Stop shipping plugins and old(er) themes with new installs

[flomei]

Hello!
It´s my first time using the trac-system, I hope I do this the right way.

My "feature request": Please stop shipping the plugins "Akismet" and "Hello Dolly" with new releases of WordPress. Also only include the latest standard theme (currently twentyfifteen) and not the latest three.

I am sure you do this bundling with the best intentions, but Akismet is especially for Germany (possibly for every state in the European Union) a big problem due to the privacy regulations. Many users use it without the necessary precautions and privacy notes to users (it´s bundled, what could be wrong with activating it?) and are possible targets for cease-and-desist orders. WordPress itself could help here by stopping to deliver Akismet with every new installation.

The same goes with the default themes which are bundled with every new install. Many users will never use them and thus never update them, but they reside on the webspace and can be used to attack WordPress installations. New installs should only ship with the latest theme or no theme at all. Instead there could be the choice to download and install a default theme directly after the installation is finished.

Kind regards
Florian

[SergeyBiryukov]

Hi @flomei, welcome to Trac!

This has been discussed before, see #16838, #11538, #27084, and #31991.

[flomei]

Thank you very much, I hope I can be helpful here.

I searched for "Akismet" but I did not stumble upon #16838. I will watch that ticket as it looks promising.

And to be honest I did not intensively search for the other things and couldn´t find the other tickets. My fault.