The new "Follow" bar
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All my paid clients hate, like it, find it looks too “social network-y”, and not suited for a professional website.
My free blogging clients don’t care, they had follow enabled anyway, so having a few more options added is only a plus.
“Some people like it” should not mean that a feature should be implement across the board.
I suggest that until your developers find a way to make this “feature” optional, they should back out of it rather than loose more paying customers forever.
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Thank you for the feedback. I do feel the need to point out that this isn’t a new feature. The action bar and follow button has been on all WordPress.com sites for some time now. The only change we made is that it’s now also visible for logged out users, and the main reason we added it was to address the need for an easy way for site owners to log into the dashboard from the site itself rather than requiring them to go to the WordPress.com home page.
As I said above, we’re looking into the possibility of adding an option to disable this, but this feature won’t be rolled back completely.
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FYI, as an IT professional, I know that any feature can be rolled back completely if there is the will. Thats basic version control. Talk to your developers. Tell them to roll it back until they can implement it with an option to disable for logged out users.
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If the main reason is for site owners to log into dashboard, (which is handy) than a better place to implement this would have been as a popup link added your wordpress branding, which is unobtrusive, and to leave the follow bar functionality alone. The follow bar was working fine and didn’t need to be messed with to add this very limited functionality.
As far as users wanting to follow a blog, blog owners had the option to show follow button to logged out users using the old follow bar, but some bloggers don’t want to be followed. WordPress shouldn’t be overriding this selection. I think your new actionbar actually allows me to follow blogs that don’t want followed.
I’m curious if Business users are getting the same problems, do they see the three ellipses and a banner across their device in mobile. Because they dont have WordPress branding, perhaps you could implement a tiny dot (similar to your wordpress branding implementation) , and send them e-mail letting them know that this dot will open a popup that lets them login to their site could handle this small percentage of users. (or however you select to implement this)
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Sorry to keep posting, but I just had a look at some of your VIP Business sites. They work properly.
They have a full follow button, or they have nothing at all. None of them have the new implementation of limited actionbar ellipses or the banner across 1/4 of mobile screen.
So, you seem to have found a good solution to VIP Business without my help :),
For those of us who are not VIP Business, Please pass your developers my suggestions. In particular, the banner occupies 1/4 of landscape screen on mobile, and flips back and forth. It’s hard to avoid touching when scrolling.
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If there is no way to remove the banner it will be deal breaker for businesses. I don’t think that there is any reason that you can’t remove the thing.
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I totally agree.
As much as I’ve enjoyed having my site at WordPress, I’m now looking into other options. If I find something that’ll work, I’m leaving WP.
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Hi @spoonnuohous,
If you have subscribed to Premium or Business, you can use the following CSS to get rid of the actionbar
#actionbar {
visibility: hidden;
}WordPress introduced a new Personal Plan about 2 months ago, very reasonable, but did not allow you to use custom CSS, which most people didn’t think they needed, and for 6 weeks, they didn’t see any need for custom CSS at all.
But about 6 weeks after the new personal plan was first introduced, this new actionbar made having access to custom CSS a must-have feature for many people, and so my clients who had previously taken advantage of the new cheaper Personal plan have either upgraded to Premium, or have left WordPress altogether.
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I’m on a premium plan, and I tried that CSS, but the action bar is still there.
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Scratch that! I moved the CSS you offered from the bottom of my CSS to the top, and now it works!
You’re amazing! Thank you SO much! :D
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For those wishing to hide the action bar on mobile and smaller tablets, see this other thread for a Media Query to do that.
https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/removing-follow-bar-at-bottom-on-mobile-devices?replies=5
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