Klout, the scoring platform that keeps tabs on your social media performance by “monitoring” how often you create content on your blogs, and on major sites like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook, has a problem. It totally ignores self-hosted WordPress blogs, like this one at Zennie62Blog.com.
The system Klout set up asks one to install a username and password for their WordPress blog, which is a routine request. But for a self-hosted WordPress blog, the username is almost always “admin” – there are thousands of people who have this.
Because it’s so common, it’s reasonable to expect WordPress to accomodate for this, but that’s not the case at all.
At first, it seemed like just a total glitch, until a rather intense forum popped up in a search today. In it were the words of many frustrated WordPress self-hosted blog webmasters. Here’s a sample:
Mike Raffensperger Sep 24, 2011 08:55PM PDT
Would love an answer to this. When trying to sync as “admin” they suggest using your domain/wp-admin but that doesn’t work either.
Seems like those of us that have the tech chops to host our own sites would have more Klout than those with the freebie subdomain ones!
Sean Sep 27, 2011 06:10PM PDT
Is there any answer for this yet? Seems completely illogical to not allow us to connect our self-hosted WordPress.
Then a self-described Klout employee named Megan chimed in with an answer that helped no one, and upset everyone:
Megan Klout Employee Sep 28, 2011 03:06PM PDT
Hey all,
WordPress auth only works for wordpress hosted blogs. This is because of the way this operated on the wordpress side. Thank you.
As stated, Megan upset the WordPress flock, leading to still more angry forum inputs like this one:
Erik Seo Sep 29, 2011 04:05AM PDT
Wow, that is just stupid. Way to penalize people for actually building a better blog than what is available on a free wordpress site….especially since self-hosted wordpress sites do typically have more influence…
That should be taken out until klout can do both self hosted and wordpress.com hosted blogs.
So Megan chimes in again:
Megan Klout Employee Sep 30, 2011 12:52PM PDT
Hey Erik and Ian,
This is has to do with how wordpress is set up. Thanks.
-Megan
Leading to this:
Ian Wood Oct 01, 2011 03:43AM PDT
Thanks for coming back Megan, hardly a great response from you though, we know it is because of how it is set up, self hosters are being penalised. As Erik says this should be puled until a fix is found. A very badly thought through decision by Klout.
In all, not good, and the problem calls into question the credibility of Klout’s system when it fails to allow self-hosted blogs to be properly registered. Making one’s known blog is the ultimate expression of the art of content development.
For all of this, Klout claims the problem is not with it, but with WordPress. Here’s Megan:
Megan Klout Employee Oct 03, 2011 01:58PM PDT
Hey all,
I wanted to clarify that this has to do with the way auth is set up on wordpress’s side NOT a decision we made. We would love to include influence from every possible network including self-hosted wordpress blogs. We are certainly looking at ways to do this but it is not simple. We appreciate your desire to get your blog included.
Thanks,
Megan
Seems that Klout should remove the WordPress icon until this problem is solved.
Stay tuned.