Blackout

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The blackout on WordPress.org is active. It is an interstitial, but you have to scroll all the way to the bottom to get the clickthrough link. It will go away if you click that link and be replaced by the Stop Censorship ribbon for 1 hour, at which point the cookie expires and you have to do it again. We’ll run the blackout for 24 hours. Yes, it will annoy you. I wanted to shut everything down, so count your blessings.

The reason we did this instead of a full shut-down is that there are many businesses and people who help drive the independent web that need access to the WordPress Codex, forums, plugin/theme repos, and APIs. We wouldn’t want to penalize them in our protest, so we just made it impossible to ignore instead.

The action on WordPress.com has also started. The primary home page of WordPress.com has blacked out all of its normal “Freshly Pressed” content. The WordPress.com official blog is sporting a ribbon — if we blacked out the blog, then WordPress.com bloggers would lose access to the post telling them how they can black out their sites using the option we deployed this evening. We launched on option tonight for all blogs on WordPress.com to either blackout (8am-8pm EST) or add a ribbon. In the couple of hours since we launched it, it looks like more than 10k have chosen full blackout, and around 3k have added the ribbon. People who chose blackout will have a ribbon before and after the blackout. Ribbons will remain until January 24, when PIPA comes up for vote in the Senate.

Both the WordPress.org and the WordPress.com blackout pages include a short message that includes a text link to the sopastrike.com site, the Fight for the Future video, the email form, the call form, and the non-U.S. petition form.

These things are what I spent the last consecutive 18 hours working on.

For more information, check out americancensorship.org.

8 thoughts on “Blackout”

  3. WordPress.org – THUMBS UP for protesting SOPA
    Wish wordpress.com had done the same – had to make do with a custom front page for today.
    All my other sites will (or already have) join in – so are many clients.

  4. Thanks for the hard work! It’s for a good cause!
    All of The Voodoo Empire sites, including VoodooPress, are participating with a full blackout today.

  5. Thank you very much for activating this on WordPress.com. I was feeling kinda disappointed as I could not do anything but adding a header (which I have replaced recently with my usual one) and writing a post about it. I have WordPress.org sites where I was able to do anything I wanted. But I was disappointed initially for not being able to go on strike with sopastrike.com’s method. You guys made it. Not only that, you made millions know and care about how this can kill the internet experience. A salute to all of WordPress folks, including Matt, for this. 🙂

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