Time for a fresh coat of paint?
I am seriously considering redesigning the Author Buzz UK site with a fresh new theme built from scratch. The site has a few broken bits that no one looks at and a lot of code that is never used. I am starting to wonder if a slimmer theme that does …
This is why the forums don’t syndicate to Mastodon
Twice, in the past, I have thought it would be nice if everyone’s stuff made it out onto social media. Both times, I have enabled syndicating forum topics. Both times it went badly. We ended up syndicating spam that is easy to remove here, but hangs about in FediSpace forever. …
You subscriptions page bug fixed
As you might know, you can see all the things you have subscribed to on https://authorbuzz.co.uk/activity/ – I found a “fatal error” bug there today. This type of error just means the code gives up and refuses to show you the page. I fixed it. Let me know if you …
Policy update: Google’s gmail is now banned due to spam
I’ve been resisting doing this, but I have to face facts – most of our spam comes attached to a Google Gmail account. As of today, I have banned Gmail since Google has failed to stop the avalanche of spam coming from them. Google once meant trust, but now it …
PHP updates and fixing BuddyPress Follow
BuddyPress Follow is a plugin we use to enable you to follow rather than “friend” each other. Sadly, it is not PHP 8 ready. This was holding us back both in terms of security and speed. Today, I fixed that. It was a four-line fix, which I shared here. Find …
Fixes and tweaks
In this morning’s dev notes, we have a patched potential security vulnerability and some CSS tweaks to do with sign up. First, the scary-sounding one. I patched a possible security hole. Some core site functionality was being provided by a deprecated and retired plugin. A patched version exists, but it …
FAIR package manager
The Linux Foundation has announced the FAIR package manager for WordPress. This will be an independent and neutral plugin and theme package manager. One of the features of FAIR is the ability to deactivate Gravatar avatars, which means a slightly reduced privacy leak (depending on how much you trust Gravatar). …
A few small display bugs
I’m currently tracking a few small bugs with the site. I do not have an ETA on fixing all the bugs because I am yet to figure out what caused them.
The Online Safety Act 2023
The Online Safety Act 2023 comes into force Monday. This should be a good thing except that I now have to do a mountain of paperwork (correctly on the first try) to basically say, “yes, we moderate and no dangerous content is hosted here”. Failure to do this could land …
40 spam accounts purged
It looks like there was a fat old spam run at our site recently. The spam accounts have now been removed. If I missed any, let me know.