As I’ve discovered, the meta tag seems quite unreliable. Some themes (e.g. Divi) and even some plugins (e.g. LayerSlider) change the meta tag, most security plugins remove it and the WordPress Manager MainWP also removes it (or recommends removing it). They’re just the ones I know about.
According to this PublicWWW - PublicWWW.com, there are < 200 websites with a detectable CP meta tag. This figure seems to tally with that from BuiltWith.
The readme.html and license.txt files don’t seem much more reliable as they too often get deleted, renamed or hidden by security plugins.
That’s why I suggested adding something extra that won’t get deleted or changed by anything.
And it’s ok. In this case we assume that the current site needs a higher level of security and public CMS detection is unwanted. If a user (or a plugin installed by a user) takes some measures to hide/protect some information, we should probably treat it as private despite of our own marketing needs. CMS might be an open secret anyway, but…)
The next step for a detection site would be to look for files that only exist in ClassicPress. I won’t list them here, this is easy enough to find out if you’re interested.
If we added a new way to identify sites as ClassicPress, then this cycle would just repeat itself: people would ask for a filter to disable this new method (and probably wouldn’t be very happy about it in the first place). You can start a petition and see, if you like, but I will just point out a couple of things for now:
We’re in a much better position to provide usage statistics than any third-party service, automating this is not a super high priority but it’s coming eventually.
Hiding the CMS version is not really a security improvement even though many people think it is (automated exploits mostly don’t bother checking for the presence of the thing they’re trying to exploit, they just try the exploit). If we want to enable people to collect more accurate usage statistics, then we should start by asking site owners not to disable or modify the meta generator tag (or building a plugin to help with this). However I’m not sure if even this is a worthwhile direction.
Yeah, that’s fair comment. Though 400 sites is still way off the mark. Twice as good as 200 though.
I think people will continue to look to sites like BuiltWith for comparison and assume the figures they present are more accurate than the ones presented by ClassicPress. It depends what our goal is. Are the figures for our own benefit or for wider public consumption?
That unfortunately won’t stop the plugin and theme developers from tweaking the tag for their own purposes.
I think it’d be worth it if it helps CP. Only problem is, which plugin (or theme) gets priority?