News is spreading around the community that the plugins created by MaxBlogPress have been removed from the plugin repository. Apparently, his plugins contained a forced opt-in mechanism that is, once you installed the plugin, you had to provide a name and email address in order to activate the plugin. Based on numerous complaints over the span of the last three months on the WordPress.org support forums, the plugins were finally removed. After getting the end users email address, the marketer would send email marketing messages sometimes daily without an easy way to unsubscribe.

Not only is the forced opt-in a terrible way to do anything, but it acts as a usage restriction of the plugin which violates the terms of being hosted on the plugin repository. I think Bobby Ning sums up the reasons for removal quite well as does Otto in the WPTavern forum.

If you take away the marketing and phone home aspects of his plugins, it looks like they provide good functionality. Since the plugins have been taken off of the repository, I wonder how long it will be before someone who really valued the plugin ends up creating a fork, minus the marketing stuff and submits that to the repository as a replacement. So far, it looks like Chip Bennett has done that to at least two of the plugins.