Search Results for 'can find the members page'
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@nuprn1; I know you’re trying to help, but you might as well have said “Just create world peace; end of problems”. For those who aren’t used to creating plugins, hooking into WP and BP functions, etc., (and more importantly, who don’t have the time to learn it all right now) this is quick, and it works. Also, in not just one opinion here, the View link and the improperly formatted page it leads to are not required, and confuse users who don’t play around on blogs and forums all the time. Thanks for the help and all, but it would also save time if perhaps you just posted a link to a quick way to do what you suggest..?
Edit: I thought it worth adding an extra note to say that I hope this doesn’t come across as ungrateful. We all appreciate the time and work you and others put into WP, BP and plugins. One issue that’s obvious reading around this site is that not only are people finding things confusing for end users, they’re also confused themselves, and they’re trying to build sites! All the advertising of “Famous 5 minute install” are pretty worthless to those who aren’t programmers (and don’t want to be) when they find weeks and weeks of work is required to produce something workable.
Most of us just want to build sites end users find simple and effective, and we’re using WP and BP because they’re presented as being the quickest, easiest, and most powerful way to do so. Having to continually slave away at making it all simple is time wasting, and often very frustrating for those who believe what code authors say about it being simple. Turns out, it isn’t, is it? I love the WP+BP combination, but I’ll take the shortest route to a working system that I can, because somewhere away from my hot computer there’s a life I used to lead!
When you integrated this with Thesis what version of BuddyPress were you using? Were you using WordPress MU or regular WordPress?
I’ve been playing around with this today. I am running regular WordPress 2.9.2 with Thesis 1.6 (need to try 1.7 but he really changed things there).
I installed the BuddyPress Template Pack plugin and went to work.
I don’t think you do the thing with the bp-custom.php file anymore, right?
I followed the instructions and copied all of the templates to my /wp-content/themes/thesis_16/ folder.
Then I started digging into how Thesis outputs its content and started updating all of those templates with different HTML markup and calls to Thesis functions to get headers, footers, and sidebars, etc.
So I got the pages like Members, Groups, Activity, etc. looking OK, but not pretty. There is going to be a TON of CSS development needed to make this look as pretty as it all does here.
The thing I’m not yet clear on is how to get it all to flow under one tab like it does here with the Community tab?
And I have LOTS of other questions….and work to do to make it fully functional and tightly integrated into the navigation and flow of the site.
Is it even worth it I’m wondering?
Just thought I’d share. I’d love to find out someone has already done ALL of this and can provide instructions, or files…would be worth something I think!
Hey Will,
did you ever find a solution to that problem? I tried everything suggested in this thread and nothing has worked for me so far. I’m still re-directed to the “Home”-Page when I try to access the member pages. And you’re right: It is a real show-stopper
If you solved this problem, I would very much appreciate if you could share it here.
Thank you!
DagiPART 3 – STRONG -vs- WEAK METHODS
When it comes to spam on BP sites, you’ll see all sorts of stuff posted on blogs saying “change [whatever] on your site and your spam problem will disappear”.
Truthfully, a lot of these tricks will actually work …for a while… but eventually, the spammer makes a minor change to their bot, and they’re back in business. In fact, many of the leading blog spamming packages include sophisticated logging features to catch the errors that “uniquely configured” blogs generate and help the spammer quickly fix the “problem”.
If we’re going to have a reliable anti-spam solution for BuddyPress, we should probably focus on “Mathematically Strong” methods, not on “Obfuscation” and “Moving Things Around”. That way, we won’t have to constantly change our spam protection methods.
Changing Page Slugs
Many people recommend changing the page slugs on BP installations to reduce spam. While this is certainly easy to do, you of course need to give your users *links* to those page slugs somewhere on your site so they can actually visit the pages. And if users can follow the links, so can a spam bot.
Changing page slugs is kind of like boarding-up the front door of your house, installing a new door in the side of your house, and then attaching a piece of string from the front door to the side door of so everyone can find the new door.
The “change your page slugs” approach seems to come from the “change your admin menu URL” technique. Changing your admin menu URL is actually a *strong* protection technique. Since there is no link to it anywhere on the site and you’re the only one that knows the URL, it’s like having two passwords on your admin login. An attacker would have to try billions of URL’s to find it.
Not so with all the other URL’s on your site. They have to be linked off other pages so your users can find them.
Adding Fake Form Fields
Many people recommend adding a few extra fields to forms throughout your site (sign-up, login, post to group, etc) and “hiding” these fields using CSS. If any of the “trap” fields are filled out, in theory, you’ve just detected a bot, because a normal user would never see the fields and fill them out.
This approach *might* defeat a very simple bot that searches every web page it can find for forms, and fills every field in every form with random spam; but it will not defeat a bot that understands CSS or is specifically targeted at BuddyPress, especially considering that BuddyPress is *open source*.
Don’t think bots can analyze CSS? Read this: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66353
A bot designer can simply read through the BP source code and discover the names of the fields that should be filled in and the names of the fields that should be left empty.
To use our “house” analogy, adding extra form fields is like installing 3 front doors on your house and rigging two of them with grenades …then hanging a big red “out of order” sign on the the two rigged doors so your friends don’t use them.
Obviously if your friends can read the signs, so can your enemies.
JavaScript Proof of Work
Javascript proof of work (Wp Hashcash) defeats spammers by making visitor’s web browsers solve a math problem in JavaScript before they are allowed to post.
Because everyone knows spam bots can’t run JavaScript.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1124949
http://www.scrapebox.com/
http://blogcommentdemon.com/
http://www.senuke.com
http://www.botmasternet.com/more1/Except when they can.
There’s also the issue of what to do with visitors that don’t have JavaScript enabled.
The WordPress and BuddyPress development teams have put an epic amount of work into ensuring both platforms will work reliably when JavaScript isn’t available. Requiring users to have JavaScript to post any kind of content to the site nullifies much of this work.
Proof-of-work was a great idea back in 1997 when spammers ran hundreds of attack threads from a single server and solving the JavaScript math problems slowed it to a crawl.
In 1997, we’d be dealing with a single spammer running 1000 attack threads against the site. Because the spammer was running 1000 threads, each of which would have to solve the JavaScript problem, they would effectively be penalized 1000 fold over a normal user. The end result is they would only be able to run a few threads before their computer slowed to a crawl and their spamming abilities would be sharply limited.
Epic win for site.
Unfortunately, things are different in 2010.
Spam bots have become the tool of choice for basement SEO marketers. Instead of a few members of the “spam elite”, we’re dealing with tens of thousands of “do it yourself” spammers each running 1 attack thread using the new “automatic backlink software” they just picked up for $29.00 off some random SEO website. Instead of fighting one spammer splitting their resources across a thousand threads, we’re fighting a thousand spammers running a single thread dedicated *just to our site*.
Skipping a ton of math, what this means, is that in order to cause a spammer a 1-second delay while their computer solves our JavaScript challenge, we have to cause each of our *legitimate users* a 1 second delay while *their* computer solves our JavaScript challenge. And, considering the 3 to 5 second database lag I see on 90% of the BP sites I visit, the challenge would need to take much longer than a second to have any merit at all …otherwise page refresh time would be the limiting factor, not the JS challenge.
So what happens when a user visits the site using a computer that is much slower than a typical desktop …say a mobile phone or an old laptop? The challenge would take proportionally longer to complete. A challenge that requires 5 seconds to solve on a desktop PC, could take 30 seconds on an iphone …and 30 second response times would not make for an enjoyable user experience.
Overall, proof-of-work challenges are probably not a good choice in the 2010 Internet landscape.
Mathematically Strong Methods
In the next post, I’ll cover the specific details of the methods I’ve proposed for the BP spam solution, and why they will defeat most spam attacks.
^F^
All About BuddyPress Spam
From what I’ve seen over the past few days, the range of knowledge about spam in the BP community ranges from zero to PhD research project. So, to get this thread off to a productive start, I’m going to give everyone some background info on why spammers target our installations, how they do it, and what we can do to reduce or eliminate these kinds of attacks.
1) Why do spammers attack BP communities?
-> Spam is 100% economically motivated. Spammers do what they do because it’s very profitable. Even if only 1 out of a million messages the spammer sends actually reaches somebody, if it cost $2 to send out those million messages and the spammer makes $50 by tricking one person into giving them a credit card number, the spammer is going to throw every resource they have into sending out more messages …because they’re getting a 2500% return on their investment.
-> Given the choice between multiple sites, a spammer will pick the one that gives the largest payout.
Gmail is a “hard” target, with users that are experienced with spam. If a spammer sent a billion spam messages to accounts on Gmail, 99.9% of them would be probably be deleted by automated filters at other ISP’s along the way before even arriving at Gmail. The first thousand messages that arrived at gmail would likely be delivered but would be put in user’s spam folders; and the remaining 999,000 messages would be flat-out refused by Gmail’s servers.
Because anyone with an email account is familiar with spam, probably 999 of those 1000 users would ignore the spam message and 1 user might act on it. So if it cost $20 to send those billion messages and the spammer made $50 by tricking the one person into giving them a credit card number, they’ve only made $30 for all that work.
BP communities are usually “soft” targets that are inexperienced with spam.
Once a spammer gets into a BP community, every single message they send is delivered to a member, and most members are NOT expecting to be attacked by other users on the site.
If a user called “site_news” sends everyone a message that says: “Our site just got featured on Oprah! check out the video! http://www.youtube.com/watch/dQw4w9WgXcQ.cn” every single member is going to get that message, and probably half of them are going to click on the link. (did anyone notice what’s wrong with that “YouTube video” …
)Then, assuming there are 50,000 members on the BP site, half of them click on the link, half of those people are using Internet Explorer, and the attack site the link points to installs a backdoor on computers running IE …at $2 / install the spammer has just made $25,000!
Now, if *you* were a spammer, which site would you attack?
2) How do spammers find BP communities?
Using Google.
Example: http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=%2B”is+proudly+powered+by+WordPress+and+BuddyPress” (front page of every BP site on the net)
Example: http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=inurl:%22/community/members/%22+%2Bbuddypress (members page of every BP site on the net)3) How do spammers attack websites?
-> Most spam attacks are done using robots, because sheer volume of posts is usually the winning factor. In situations where there is a “captcha wall” or other defense blocking registration to a “high value” site (hint: yours), spammers will use people in low-wage countries to break the captcha and sign up on the site. The going rate is about $2 per 1000 captchas.
http://www.decaptcher.com/client/
Once inside the site, they will then use bots to post spam to all the members on the site.
-> There are literally *thousands* of different programs available that spam websites, and they all have *different* venerabilities.
For example, this program: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1124949
a) Will DEFEAT a “hidden fields” challenge,
b) Will DEFEAT a “javascript proof of work” challenge,
c) Will FAIL a “captcha” challenge
d) Will FAIL an “Akismet” challenge
e) Will FAIL a “Hashed Form Field ID” challengeBut this program: http://www.botmasternet.com/more1/ , wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XRumer , video of it running: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AL2i4SNPJmg
a) Will DEFEAT a “hidden fields” challenge,
b) Will DEFEAT a “javascript proof of work” challenge,
c) Will DEFEAT a “captcha” challenge
d) Will DEFEAT an “Akismet” challenge (uses proxy networks, never sends the same message twice)
e) Will DEFEAT a “Hashed Form Field ID” challenge
f) Will FAIL a “enter the numbers with a triangle over them” challenge (as used by PlentyOfFish.com)
g) Will FAIL a “click on the photos of cats but not the photos of dogs” challenge4) How do we stop spammers from attacking BP communities?
-> By making it frustrating and unprofitable (but not necessarily impossible) for spammers to target us; while making these tactics invisible to normal users.
I will cover how I propose to do this in the next post.
^F^
