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.

I’m currently tracking a few small bugs with the site.

1. The register button needs to go on a diet (not-logged in view).
2. 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 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?

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 noticed a lot of spam was getting cached in the wider fediverse. I’m not prepared for us to be a vector for spam so I made a change.

I hope you can understand why I did that.