[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

Really! no comments?

Feel as though I’m being shunned if I start a new thread

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

I said I’d try and establish some test conditions to try and determine whether banned email domains were an issue in WP or BP, tests were not hugely conclusive sadly.

site running out of the box no modifications (WPMU / BP) – no anti spam measures in place. had been receiving ~ 10 -20 spam registrations daily (quantity of spam is governed to some extent by search engine ranking /prominence)

1/ Running WPMU 2.9.2 ALL BP plugins deactivated site open to user account registrations only.

24 hour period = no spam registrations at all – a surprising result!

2/ Conditions as above (1) but allowing blog to be registered

Start to receive spam signups – not many but only observed over a 6 hour period.

These do not match to any banned emails domains entered by me, so on the surface looks as though banned domains working BUT this is far from conclusive as they may simply not have attempted to.

3/ Activate BP 1.2.3 allow accounts and blogs to be registered.

Spam increases – not hugely though! of the 6- 8 received in a 12 hour period one is noted as having an email domain that matches to one entered in the banned domains list.

None of the above is that conclusive or useful sadly, it’s a difficult subject to run tests on. It does appear that BP probably does have some problem with the banned domain list, but then I get the impression that with each version 1.2.2.1 / 1.2.3 spam issues feel as though they are lessening but others may not be experiencing that.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

This just noted and can probably tackle with a little hacking, but will mention anyway for the record.

Date stamp for sent invites does not look to WP for user preferred formatting instead displaying in the format that drives some of us nuts

month/day/year

In the UK and elsewhere the preferred format for dates is day/month/year as that is clearly the better way

It’s minor point!

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

Having resolved emails issues-ish two things arise:

Having received invite click on link to register

/register/accept-invitation/me@example.com

But am simply dropped into the main site url

Would have thought it’s a per site configuration issue yet the test install I have has no custom modifications and is all out of the box – I haven’t looked further into this though and a reason may be apparent with a little investigating.

The other minor concern I have is with the textarea allowing users to customise the email message sent. This presently allows markup, would it perhaps not be best to strip html characters from this submission?

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

feeling reckless – I fancy uploading this to the production site. seems pretty stable and final to me?

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

No didn’t think it was the plugins fault, and might roll back to 1.2.2.1 as issues like that make testing to the full outcome rather difficult

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

Sadly still no email received though. We have the original plugin working on 1.2.2.1 will this update function on that version as I have no intention of upgrading to 1.2.3 at this moment if there are these sorts of issues.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

Also updated and it’s created the table now, and invites sent are shown.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

Erm doesn’t appear to exist. Think, reading your posts just before my first that I downloaded at the same time roughly you were uploading so need to download your corrections which I’ll do in a minute and re try

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

Great stuff!

Installed ‘bleeding’ on live test site running BP 1.2.3 / WPMU 2.9.2

Installed smoothly – previous version didn’t exist fresh install (production site has older version )

Things noted:

The group send invite that was part of the original plugin function allows to select from all members including members marked as spammers! (am logged in and working as admin)

Having sent email invite from my account I’m returned to a ‘Sent invites’ (‘You have sent invitations to the following people.’) but there is no data available.

No email has been received, but tested setting up new account and that hasn’t been emailed either so think this is a BP 1.2.3 issue as all was working earlier today *sigh*

Looking pretty good though.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

Does anyone else see this issue ?

At the moment running 1.2.2.1 / 2.9.2

Specifically viewing a message thread in your account shows the ‘Sent’ time stamp as being out by a good ~ 7 /8 hours

It is unlikely anything to do with server /WP time settings being out of phase, the main activity stream times are correct.

The problem does appear to replicate the one that plagued the activity stream prior to 1.2 and corrected by Andy’s code here:

https://trac.buddypress.org/changeset/1785

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

Rename the plugin to force a deactivation of it and see if that brings the site back up?

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

I’ll choose my words carefully here

Better to ask what you think you may get over and above the help here on this forum, the home of the BP development and where most knowledgeable users hang out?

It’s difficult to quantify whether something like a subscription to the above mentioned business is worth it it depends on what you may gain as to whether it was worth what you paid, speaking just for myself it would be money thrown down the drain, completely worthless.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

But there are many steps one can initiate to stem that tide of spammers, although the domain blacklist is an issue in not apparently working I have still had reasonable success in reducing spam signups to around a dozen a day and still have one or two steps that I haven’t taken yet

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

True, I keep a test install running live with minimal plugins other than BP, I can perhaps disable BP and take it back to WPMU and open registrations again and see what gets through and report that back which might help, but won’t be able to set that up till later.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

It’s not 1.2.3 I’ve mentioned this but no one responded to the point . The feature doesn’t work or didn’t work in 1.1.2 and I think but am not sure yet that it’s not working in 1.2.2.

trouble is with disabling all plugins and buddypress is that on productions sites where the issue would be apparent – difficult to recreate in a local dev environ – one doesn’t really want to do this!

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

Running with a custom page used as a static front page complete with dynamic sidebars and posts page set to a blank page causes issues with missing admin bar and no sidebar. Setting front page to Activity stream and posts page left as the new blank page and issue is resolved. At the moment I can’t see where the problem lies especially as the site functions on a mirror version locally with custom front page.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

@hlna. Only one upload for now, it will be * magnificent * Thumb generation on the user site. Color correction, rotating imaged, I’l be like a whole remote end for BP album!

^F^

Oh: yes, and we can automatically import Flickr Albums to Album. But the user has to send them an API key to make sure they have permission.!

That is all outstanding the development and pace of Album is really impressive.

It’s expected that the user would have to authorise access to their flickr acount, they shouldn’t have a problem with that, the bpdev plugin required the user to get and enter a flickr ID.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

Xampp is far from intimidating, it’s simplicity itself really and a very well put together package, perfect for running a local dev install of WP/WPMU/BP.

Set up a simple vhost container for the local site and edit your local hosts file to include mylocalsite.com.dev and mysubdomain.mylocalsite.com.dev or something similar.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

@hnla – Just post a link to where I can download the plugin you’re talking about, and I’ll go take a look at it and see how easy to work with it.

^F^

The plugin is at this link it required a parent plugin bpdev-core to function

http://bp-dev.org/plugins/bpdev-flickr/

I had a skim through the file to try and see what actually would require updating to make it compatible with 1.2.* but I’m not really anywhere up to speed with plugin coding.

I guess I was thinking hat it might be relatively easy to isolate the flickr api and provide an option to either upload photos or to simply connect and display a flickr album set, but the phrase ‘relatively easy’ is one of those that is easy to write

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

No problem, there may be further issues as frankly I haven’t bothered to look to closely at IE<8 and have been simply playing with extending the default styles which to be honest can be problematic trying to style or override existing rules, but the right group of elements exist in the markup to be able to configure as one wants. I’ll probably be looking closer at IE6 and it’s handling of three column fluid content layout and switching in/out of sidebars so if I find issues I’ll post them back (one that immediately springs to mind is that of handling of min/max widths as used in default)

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

One other thing about the layout, the positioning of the admin bar is not too clever with regards IE early versions that never understood position fixed, and other approaches would need to be found unless happy to have that adminbar actually sit as a footer.

With site layouts and sidebar columns a standard framwork I have always employed as a base is essentially two main parent containers along with a #content-wrap ( = bp #content) and a #content (bp = .padder) with either one or two sidebars that follow immediately after #content closes, using that arrangement one can fashion source ordered layouts with one or two sidebar, placed singularly left or right or flanking the content as a pair, with the a very simple group of rulesets to provide layout switching based on html or body IDs. #content-wrap is always floated with negative side margin as appropriate #content with a positive margin as appropriate, sidebars will drop into place using negative margins, the one oddity is that one has to be aware of the content-wrap float direction and that it must state a width otherwise earlier versions of Opera would have a fit

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

You shouldn’t really need to be adding meta tags to control IE8 it generally works fine and certainly doesn’t want to act as IE7. Compatibility mode is a bit of a joke it’s far more sensible to add a conditional stylesheet to handle earlier versions than force IE8 to render in cack mode throwing away all it’s benefits and improvements

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

If still having issues you can try a few thngs, firstly as a test add zoom:1; to #content .padder to establish whether .padder requires hasLayout..

Go to a more traditional source order set of styles which would involve giving the #content element a negative left margin equal or greater than the sidebar then padder gets the a normal margin to pull it clear of the sidebar area, the sidebar is floated and has a negative margin 100%.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

Hmm works for me in IE6, what exactly is out; is the sidebar simply positioned below clearing #content?