tialaramex, I think (but am not sure) that you and I agree that WP is not currently presenting LE’s pledge to the world completely. As a 10-year WP editor, I find the WP part of our failure concerning. One peculiarity about WP is that is requires (but does not enforce consistently) a reference in a “reliable source” for every statement of fact. Currently, the LE article does not comply with WP policy, since only a few of its statements are backed up by reliable sources. The LE website is not considered a RS, and neither are most blogs. I once proposed to the WP community that we accept all unreferenced statements in articles until they are contested by an editor (or a reference is found), but the proposal was defeated, so there are currently no rules and few warnings before articles or parts of articles are deleted for not following policies.
All this is to say that I’m willing to insert a mission statement into the WP article, and I might be able to make it stick. Someone good with words and intimately familiar with LE should write that statement for me. It would be best if that person could get the statement approved by whoever runs LE and published somewhere that sounds reliable.
Don’t forget, a promise of “one command” implies not having to spend many hours figuring out exactly how LE is different from the usual manual certification process. I can’t agree that the many people having problems understanding how to make LE work are a stupid minority whom we have to tolerate. I believe, along with others, that we have a serious current problem (one which might perhaps be easy to solve) with misleading visitors to the LE website about our goals and our current tools.
We do not have control over the world’s reportage, but we do have control over the content of the LE website. This thread has already created links to CertBot on our Startup page. Let’s finish the job. I’ve said above what that means: we have to choose how we describe our goals and then explain how LE as it exists now meets those goals. If our goals include webmasters being able to secure their sites, then we must show exactly how to do that using the LE technology. If we can’t achieve that, then a vital part of our project is still in Beta.
Improving our documentation a good process for us, because it will likely improve both our software and our documentation, so they match (here and elsewhere I’m ignoring the fact that CertBot offers better documentation than LE; I’m only concerned with the LE and WP websites, because that’s where we are failing to be clear and complete about what LE does and how it does it).
About the hundreds of thousands of certificates each week: I’m guessing most are requested by people who have been using manual certification methods who simply want to save the $100 to $300 a year they are currently spending for a website certificate. Money is a powerful motivator. Since we don’t really know how and why so many certificates are being requested, I have to guess, and that’s my guess.