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 has a slightly different name (an extra “s” on the end). As a result, automatic updates had been failing. I moved us to the new version without any loss of functionality or fuss.

Now for the signup-related tweaks. I fixed two open issues.

The “register” button, shown when you are not logged in, did not look nice. It was big and had awful margins going on. (A known problem) I reduced its padding to half an em and added a margin of the same amount. I think it looks better now, but I am open to feedback.

The signup form was given a light dusting. There are a couple of fields in that form for spam bots, not humans. I changed the behaviour of the page so people are no longer shown the spammer traps when signing up.

All of those fixes were because I am working on an admin tool to help deal with bot-made spam user accounts. I’m almost ready to test the first iteration.