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Fixes and tweaks
June 15, 2025 in bugs by Matthew Brown
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.
FAIR package manager
June 12, 2025 in features by Matthew Brown
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).
As a result, I’m carefully considering making the switch for all sites with Author Buzz UK. Thoughts and opinions gladly received.
A few small display bugs
May 5, 2025 in bugs by Matthew Brown
I’m currently tracking a few small bugs with the site.
- The register button needs to go on a diet (not-logged in view).
- Forum topics (but not replies) are MIA for no good reason.
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
March 13, 2025 in uncategorised by Matthew Brown
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 a lot of fines in my direction. I hope this does not force me to shut down Author Buzz, but I do know that I will fight to keep us open and online.
Who knows what happens next?
40 spam accounts purged
February 8, 2025 in spam by Matthew Brown
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.
Blog Activity
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Danny H commented on the post, Redesigning Author Buzz UK, on the site Author Buzz Developer Blog 7 years, 2 months ago
Might be an idea (if you haven’t thought about it already) to put a ‘try our new beta site’ link on the main page when you think it’s ready for public consumption
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Matthew Brown commented on the post, The AB Theme Framework, on the site Author Buzz Developer Blog 7 years, 2 months ago
That’s odd. I’ll look into it.
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Danny H commented on the post, The AB Theme Framework, on the site Author Buzz Developer Blog 7 years, 3 months ago
Good work (I think!!), but it would be nice if you could fix current problems before creating new ones. Invitation emails are not being sent when you invite an existing AB user to your blog
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Matthew Brown commented on the post, New Plugin: AB Custom Post Meta, on the site Author Buzz Developer Blog 7 years, 3 months ago
You are indeed correct. When I first set things up I turned off every permission that was not strictly needed. When I set up the group and blog system I missed that one option. Well spotted Beta tester Danny.
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Danny H commented on the post, New Plugin: AB Custom Post Meta, on the site Author Buzz Developer Blog 7 years, 3 months ago
The thing is, the plugins menu isn’t available to mere mortals, you as the admin have to enable it for us so we can then see what plugins are available