A few potential bug fixes and spam defences

no spam
Bugs
1

I’ve been looking into two seemingly unrelated bugs that I now suspect share a root cause.

  • Sometimes for no obvious reason the front page goes months out of date (often following spam removal) lasting until new content is added and the cache expires.
  • On rare occasions, you see scary-looking JSON (looks like code) instead of a nice web page. This lasts until the cache expires.

This evening, I added some new directives that control cache expiry. In both cases, this is for JSON content which is what the cache shows you when you want to see a post and the cache got confused. This is also how the content for the front page and other parts lazy loads into the page.

In theory, I have solved both but time will tell.

In other news, I blocked a couple of countries that only ever send spam and some (Russian) email hosts. There should be slightly less spam to be seen if it all works out.

Okay, so it seems that the out-of-date front page issue is not wholly caused by the same issue as the horrible JSON instead of a nice page problem. I shall keep working on it.

1 Comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Your post must include a link to this post.

How does this work?
Write a response on your own website and include a link to this post. Then submit your response’s URL here. Your response may appear here after moderation. To update or remove it, edit or delete your original post and submit the same URL again. Learn more about Webmentions.
Bugs
1
I’m checking up on a small bug

There appears to be an issue with ActivityPub on some blogs, including Author Buzz HQ. It should not break the site (as far as I can tell), but it might make following the blog on the fediverse tricky. Whatever the problem is, I’m on it. Update 1: Dev blog itself …

Bugs
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 …

Bugs
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 …

Skip to toolbar