When Matt Mullenweg publicly started going after WP Engine one issue that got a lot of attention was the disparity between how much time he’s company Automattic was claiming to sponsor its employee doing work for WordPress versus WP Engine. The metric being used, Five for the Future, has plenty of issues. One that has been out in the open, which we happened across, is that there are many pledges that couldn’t be real. At the time, Automattic was claiming to currently be providing sponsored to the Tide team, despite that team having gone inactive in early 2022. They were not alone, as there were 331 current pledges to the team. The story wasn’t all that different with another team, where there were 14 listed members of the team and 338 pledges. There is a form for reporting problems with pledges, though one that doesn’t seem designed for systematic issues, as you are supposed to report the URL of an individual pledge. We filed a report about those issues at the time, so what has happened more than a month on?

After our post about Automattic’s pledges, their Five for the Future page was updated and no longer lists time pledge to the Tide team. That appears to be unrelated, as that change came alongside many Automattic employees leaving the company. There were significant changes to Automattic’s pledging when those people left.

The larger issue here, though, hasn’t been addressed. The Tide team now has one less pledge than it did when we previously covered it:

The other team, the Plugin Review team, now has 2 more listed members, but the number of people pledging has increased by 32:

With another team we mentioned with pledges out of line with the stated membership of the team, an Automattic employee recently said something the team did was on hold “as we don’t have many Community team contributors available.” That would be hard to believe if there were really were 2376 people providing time to the team:

As our previous post noted, there were 60 members of the team as of July.

We haven’t received any response to our report either.

In one of the previous posts we mentioned that based on recent postings, the Five for the Future program appeared to be managed by Automattic, as three of their employees were the only people involved in update posts about the program. Two of them are still with Automattic, the third resigned, “because I’m not aligned with the recent strategic decisions taken by Matt in the conflict with WP Engine.”