This morning I received a comment from a reader saying, “In your ‘Possibly related posts’ section at the end of the LotR post includes a vulgar link. You should take it off.”
A vulgar link? What?
Then I followed the permalink to this morning’s LotR post on my blog and noticed WordPress was generating “Possibly related posts” and attaching external links to the end of my post. Then, after a little research, I found that WordPress was automatically adding this little “feature” and turning it “on” without notification.
After some digging, this is the option I discovered on my dashboard: “Hide related links on this blog, which means this blog won’t show up on other’s blogs or get traffic that way.” Notice the presumption–it’s on until you turn it off.
Not only is this unethical from a blog engine, it has the potential to undermine the integrity of a blogger. So if you are considering starting a blog, surprises like this should factor into your consideration.
Tony Reinke 
Thanks for the heads up Tony. I just jumped on the WordPress bandwagon a few weeks ago and that’s the LAST thing I want to happen to my blog. Your right, the integrity of the blogger could easily be underminded.
I’ve been running WordPress for over a year on a few sites, my own and my churches. There are some steps you must take for comment spammers and little issues like this one Tony describes.
Just be prepared to upgrade your site often, if you create your own custom themes like I do it can be tedious but I think its worth it. Also, test your plugins well, I’ve ran into several issues with plugins, now I rarely use them because you can achieve the same thing if you code it yourself.
But all in all, its an awesome blog and much more, and its almost a full blown CMS. Thanks for the post Tony!
It reminds me of the ads that some websites have to fight through as part of their hosting.
It’s good, however, to be able to turn it off at least.
Can you point directly to where this setting is in the dashboard. I was unable to find it in mine.
It’s too bad WordPress would do this. They tend to be a pretty class act.
Thanks for this. I have a WordPress blog and had no idea this feature was activated. God bless.
Thanks for posting this.
I think this is only an issue for using wordpress.com, and not if you downloaded the blog engine and running it somewhere else by yourself. Am I right on this?
To turn it off you’ll need to go to Design and then Extras. Thanks for posting this! I was wondering about this…
To be fair to wordpress, they did announce this new idea…at least I saw the announcement on the day they began this experiment. On the dashboard page, under “wordpress.com news.” Trouble is I rarely read these notices…maybe we can suggest that they send an email announcement? Or turn it ON when asked, but assume NO until they’ve heard YES.