On Sunday, the head of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, used the blog of WordPress to attack a competitor of his Company Automattic. That would seem like a conflict of interest, but as we noted last week, WordPress never released the conflict of interest policy they announced was coming back in 2021 and 2022. That followed on his attack on them at WordCamp US and on his personal blog. One point of contention was covered this way on yet another Matt Mullenweg outlet, the WP Tavern:

To make his point, Mullenweg compared the Five For the Future contributions from Automattic and WP Engine, a competitor of similar size. Automattic contributes 3,786 hours per week, while WP Engine contributes just 47.

(Nowhere in the post is it disclosed that WP Tavern is owned by him or the connection between him and Automattic. We left a comment about that, which was not approved to be shown.)

While that post written days ago, says 3,786 hours per week are being contributed, the claim is now up to 3,950 hours:

Considering how many issues in WordPress haven’t been resolved despite solutions existing, including plenty of security issues, the question is if Automattic is really contributing so much of their employees’ job time to WordPress. It is a question that has been coming up with this situation and another contentious situation earlier this year, as we will get to. Before that, though, we looked at one team that Automattic claims to be providing sponsored hours for, which looks like it might have been inactive for over two years. The pledges for that team also suggest that there might a wider issue with overstated or completely fake pledges.

Tide Team

Looking at the list of teams Automattic claim to be involved in, one is the Tide Team:

According to the page for that team, there are 331 people have pledged time to the team:

It appears that is currently pledging and not previous pledged time (thought it isn’t completely clear). Many of those pledges come from accounts claiming to be involved in what must be most of the teams (considering that Automattic pledges for 22). 91 pledges are for 19 teams in total. 37 pledges are for 21 in total. Looking at some of those accounts, it seems like a lot of those pledges are not real. Take this account that is pledging 60 hours a week to 21 teams, where they only joined in February and their only activity is a post about their website going down:

Getting back to the Tide team, the last post from the team was in March 2022, noting that a meeting had been canceled:

The previous message was about a cancellation as well. The last non-cancellation message was in February 2022:

That page links to a GitHub repository, which had its last commit in May 2020:

It looks like another GitHub repository in the same project replaced that, which was last updated in September 2022:

Putting that all together, it appears that team is inactive. If that is the right, how much time is Automattic taking credit for?

A more recent mention of the Tide team was citing their tools use in a plugin from WP Engine!

Marketing?

One Automattic employee is listed as being sponsored for 5 hours a week for the Marketing team. The page for the Marketing team has this message at the top of their page (emphasis theirs):

Update May 6, 2024: The Make Marketing blog is temporarily closed to new activity. Current marketing focus and processes are shifting to a new experimental project called WordPress Media Corps. Check out the WordPress Media Corps Initial Roadmap to learn more.

(There are currently 1,759 people pledging for that team.)

That person is doing work that doesn’t really seem like work that is focused on WordPress. They are one of three Automattic employees producing a podcast for another Automattic employee, where the latest episode’s description, written by that first Automattic employee, ends this way:

Whether you’re a seasoned user or new to the platform, Josepha’s reflections will inspire you with insights from her earliest days in WordPress.

That podcast appears to be more of a vanity podcast for an Automattic employee, who has the title of Executive Director of WordPress, than something helping market WordPress.

Back in March, respected WordPress community Member Sé Reed, who was a member of the Marketing team, raised the question of what Automattic employees were possibly doing to match up with the pledged time with that team:

According to your WP.org profile, “Automattic sponsors Nicholas Garofalo to contribute 40 hours per week to the Marketing Team.” This is the same amount pledged for Reyes Martínez and Lauren Stein. Dan Soschin’s 40 hours are split between Marketing, Training, and Core so let’s say 10 of that goes to Marketing, and Brett McSherry is pledged for 5 hours per week.

So roughly 135 hours PER WEEK of Automattic-sponsored time is pledged to the MakeWP Marketing Team. I simply do not think that the projects listed here account for that amount of time.

There wasn’t really an answer from one of the cited Automattic employees, but they did make this curious admission:

That said, these pledges aren’t hard and fast accountings of time spent by anyone, at Automattic or elsewhere.

That person is claimed to be sponsored for 40 hours a week, which should make their accounting pretty easy, since that would be their day job.