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 …

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 …

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 …

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). …

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 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 …

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.

I’ve had to make a change to the way Author Buzz syndicates content to places like Mastodon. We used to have forum topics and replies in the syndication stream. I have now pulled it back to only posts to the main blog. The reason for dialling it back was I …

I’ve finally gotten to the point of working out how to import all libraries in the UK. This will allow authors to (one day) list which libraries carry their books; and other things like that. The choice before me now is do I make each library a type of post/page …

I have started the process of revising the themes on offer to our bloggers. In particular, I want to remove themes that hide their best features behind a paywall and themes that have not been kept up to date. I will do my best to make sure there are some …