Easily one of the most irritating things about WordPress is the continuous attempts to up-sell in the dashboard. Here’s how to get rid of them.
It’s one thing to have a gentle hint, like Updraft Plus saying “hey you can get more features with the pro version” and a dismiss function that makes the reminder go away for a year. It’s more irritating to have something that pops on every login, and even more irritating to see something show up every time you are on the dashboard.
I can tolerate most of these. Sometimes they’re irritating enough that I just switch plugins, especially when they try pushing related plugins you don’t give a damn about. This is one reason why there’s no Yoast on my sites. The SEO Framework is just as capable, a lot less pedantic, and it doesn’t nag. Yet.
But what to do when there’s no alternative and the plugin is persistently nagging? Use your ad blocker to make it go away! Since it has just recently pissed me off, I’m going to use WPCode Lite, an otherwise useful plugin as the prime example. With a recent update, this plugin has elected to add a widget to the post edit page with the title “WPCode Page Scripts”. Cool! That’s a welcome minor convenience. Click on the widget though and what do you get?
Page Scripts is a Pro Feature
That’s nice, but for me it’s not worth subscribing. How do I dismiss this? Surprise, surprise, I can’t. Well, F*ck you, WPCode! I’ll do it myself. Now this takes a little knowledge of HTML and custom AdBlock Plus rules, but the general process goes like this:
- Right click on the widget and choose inspect. This will highlight the general area in the code you want.
- Look for the highest level element that uniquely identifies your target widget. In my case, inspect took me to a div with the id “advanced-sortables”. We don’t want that. There are a bunch of useful elements on the page that are enclosed by that. Drill down a bit and we find another div with the id “wpcode-metabox-snippets”. That’s the one!
- Click on your AdBlock icon.
- Click on the gear to get to settings.
- Select the advanced tab from the left.
- Scroll down to “Your Custom Filters”.
- In the box below “My Filter List”, enter this rule, substituting your domain for mine:
ambitonline.com###wpcode-metabox-snippets
You can also leave off the domain if you have multiple sites, but in my experience more specific rules help prevent long periods of “WTF” until your realize that the ad blocker is doing something you didn’t expect.
I’m picking on WPCode here because the arrogance of this has really ticked me off, but you can apply the same method to most other notices like this. At some point, plugin developers will take defensive measures to make this even more difficult and then we’ll have a discussion about writing user scripts in TamperMonkey and it’s kin.
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