It has nothing at all to do with themes, it had to do with his friend having the "hide this blog from search engines" option enabled, which makes the tags go local, and has for over a year now.

What's funny is the OP's friend actually wanted the links to be global and changed her options so they would be, so the subsequent pet issue ranting is that much more ridiculous. Add that to the fact that half or more of what options and wank said has a low correlation with reality, and it becomes obvious that you guys need to get out more.

Why Do Some Themes Have Local Tags Instead Of Global Tags?

not sure if sending responses as such one:

it is working as I would expect

would be too much of fun.

X-hacker: If you're reading this, you should visit automattic.com/jobs and apply to join the fun, mention this header.

We very occassionally [sic] show Adsense (contextual text ads) on post and tag pages.

Presumably the 'traffic' Matt refers to is from wordpress.com blogs into the tags pages. OK, so he's not misleading our readers in order to get clickthroughs from them. However, forcing every wordpress.com user to link to the tags pages does substantially increase the chance of said tag pages turning up in Google searches. More people coming in from Google = more people seeing the ads. The baffled wordpress.com users are just collateral damage.

Blogs marked private are allowed to opt out because their linkbacks won't count for anything in Google. Mature blogs are not, because the global tag links were never intended to be useful for anyone other than Automattic. So what if they're forced to link to pages that have nothing to do with them? It's another PR link for the pages in question, which is all that matters.

So it is, still, absolutely about ad revenue, just not precisely in the way we were speculating. What this explanation leaves out is why they don't label the links. I'm inclined to revert to my original feeling that this is merely laziness.

wank wrote:

Sending 404s can't be intended behaviour. Nobody wants to make their site look more broken than it is. Did you get any response from support when you told them about the bug?

you'll be laughing, but, yes, it can!

here is my "Feedback" request (as Mark don't quote original requests I had to recall it):
.
----------------------

this is just one of a Mature blog posts:
http://udoj.wordpress.com/2007/08/07/broken-chains/
(navigation in other posts is broken the same way)

this is where this post category link leads to ("Not Found" Global Tags page):
http://wordpress.com/tag/blogs-in-our-monkeysphere/

1. why Mature blogs which are not part of the Global Tags system are forced to link to it?
2. why their post Category links are leading into a 'Not Found' page, which don’t even contain the post that sent you there?

----------------------
.

here is the response I've got:

From: support @ wordpress.com  < Mark @ wordpress.com >
To: options@wordpress.com
Date: Wed, 10 Oct 2007
Subject: [WordPress #KNH-592276]: [categories] [options.wordpress.com]
         Why the Category links within a Mature blog posts
         lead into "Not Found" Global Tags page? 

Hi,
I've checked udoj.wordpress.com and it is working as I would expect.
-

Mark

see: "it is working"!

just not as you or your casual visitor (or anyone else but wp.com staff) would expect...

now this is really a "hands down" situation.

and it's not even about that 'ad revenue is more important than accessibility'. as I've already said somewhere:

* GT pages don't have ads on them, Matt said:
We don’t show ads on that traffic, and our business is such we don’t need to.

* GT do increase distribution of other categorized/tagged .com blogs within a total number of page-views, however they don't increase net page-views number on .com.

if it were about 'ad revenue' indeed, then I wouldn't even bother myself to mention it anywhere and shut myself down, because this farking GT system would be reasonable, at the very least.

but it's NOT even about profit (or, at least, I can't see how), and that's exactly what making it so absobloodylutely mind-boggling.

It's confusing the kids because when they click on the post category links, this sends them without warning out of the safe space of the blog into the unmoderated wilderness of global tags.

We've suggested one possible solution (flagging the blog as mature) and would like to know whether it will work. Please confirm that if a blog is hidden from search engines and/or marked as 'mature', its post category links will lead to the category page for that blog. Any other behaviour is seriously broken. Blogs which are not part of the global tags system should not be forced to link to it. Nor should their post links be leading to a 'not found' message.

(Another possible solution would be to label the post links as global; but it's been made clear on multiple occasions that you're not willing to do that so I'm not really sure why I bothered mentioning it. After all these months of kvetching I've come to accept that ad revenue is more important than accessibility.)

I can't see anything wrong there.
There is no tag cloud and the categories I clicked worked.

What am I missing?

but she is

still just baffled over all of this. I want local and global stuff. Am I nuts are shouldn't ONE be local and the OTHER be global?

sorry for the possible confusion, I just called such pages "Not Found" because that's how they really should be called as I believe.

Adam (SBK) was first who mentioned this issue (and I have to admit I didn't catch it at once), but then he also linked to such mature blog post in the comment he left on my blog.

I don't know whether it's an intended behaviour or a true bug -- mature status and global tags are kind of a 'grey valley'.

not sure if I ever sent a request on this issue to the support, but taking such an opportunity a month ago I directly asked about this issue Andy who kindly replied in the thread mentioned above (and obviously had a chance to read Adam's note as well).

then I asked the same question directly Matt too, who was also kind enough to provide me with some details on the nature of Automattic's business.

and no, in both cases I didn't get any response from them -- it's probably either because I was too harsh or they were too busy to follow up those threads.

PS
just in case if there are too many linkbacks to my blog they can be safely removed and relevant threads referenced can be found via 'google custom search' link on the sidebar (regular WP search doesn't look for comments and Pages), search terms are: mature empty.

getting Mature status set will have quite an opposite and unexpected effect.

namely, both Category AND Tag links within a "mature" blog posts lead into blank "Not Found" global tags page which says:

"Sorry, we don’t have any posts here with that tag. 

You may want to try one of the sites below."

and below there are only Automattic's partners sites.

so, judyb is correct: unfortunately, "Private" status, i.e. protected from indexing by the search engines, is the only but unacceptable way to have the sane (from the point of usablity) links behavior in the post metadata on wordpress.com

I want the links within my post to be local. When my readers click on a category within my post, I want them to see what else I have written about that topic, not what someone else has written that usually has nothing to do with what I am focused on.

I want the links in the column on the side to be local as well.

One of the blogs I have with my daughter is for kids and they are ALWAYS confused, even through I run the category listing on the sidebar widget. I still want to sort them with the categories, I just want the globals out of my post window.

... there was some confusion when we first introduced the feature but once people started seeing how tags could drive additional traffic to their pages they changed their mind.

However even for something that 99% of people love and 1% hate because of the size of WordPress.com you’ll find a few thousand people who hate anything we do or change. Our job is filtering that feedback for good ideas and deciding what’s best for the majority of our users.

scuseme for a shameless plug, but well it's almost an interview.

see also:

Blog Interviewer: WordPress was certainly not the first blogging software on the scene but what factors do you think have allowed it to eclipse other blogging scripts like Movable Type?

Matt Mullenweg: If I had to look at why WordPress has been successful to the extent it has, I think it is mostly due to that we listen. We are users of the blogs ourselves. I mean, every WordPress developer is a pretty active blogger, and we listen a lot to the people using the software. Our assumption is that we cannot and will not know the best stuff for the next version of WordPress, so I do not even try to make predictions of where WordPress is going to be in a year or two because frankly, I do not know. If you asked me two years ago if we would be where we are now, I would have said something completely different. Our users are very smart because they use WordPress obviously and they are not shy, so they are very willing to share their opinions about where things can go. So our role and my role as sort of their lead developer is very much taking in all these inputs and trying to synthesize where we should go with the project and balance out what is often a silent majority with a few very passionate users who might be on the leading edge, and those few passionate users might out weigh the majority sometimes because they are where everyone is going to be a year from now, and sometimes we say the majority might out weigh them, and so just sort of navigating those waters is, I think, a big part of what I do.

Say categories are LOCAL for your site and tags are GLOBAL for all of wordpress.

I'm not sure. Is there a way to tell without asking? Here's her blog:

http://welcometowhereveryouare.wordpress.com/