, you know, have their own font managers, and that's great. But this is something that really ought to be in core WordPress. So they've done a lot of code sanitizing, making sure everything is right, accessibility improvements, and this is about what it's going to look like and WordPress six, five, so I hear we can upload install fonts, you can see what fonts are active and what variants it's a really nice interface. And kudos good work. I really liked this. This should be ready to go in WordPress six, five and yes Sue is asking. They do load locally. So this is part again of the bigger picture of getting, you know Google Fonts cause privacy issues they just do. And so this solves that problem in core WordPress. So that's a really good thing. turning the page let's talk about some security news. We have a lot to talk about in security news. In the solid vulnerability ports this month 225 plugin vulnerabilities 72 active or active vulnerabilities still at this moment, or the plugin has been closed. Three theme vulnerabilities and of course, you can reduce your site's risk to nearly zero by using solid security pro using site scan, the version management feature and the patch stack firewall. When you have theme and plugin vulnerabilities, patch stack and the version management feature just take care of things. It's really really helpful. Big news in WordPress security It's been talked about everywhere is the bricks vulnerability. So the bricks builder has patched a high severity remote code execution flaw. This is the first time I've ever seen one of these rated a 10 out of 10 I'm sure there were there have been others but this is the first thing I recall seeing. That's a 10 out of 10 severity. Big big deal. It was patched in this version 1.9 dot 6.1. The flaw allowed remote code execution meaning somebody without appropriate credentials could do something and access some code on the site and start to do some things. It could lead to a full site takeover by the attacker. It was reported February 10, fixed February 13. So if you're a brix user, you definitely want to make sure you're up there was surely you know by now this has been a topic of discussion now heavily across WordPress communities in the last week.
Something else happened that has been called the mother of all breaches, but it's not as bad as it sounds. So 26 billion with a B billion records had been leaked in this massive 12 terabyte file that hit the dark web that some folks have called the mother of all breaches. Now the good news here is that this is not anything new. This is sort of a compilation of previous exploits and breaches that are just all wrapped up and combined into one new file. So as usual, security experts say just make sure you change your passwords unable to FA and use tools like Have I been poned to make sure that your username password are not used in this breach and you're not still using it on websites. Again, you're using solid security the the there's a feature in solid security that refuses compromised passwords. So it uses the have I been poned database to make sure that none of the username password combinations that are used by any user on your WordPress site have are showing up there in that have I been poned database pretty good stuff. Another little bit of malware news is that there is a new password stealer called over that is being spread through Facebook advertising. So the cyber criminals are paying for legitimate Facebook ads to spread their malware. Facebook ads have been discovered that distribute this password stealer the ad links to discord which pulls a script from GitHub and installs malware on the machine. The malware steals data cryptocurrency browser data session cookies documents and sends that information over to a telegram bot every 90 minutes from an infected computer. It also contains remote access tools so the hackers can do all sorts of nasty things. It's a growing trend that cyber criminals are continuing to use social media for their attacks. It's also very important I think for look if you're taking money for paid advertising content, you probably need to vet these links that are being given. Make sure it's not linking to somewhere nefarious. Ah, if you are a reCAPTCHA user pay particular attention to this little story, because Google is going to significantly lower the free cat reCAPTCHA tier on April the first, on January 29, Google began sending emails to users of its reCAPTCHA service, informing them of a significant change in their terms and pricing. Starting on April 1, the free reCAPTCHA service is now limited to 10,000 assessments per month, rather than a million. So and they're calling this now reCAPTCHA. Like that's the free level. So here's the thing. I for years, many folks who just put reCAPTCHA on their site and not thought about it again, thinking that it's free. And if you have a low traffic site, great, it's probably not going to affect you. But if you have more than 10,000 reCAPTCHA assessments in other words, you know, it's got to go through the process of either validating that you're human or you got to click the crosswalks. Or whatever. If you have more than 10,000 of those in a month, which a site can really quickly build up to then you have to get into a paid tear. This is per Paul's asking if it's per site or per account. And I Paul, I don't know the answer to that and that's per site. If you have more than 10,000 You have to upgrade at to what they're calling now reCAPTCHA standard for $8 per month per site for up to 100,000 assessments and there's other pricing tiers if you need more than that. So it significantly impacts agencies that rely on reCAPTCHA for bot protection. And lots of folks are now considering H CAPTCHA or my favorite Cloudflare turnstile for their reCAPTCHA protection. Oh Google. All right, let's talk about some news from us here at solid WP really excited to announce that disaster Week is coming back March 19 and 20th. So one month from today we'll be into disaster week. That's a two day event for two hours each day one to 3pm Central Time. I talked about this in the pre show but thrilled to say that our friend Kathy Zant is going to be back with us. For the first hour she'll be setting the table for us with the state of WordPress security. Also in the second hour of that first day. We'll have a great security experts panel featuring Kathy Zant, our own Timothy Jacobs and our friend Thomas ray from we watch your website. I'll be moderating that panel asking some questions of these very intelligent security experts and also taking your questions to the panel. On the second day march 19. Timothy Jacobs will be starting out with how do you reduce your site's risk to nearly zero with solid security. He'll be talking about look, we talked about all these problems on day one about WordPress security. And here's how practically speaking, the features and the settings and solid security deal with those issues. So that's going to be coming on the third hour. And then the fourth hour I'll be talking about clients and security and giving some insight there so should be a great disaster week, four hours of excellent content March 19 and 20th. Make sure you register you can do so at the link at the bottom here. Make sure you download the slides. I'll drop those in again, for you there. We have quite a few other events that are upcoming and free to attend. Tomorrow we have Trisha Clements, who is an expert in Google business profiles coming to talk about the changes that have been made in Google business profiles in 2024. Some important changes that you may not be aware of that you need to be aware of, either for your own business or for clients that you're trying to help. So that's coming up free live stream tomorrow, one o'clock central time with Tricia limits. also plug in Roundup coming up March the fifth, trusted devices. We're going to have a special webinar with Timothy Jacobs on March the sixth, where we'll be talking about this trusted devices feature, which is one of the only WordPress side ways to defend against the stolen session cookie attack, which now makes up about 60% of WordPress site attacks. So Solid security has done this for years in this feature called trusted devices. And Timothy is going to unpack that for us on March the sixth. Again, that's a free live stream news roundup March the 12th. And that disaster week we talked about March 19 and 20th. So lot coming up here on solid Academy if you're a solid Academy member next week is our website content accelerator with Maddie Ozma natty is a sought after content expert in the WordPress space. She's going to be talking over the course of two days. That's 27th and 28th. That's Tuesday, Wednesday of next week, two hours each day about using AI content tools for your workflow. Some chat GBT prompts that just create magic for you how website design supports content effectiveness. And last of all conducting a content UX audit on sites. This is going to be really great looking forward to having Maddie back with us. This is the second time she's presented one of these for us and she's always a great presenter the march goodness the march premium and then pleased to announce this is now up on the site and ready for you to register if you are a member is the WordPress accessibility crash course with Amber Hines from equalised digital. We always love having amber with us. She is brilliant she comes from an agency background. And now they're in a product facing company and they have a great plugin called Accessibility Checker with equalized digital. She'll be giving us again four hours of training March 26 and 27th. Talking about accessibility laws we need to be aware of principles of accessible design. And and this is what I'm most excited about in this course. The second day she's going to be talking about how do we talk to clients about accessibility? How do we sell accessibility as a service? So that's coming up March 26 and 27th. And of course, as a member you get office hours with me every Thursday, one to 2pm Central time. If you're not a member, I would invite you to become a member. It's simple and it only costs it you can become a member as low as $199 a year by getting any solid suite membership Academy premium is only available as part of the solid suite now and for as low as 199 a year and you also get solid security pro backups and central in that membership as well. All right,
let's talk about some plugins shall we? And we start off with our friends over at Kadence WP Kadence has some new features they've released it in their new blocks plugin release conditional fields have been added to the Kadence form block as this is a pretty nice little feature. So the little toggle is there and ready to play with now where you can show a show or hide a certain field. If certain conditions exists. That's pretty cool. Also, the advanced form block now provides analytics. So right here in the form list, you can view analytics and you have a really nice, how many views submitted. What's your conversion rate right there. That's pretty nice. And you can change that over time as well to see how a form is doing. I also they have supplied more data. We saw some of that in the chart. Start rate abandonment, error tracking, those are going to be added in the future to track in those analytics are pretty cool. Also, if you're Kadence blocks user, maybe you've had time to play with the Kadence advanced query Loop block. It is pretty amazing. And they've improved it in the latest release. They've added range filters with a little slider. They've also given ratings swatch filters. So if you have a store, you can filter by rating and color and that sort of thing. filter on any variation pretty nice. Also, you can select in this new advanced query Loop block either specific posts one by one to just show in this block. Or you can also turn on infinite scroll which is kind of nice if you want that feature. So related post is now also available to suggest additional content based on what's in the block now. So Kadence continues to iterate on that advanced query Loop block and it is pretty nice. All right. WooCommerce 8.6 was released just a few days ago on February the 15th. It is backwards compatible with previous versions. They have added a new product detail block with a better design than the way they were doing it in the past. So six additions were made also to the product collection block. So now you can have built in collections like new arrivals, top rated products, best selling products on sale, featured products, and even just a product catalog block. Here's how it kind of looks here. Basic Page. We're going to add a product collection block. We have these options we can choose from and boom. It just shows automatically the last five items added to the store. Pretty nice. Here's another one let's do a product catalog. There it is. And then we're gonna try one more here
here's our products that are on sale. Boom. Yep. So pretty nice real quick, create a really decent looking homepage for your site. And clearly we need some CSS work here. But you have a lot of products just really quick showing up based on certain criteria. This also allows you to edit a page and let's say we want to take the sale products and change it to something else so we can choose collection and turn that over to let's say featured products. So without changing anything else, we just change one collection type to another and that works really well. So if you are playing with blocks on your WooCommerce site, these new collection blocks are pretty nice and really make it easier to show grouped products on your homepage or other pages. Pretty neat. Also, if you're a WooCommerce person really important to take note of this. It probably won't affect many of you but it might if you're using old WooCommerce stuff. WooCommerce is going to be removing its legacy REST API in WooCommerce nine and upcoming release in a few months. Now. This is not the WordPress REST API. Okay, we're not talking about that. This is the WooCommerce REST API, which WooCommerce stopped using back in 2016. Right so it's they haven't used this for years. And it's just time to remove that from the product. So you may have seen this a little dashboard warning pops up that says hey, we're taking away the legacy REST API if you need it, and you know you need it because you have custom code that relies on it, or really old WooCommerce extensions for whatever reason, that are still relying on that. You can download the REST API as an extension an add on plugin and it'll be fine. But they're taking it out of WooCommerce core and that's a good thing. All right, let's flip the page to AI news. Wow, lots of things happening in the AI world. First of all, Google is saying goodbye to Bard and hello to Gemini. I never really liked the bard name. Anyway, Gemini sounds cooler. Google has renamed Bard to Gemini to simplify branding across its AI products. And services. A more powerful version called Gemini advanced is also being launched bundled with Google one at a subscription of 1999 per month. Gemini is becoming the default virtual assistant on all Android phones. It's also available on iOS devices. If you have the Google app you have access to Gemini as a virtual assistant there. Gemini is also going to replace Google's duet in Gmail and Docs and Sheets and Slides and meat and other Google workspace products. You'll have this one AI to rule them all. initially only available in English more languages will be added over time across 150 countries. A free two month trial of Gemini advanced is being offered if you're a new Google one subscriber. So this is really just the beginning of Google's work to integrate AI across all the things that it does. I think we'll see some significant advancement in Gemini across especially like Google ads and things like that. You might see Gemini coming up with more likely to convert ad copy and things like that in the future. Pretty neat. Let's see how Google continues to grow its Gemini AI. This is big news that was just announced a couple of days ago, Reddit has licensed its user generated content to an unnamed AI firm for $60 million annually. So basically, while a lot of outlets like the New York Times and others are blocking AI bots from scraping their site, Reddit has made a deal to sell their all their content to AI to train the AI. So this is super helpful information for AI products because it's user interaction back and forth conversations and that's the sort of stuff that AI models thrive on to learn and to really improve their ability to interact with humans. So this also comes ahead of a planned API. A planned IPO that Reddit is going to have which some folks are saying might be a $5 billion valuation so that's that's a lot. I read it as emphasize its commitment to ethical use of data and community trust. But of course the move to sell all this content to AI company has sparked debates on, you know, can you use personal content commercially? How do you do that and respect privacy? It's a whole thing. So it certainly is going to set a precedent for collaboration between tech firms and online communities like Reddit. So that's interesting. By the way, when I first read this, I thought great now chat. GPT is just going to be snarky about its reply, because it learned from Reddit. I don't know. We'll see what happens. All right. Speaking of chat GPT open AI has developed a new video generating AI tool Have you heard about this? Open AI has unveiled Surah, which is a new AI model that can generate two NATP videos that are up to one minute long from a text prompt from a text prompt. So the demo that they released showed a range of styles without AI weirdness in a lot of cases. Some videos featuring human likenesses have like an unnatural, video gamey kind of quality, as you could definitely tell but this is like the first generation and you creating a one minute video from a text prompt. That's crazy. I it's currently just a real research video. It's not publicly available. Open AI recognizes the tools potential for abuse, and is working on tools to detect Sora generated videos. They're also engaging policymakers on the ethical concerns of AI generated video, of which there are many, but it's just astonishing how quickly these AI products continue to advance. Not to be left out. Netta has talked a lot recently about its AI strategy Mehta of course, the parent company of Facebook has outlined its AI strategy that's focused on an increase in computing power. A move toward open source and training data. So meta is now investing heavily in a more advanced computing infrastructure to do AI more efficiently. It promises a stronger commitment to sharing breakthroughs, and emphasizes the critical need to diverse datasets in training. It also promises to develop AI responsibly and consider its ethical impacts. Like they all do. Their proposed guidelines address privacy, security and fairness concerns. They are being more forthcoming about their plans than some other firms. So we will see in the middle of all this, the news media is confronting an impending extinction level event. Now this is an excellent essay that appeared in the New Yorker a couple of weeks ago. I would encourage you to read this. This is one of those where I would just say just read the article. The writer is very thoughtful about this and I really appreciate it the take the media industry facing this extinction level event with declining revenues falling readers, widespread layoffs across print digital broadcast. factors that are driving this crisis include reader burnout on news platforms like Google and Facebook that dominate traffic and ad revenue and the demise of print, competing with streaming services. So legacy brands, like seen in The Washington Post LA Times are struggling to transition business models. They've tried subscriptions and events and ecommerce local journalism has been hit hard for decades. 3000 newspaper closures in the last 20 years 204 us counties no longer have news coverage. Yeah, so with ad revenue vanishing the future requires rethinking the relationship between news outlets and audiences in the role of journalism itself. It's a really interesting article, I would read it. So get get give it give that one a read if you're interested in this subject at all. Ah, another good read here, and I have the wrong link. But if you Google the idle you'll find it I still have the New Yorker link here. So for the basically the entire internet this little teeny tiny text file called Robots dot txt, govern web crawler behavior. It told web crawlers you know you should you can access the site, you shouldn't access the site. And while most search engines do honor robots, dot txt directives, AI tools, don't they just scrape websites without any governance or concern about website owner intent? So the robots dot txt relied on good faith and crawlers can legally ignore it like there's no law that says you have to obey robots that txt, but maybe there should be and that's the point of that article. And we'll have to see what happens here. There are now directives you can add that will block the open AI scraper. But it seems like a better broader solution is needed. Yeah. All right, a few more bits of AI news. If you want to follow some of these things. This is a funny story. Air Canada is now required to honor a refund policy that it's chatbot invented.
So this person was talking to the chat bot and was asking about certain things about in the Chatbot gave it certain information, which the person saved and then the Chatbot just made up the policy. Anyway, so Air Canada has to honor that. Open AI is now valued at $80 billion now that that valuation has tripled in the last 10 months. It's insane. The US Patent and Trade Office says that AI cannot patent inventions only people can So and also open AI tried to trademark the term GPT with the US trade Patent Office patent trade office said now it's already been used so you can't trademark CPT. Oh my WordPress and AI. It continues. Let's talk about news and SEO. We got a lot happening in the SEO world this month. I first of all, you may have seen this. But Yandex which is the primary search engine in Russia has been sold by its Dutch owners to a private consortium of Russian investors were somewhere around $5.2 billion. The move comes as the Dutch parent company sought to distance itself from all things Russia after the Russia's invasion of Ukraine a couple of years ago. The sale is still pending shareholder and regulatory approvals. Interestingly, and this is the part that made me laugh. The sale could have been more than $10 billion but the Russian government has what they call a mandatory discount that is imposed by Russian law dictates that any sale of Russian assets by parent companies incorporated in countries that Russia deems unfriendly are subject to a mandatory discount of at least 50%. So there you go. Google is going to be in court. Google will be facing an antitrust trial on September the ninth brought by the US Department of Justice in several states. The DOJ alleges that Google abused its dominance in digital advertising technology and they seek to limit Google's control over publisher revenues. Google of course, that denies the claim says that the lawsuit will raise costs. The new trial also comes amid two other major antitrust cases against Google. There's a currently a trial going on in DC now. What should wrap up in May that's focused on Google's dominance and web search. And a Texas trial is set for March of next year, focused on Google's ad technologies. So all these court cases really could force significant changes to the way Google does business. Love to see what happens there. Google is also removed the old cached links remember those? You do a search and underneath the the search result, there'd be the link for cached and Google would say the cached version of that page. Well, that is now gone. I it's been a it's been gradually going away over the last year or so. So now no official details were given on why they removed it other than Can you imagine how much storage space those cache pages would require? My goodness, it allowed you to access sites that were down review recent changes, but yeah, it's gone now and it's not coming back. There are also some changes coming to Google's core web vitals. So next month interaction to Next paint I N P will replace first input delay in Google's core web vitals so I NP measures the responsiveness of a site from when a user clicks something to when something actually happens on the screen. That's a good measurement. I like that. So it's interactivity. So JavaScript tasks over 50 milliseconds downgrades your Imp and affects your core web IDL score. So follow this under more acronyms to remember. This is a weird one. That some of you may have come across. There's this thing that's floating around out there called the weekend ranking bug. So SEO experts are reporting this troubling pattern where sites with certain generic top level domains like dot media and dot club, completely drop out of Google search results over the weekend, such that you can't even search for the actual domain name and come up like it's gone out of the Google index. It was first reported in November, but it's dramatically escalated in January. And folks are still talking about it. So weird thing so if you've got any sites that are dot media dot club, or you know stranger, top level domain names like that, pay attention to this because it might be affecting you too. And last of all, great little article here on Search Engine Land. Ai won't replace SEO pros anytime. Soon. AI tools are rapidly advancing, but you really they really haven't caught up to the critical problem solving social skills that are required for SEO and the human eye over SEO strategy. AI can automate a lot of tedious tasks but it certainly is not. Going to replace SEO pros anytime soon. Alright, let's move to some other news stuff that didn't. Stuff that didn't fit elsewhere. Let's see. Well, if you're downloading the slides, I've got the story in twice. I guess it's important Google's raising prices on reCAPTCHA. You saw that they're also raising prices on Google workspace accounts. So if you're using Google workspace, you probably got an email about this. Google is raising prices for all monthly plans starting on March the 14th. The flexible monthly plans are going to increase between two and $3 per user, or just under $2 up to $3. Depending on what level of account you have. Google says look, just lock in an annual plan your rate stays the same. So they want us all moving over to annual plans in a price increase is going to force that change. Yep. WP tavern has come back to life. So if you are if you're a reader of WP tavern, you may have noticed that it has gone dark for a pat the past few months. This is an automatic backed WordPress News Service. has been around forever and it went silent last year, when the longtime contributor Sarah Gooding moved on to a new opportunity. Matt Mullenweg has now posted on dopey Tavern and they've got a short small group of people are giving. They're giving a trial run at writing some tavern articles and there's a few tavern articles out there now so it's good to see tavern coming back to life. One last little thing here and that is the open web alliance has been formed to advocate for open source. So if you're an open source fan, you'll want to know about this. This is formerly called the inter CMS group, which is a group of content management systems that work together to get some changes made to the EU Cybersecurity Act. They've renamed and formalize this group. They're now called Open Web Alliance. They promote open source share practices support projects. It signals a more unified approach to open source advocacy, with security, compliance, all those sorts of things. This is a good thing. And if you'd like open source code, take a look at this. And hey look, it's a WP tavern article. Great to see them back. All right last for you today. Some stuff that was worth a look not really a full news story here but some articles and information we found that we thought was a lot of fun and we thought we'd share with you. How do you build a low code accessible WooCommerce site you might ask? Well take a look at this post on equalised digital, and you'll find Amber Hines demonstrating exactly how to do that. So if you're into E commerce and you want things to be accessible, this is something you absolutely should take a look at. Also great article here from the admin bar on maximizing the value of your content through a repurposing strategy. Really good read here, check that one out. Our websites still need it today. Lots of folks think that their social media profiles are enough. Executive Director of the WordPress project Josepha Hayden Shambo see explains in this episode of Gosh, that's the what's the WordPress podcast? Whatever it's called, the name is out of my head. She talks about why relying on social media just isn't enough. Really good conversation there. And if you want an overview of what's coming in WordPress six, five, we've talked a lot about it over the last couple of months here on news roundup, that there's a great article there on the make WordPress blog that talks all about the things that are coming in WordPress six five WordPress success accessibility day was last September and now all the replays are up so if you didn't get to be part of WordPress accessibility day, you can now go back and view all the replays there at 2020 three.wp accessibility dot day. And last but certainly not least, get some time to kill. Check out this link. This is a little game from Jonathan Bassinger, a longtime WordPress developer called dodge which is kinda like asteroids. You got to WordPress logo in the middle and you have to dodge all the other CMS logos that are trying to kill you know, there you go. All right. Last but certainly not least is some word news from WordPress community. The 2023 annual survey results are in and it was the survey itself was rebuilt for accessibility and offered in different languages. And they saw a significant rise in completion rate as a result, the use of Gutenberg block editor is up to 60% now, block theme and plugin awareness 61% Both of those increased performance and security still top focus areas though the sentiment behind them is declining. You can read the full results there at the link.
Contributors are divided on the areas that they think the project ought to focus on. You're less welcome than they were in 2022 Interesting. So they've revamped the survey added a few more things made it more accessible in the survey will continue to be distributed at all word camps this year. So pretty good. And speaking of word camps, there are a couple of upcoming US word camps. Word camp Montclair, New Jersey is coming June the first so if you're up by in that area might be a good day to check out. It's a one day camp where camp us is scheduled for Portland, Oregon, September 17 through the 20th That's gonna be a good one. Around the World. A number of other word camps scheduled include WordCamp Asia and Taiwan March 7 through ninth WordCamp Europe in Torino, Italy, June the 13th and through the 15th and word camp Canada is now on the books for Ottawa in July 11 through 13th of this year as well. All right, well, that is wraps up our news roundup that is going to finish that for us today. If you joined us late and you didn't get the slides. I'm dropping those links again in the chat now. You can download the slides also if you're watching the replay if there's a link right there below. Well, thanks for hanging out with me for the last hour. Hopefully you've seen a couple of things that are interesting to you and you have some things to read now. That tomorrow for the Google business profiles changes for 2024 with Krishna Clements, right here on the solid Academy where we go further together.