Twice, in the past, I have thought it would be nice if everyone’s stuff made it out onto social media. Both times, I have enabled syndicating forum topics. Both times it went badly.

We ended up syndicating spam that is easy to remove here, but hangs about in FediSpace forever.

A bit like this:

I’m sure there must be a way to revoke that stuff, but I’m not sure what that way is. So, until we can undo spam that gets syndicated, forum stuff will remain local only. If someone can help me figure out how to unspam social media, I think it would be nicer to take a poll to see if our active members even want our forums appearing on social media.

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 see anything broken. That’s what I am here for.

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 means spam.

File this OM as #Internet

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 line 133 in buddypress-followers/_inc/bp-follow-widgets.php

add_action( 'widgets_init', create_function( '', 'return register_widget("BP_Follow_Following_Widget");' ) );

Then write this instead:

function BP_Follow_Following_Widget_init_func(){
    register_widget("BP_Follow_Following_Widget");
}

add_action( 'widgets_init', 'BP_Follow_Following_Widget_init_func' );

The reason this works is that the function create_function() was removed in PHP 8 and was deprecated in 7.4 or thereabout.

Also, this post is the first to use the new Open Mention Tag Patterns. These are dead simple one-line paragraphs with hyperlink templates which can be used to tag your content in OpenMentions, which will ping via WebMention. Your post will then (eventually) be listed on OpenMentions.com.

By default, the writing patterns are enabled for all, but you can add dreamlogging templates if you admin a blog here and want to. You can find the code here. While, yes, you can just grab a link and use it, I think the Patterns are one step easier. Edit as you wish.

The next line was the Pattern:

This is a WordPress Development post.

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.