Please remove all crap related to license activation checking

[romainmenke]

More and more noise, alerts and general crap is being added by ACF when licenses are not "activated". All this noise is pushing towards activation.

But when you inspect the code that runs during activation you notice that this is just a trap.

On activation, ACF will now call home and report a whole range of information and stats about your project.

Can you please stop this crap and revert this plugin to the good citizen of the WP ecosystem it used to be?

Calling home is bad because :

• exfiltrating data is always bad
• it slows down some requests
• it bloats the plugin
• ....

[lgladdy]

Hey @romainmenke,

We haven't made any changes to the data that is sent during an activation for a long time, but will require ACF PRO to be activated from our next release in order to use the PRO features - much like any other premium plugin. You can find out more about this in our ACF 6.2.3 release blog post: https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/blog/acf-6-2-3/

It's important to note none of these changes apply to the free version of ACF contained in this repository. The free plugin does not contact any ACF servers and only uses the WordPress Plugin Directory for updates and changelog information.

[romainmenke]

Please reconsider this as this is a very hostile change to a widely used plugin.

We have an unlimited lifetime license and we are not very keen on having crap that calls home.

[romainmenke]

much like any other premium plugin

"we're all doing it" has historically been proven to be a very bad excuse 😛

[polevaultweb]

Hi @romainmenke, you have a lifetime license that means you aren't affected by these changes. I'm not sure how this makes them hostile. Our plugin has always phone home to contact our licensing server, this is done in a performant and cached way.

[romainmenke]

We were never forced or even nudged to activate before.

Having access to the source code of the pro version was sufficient to have access to the pro features.

This enabled us to forgo activations and prevent the plugin from phoning home.

Forcing activation in future versions is very hostile and a major shift from past operating behavior.

[polevaultweb]

We were never forced or even nudged to activate before.

"It's the way it's always been" has historically been proven to be a very bad excuse 😛

I appreciate this is more work for developers if they haven't activated before. We do make it easy to define the license key in code which should help here.

But we feel that expecting our customers to activate their license key isn't an unreasonable ask 😄 This helps protect the plugin from piracy and invalid use. This of course all contributes to making the plugin sustainable, so we can keep making the plugin even more awesome for WordPress developers like yourself.

[romainmenke]

We were never forced or even nudged to activate before.

"It's the way it's always been" has historically been proven to be a very bad excuse 😛

... when shit has always been shitty, sure, then it is a bad excuse to keep things shitty... you got me there...

But going from a trust based approach and a plugin that is free of crap, to a plugin that is suspicious of it's paying users and filled with needless bloat, is not a step towards a brighter future...

I would voluntarily switch to yearly subscription if it was free of crap like this, but that is maybe just me.

It is clear to me that ACF is no longer maintained in the same spirit as it was created years ago.

I understand that you are trying to make money on this plugin but that is a marketing/sales problem.

[polevaultweb]

I appreciate your feedback and comments - good to hear.

It is clear to me that ACF is no longer maintained in the same spirit as it was created years ago.

I and the team wholly disagree with this. We are ACF users and ACF fans, here continuing to be stewards of this awesome plugin.