BuddyPress.org

Just ran test on 0.5 on live test site.

Ran process from start to finish with all dashboard options in effect and used and all ran perfectly, checked DB and all screens no issues what so ever, congrats on that.

Ran second test but this time testing Opt Out and that equally ran smoothly.

A few things have occurred to me though:

Perfect world it would be nice to have access in admin to textarea to set the text that is displayed on the Opt Out confirmation screens that would ensure we could add any thing we thought necessary for our own particular circumstances.

In a similar vein having allowed users to configure the email message area it occurred to me that I would like one further textarea that admin might use to set a footer to the email for any disclaimers we might think necessary and that we DONT want changing by users.

I have a possible concern over the legal requirements of Opt Outs with respect – in our case – to the UK Data Protection Act and have asked our legal chap to think on it , my concerns may be ill founded but I’ll report back if they are confirmed.

Last little point and which is more an issue I have to resolve but sent invites arrive and are dumped to my spam folder yet registrations and all the attendant confirmation emails arrive correctly.

Tim, regarding your other post, if you don’t provide the information we’ve requested, it’s really, really tricky to know where to start diagnosing the problem.

EDIT: it looks like your reply was marked as spam automatically by the forum. I’ve just unspammed it.

I am running akismet, and hashcash currently, along with SI contact form. Anyone know if I can include WP-SpamFree ontop of those other plugins?

Akismet, WP-SpamFree Anti-Spam, WP Hashcash, search for other anti-spam threads in thisforum

I know this sounds picky but those captcha images are really ugly.

Maybe it requires some backend server/email configuration to not get caught in the spam filter? The point being that person sent the request, they should get a response to that email if there is one.

– The Reply To idea is very good. I’m using wp_mail, WP’s built in mail function, which in theory should allow me to feed in some headers. I will give it a try – but no promises on this one, as I’ve had trouble making the WP default reply-to address work correctly in the past and don’t feel like tearing any more hair out over it

This is a nice idea but I would tread carefully. it sounds like a classic SPF issue? my original problem at the start of testing this plugin were not receiving the emails that turned out to be our google business account marking them as spam, which wasn’t happening before but haven’t had a chance to track down what has changed.

Obviously I like this plugin a lot. Added it to my test site and everything went really smooth and easy. Just a few comments/bugs:

-It would be a great feature to customize the subject line (similar to the body). Would also likely want to include the name of the person requesting in the subject. As a side note, Facebooks email invite has a subject that says “Check out my photos on Facebook” Interesting way to get people to read the email.

-Email Invite should have the “reply to” from the person that invited them. Maybe it requires some backend server/email configuration to not get caught in the spam filter? The point being that person sent the request, they should get a response to that email if there is one.

-In the invite I sent it had an apostrophe and when it got to the email it shows the apostrophe with \’ in the email. Needs to be filtered/sanitized somehow?

-Would be really nice to have the email field auto-populated. Otherwise, people can sign up with a different email address and then it doesn’t update that the invite was accepted and that person never gets the group/friend invites (I tried). Granted, a lot of people have only one email, but would also save them time if it pulled in the email into the email registration field.

-Personally, I’d prefer it to just add the person to the group and make the requesting person their friend instead of sending them 2 more emails which could be confusing since you’ll get a total of at least 4 emails after activating (New Account, New Blog, Group Request, Friend Request). Maybe this could be an option that can be turned off or on.

Nice work. I love the person’s name on the registration page. I think touches like that could be expanded upon to really increase sign up rates.

Hashcash 4.5.1. doesn’t work for me anymore…

It does look like the spammers are starting to break through Hashcash again. I just got a new splog signup 11 minutes ago.

I give up, I’m just going to ban the proxies if its the only solution.

Do the rules need to be insert at a particular position in the .htaaccess?

The .htaccess solution posted above is working sweet for us.

Actually, because our site has such a wide niche and entices people to speak their mind, not sure that we want anyone from a proxy IP to have access anyway, so this kills two birds….

I had failed to do my code merge correctly

Never been a fan of CVS/Subversion, always get confused when it comes to merging,tagging, checking out, et al

Back to the Opt Out debate:

I’ll be updating our privacy statement to include, in the email address records section, acknowledgement that members can send invites to NON members and that those email addresses are stored in our DB but that we will remove any address on request.

As for the email I would be wanting a statement at the bottom of the email notifying the recipient that they may use the Site Admin link to request that their email address be removed from our DB records and no further emails be sent to that particular email address.

Checking through the Can Spam Act suggests that one of the primary compliances is for a clear and definite Opt Out notification.

The Act itself is, it’s to be noted, a Federal USA piece of legislation, so not necessarily binding on other countries, naturally emails sent to American addresses might be deemed to fall under the act but this area of international law and boundaries is a particularly gray area, but I’m going to have a chat with our legal chap to see what his position is on the Act, it’s probably a case though that it doesn’t hurt to reference it in the sent email.

PS: I think it is also interesting, that testbp.org now has a huge spam-problem too… Andy always mentioned, that it was ok… but it seems not anymore…

Hashcash 4.5.1. doesn’t work for me anymore… I had almost none spam-signups with the old version, but now there are alot! Maybe I will try the proxy-method mentioned above… (it seems, that it never is over… I thought I found a solution, but now I am flooded again )

hnla,

Whether legal or not, the feature would be a better user experience. Plus, I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing that an “opt-out” link that removes your name from future emails would help to avoid getting your server blacklisted or filtered by the various spam filters as well. I’ll add it to my list to try and research some of the details for Boone so he can implement it the best way possible.

Not exactly sending emails in large quantities though, and as for Can Spam Act I would expect these to be emails being sent by members from their own contacts not a some random list they may have found, I might be inclined to point this out in writing to members though.

The functionality of this really needs to be kept simple and straightforward, with not too many bells and whistles – that can tend to confuse and overwhelm users.

“It’s possible to add a “I dont want to receive more invites” on each email? (like a unsubscribe link). This will solve a lot of headaches if someone start receive multiple invites from a lot of people.”

Actually something like this might be required by the Can Spam act. Not for sure of the details. I think we need to look at one of the Facebook emails and see what they have since certainly they’ve gone through a lot more work and effort to figure out how to send emails like this in large quantities.

Wondering if setting a quota? monthly? to the number that may be sent – not sure if there is any point to that but also mainly concerned with spammerish type issues arising and of trying to second guess non technical minded users managing to something very silly – not unkown

Hello to everyone following this thread. I just released version 0.4 of my Invite Anyone plugin, which, as promised, adds the invite-by-email feature.

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/invite-anyone/

Here’s what’s new:

– “Send Invites” tab added to the Profile section

– “Send Invites” has two subsections: Invite New Members and Sent Invites

– On Invite New Members, users can enter email addresses, a custom invitation message, and check off some groups that the invited member will receive invitations to when they join the site

– On Sent Invites, users can see all the invitations they have sent, as well as whether or not the member has accepted yet

– When a user accepts an invitation, they receive invitations to all groups to which inviter(s) have invited them, as well as a friendship request from each individual who sent an invitation

– A link is added to group Send Invites pages that goes to the profile Send Invites page and pre-checks the group’s box

– There’s a Dashboard panel for sitewide admins that allows them to control some of the default behavior of the Send Invites page, as well as the visibility of the Send Invites tab. You can create a blacklist of users who are not allowed to send email invitations (good if you have spammers in your community!), limit by blog role, or by length of time since joining the site.

It’s been fairly thoroughly tested, but it’s possible (likely even!) that there are still annoying bugs. Please let me know if you find issues or have suggestions.

Hmm… check this out: http://www.642weather.com/weather/scripts-wordpress-captcha.php

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.