Web Admin Notes

Hello, occasionally some modifications to the site and forum areas may need to be updated or configurations changed to help support the site performance and security. I will list any significant updates to the site below. Thank you, Richard

December 22, 2022

  • SPAM registrations are continuing so we added an additional hidden “HoneyPot” field that only bots will hit during registration. Hopefully this will slow down the SPAM registration attempts further.

December 18, 2022

  • Noticed an increase in attempts to register for the site that appeared to be spam. Changed the math captcha out to true ReCaptcha and made the interests fields mandatory to try to prevent it. The attempts kept happening and originating from similar email addresses. Added a true firewall at the server level to work to proactively prevent bots or repetitive human attempts to access the site maliciously. Moving the site behind the firewall caused an unexpected SSL issue for roughly 48 hours but the server support was able to get it secured.

November 12, 2022

  • Corrected caching issue that caused the site to be out for a couple of hours for some users. Remnant caching code in the HTACCESS file conflicted with the newer server caching. It wasn’t an issue until the newest version of the server caching rolled out.

November 3, 2022

  • Added a missing, and very useful, back to top of page arrow to the lower right of long pages.

October 31, 2022

  • The October 28th upgrade to BuddyPress 10.5.0 caused a major issue with the messaging and user profile area.
    BuddyPress was then downgraded to 10.4.0 until the patched release 10.6.0 came out on October 31st.
  • Updated all other plugins, theme and optimized the database.

August 8, 2022

  • Upgraded site to PHP 8.1 as the emoji plugin has caught up to the newer versions of PHP. Emojis test fine in forum posts.
  • Tuned the database and updated core files.

May 24, 2022

  • Made significant changes to the login page as there were issues with the login and logout buttons on the home page getting caught in a loop during the logout process.
  • Added a custom login screen layout to enhance the user experience.

May 21, 2022

  • Issue with content not showing for some users but appears to be better after upgrading the core files, plugins and tuning the database.
  • Who’s Online was showing to people not logged in briefly after a plugin update to the widget visibility controller. Many people reported the bug, and they issued a new release.

  • Tuned the database and updated core files. 

  • Still cannot run PHP 8.0 as the emoji plugin fails on upgrade. Will upgrade as soon as all plugins are compatible. 

April 8, 2022

Updated Managed WordPress hosting to the newest PHP 8.0 Version. PHP 8.0 provides more security and speed to the backend of WordPress to make for a much faster browsing and posting experience in the forum. For the nerds:

  • It’s the latest version of PHP so it is definitely more secure than PHP 7.4 and other older versions.
  • Major issues are fixes in the version 8.0
  • Its performance is quite faster than 7.3 and 7.4 and other older version
  • It provides major changes for WordPress sites and performance will definitely increase.
  • And more over 65% site are made up of PHP so support will be better like facebook, wordpress, Wikipedia
  • Source

January 26, 2022

Issues were caused by a major update to BuddyPress to the Who’s Online and Forum Search Widgets. New widget formats were introduced and corrected. I also moved the Who’s Online to the top of the sidebar. The Forum Search widget was conflicting with the theme and I was able to disable a theme feature that was causing the issue. All is well at this point.

November 28, 2021

Noticed image directory for the forum was growing very large. Added mechanism to limit image upload size to save server space and ease strain on daily backups. Images will now also open in a lightbox if larger than the forum window.