Rant: I hate it when software thinks it knows more than I do.

This is kind of rantish, but I think this makes a good point.

I thought I would try out a copy of Wordpress MU on my dev server. Turns out, this script thinks it's smarter than me!

A little bit about my experimental server: I have a few admin scripts setup at the root domain (like example.com) and the main website setup at example.com. It's my choice to set it up this way whether or not somebody else finds it 'inefficient'.

Well, when I was at the Wordpress MU setup page, it recommends that I not use www. I was like "thanks, I'll log that away" as I typed www.mydomain.com into the box. When I hit submit button, I get shown this screen.

How the heck do they know whether or not www. is depreciated on my server? They don't, and lo and behold, after I clicked the continue button, I was staring at a 404 page because the setup script thought it knew better than me. Turns out the only way to work around this is to manually hack the code.

Lesson: Forcing your own personal preferences in your software (or website design) is generally not a good idea. Data validation is fine. If you need to change inputted data for security or formatting purposes, that's acceptable. But to modify an input because it's "The preferred method of hosting blogs" is a little ridiculous.

Ok, rant is over. What do you all think?