Expiry of events / Exclude specific file

  • Resolved ig_communitysites

    (@ig_communitysites)


    4 years, 4 months ago

    First off: excellent plugin! A couple of polite requests, if that’s all right…

    From digging into the plugin, it appears as if it stashes an event for every file that’s added/modified/deleted on every scan, via the creation of a wpcm_file_event post in the wp_posts table. But if there’s a file which legitimately changes on a daily basis and yet needs to be monitored, won’t that gradually create hundreds of posts? Could there be an option to delete events older than, say, 30 days to avoid that? (As background, we’re running the plugin on 100+ sites, so going through them all to clear them out is going to be a very tedious process, although that’s what we’ll have to do if necessary.)

    And on a related note…is it possible to exclude a specific file in a specific location? The public_html/.htaccess file on our sites changes every day because we’ve got a security plugin writing blacklists etc to it, so we don’t really want to know if that changes. But if someone does something involving a .htaccess file somewhere else…well, as you can imagine, we want to know about /that/ very much!

    And finally, a big plus-one for getting the file list in the notification email. We’ve done some hacking to make that happen, because its essential given the number of sites involved, but we’d obviously prefer not to hack things if we don’t have to. That’d be an awesome feature.

    Many thanks for your time.

    ian.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Author WPWhiteSecurity

    (@wpwhitesecurity)

    Hello @ig_communitysites

    Thank you very much for the positive feedback. I am glad you like the plugin. Below please find the answers to your question:

    1) Automatic deletion of notifications: we have not implemented this feature since every file change notification that is marked as read by the user is then deleted. I presume that a plugin user would review every individual file change and mark it as read no?

    Or are you using it in a different way?

    2) Yes, it is possible to exclude a specific file. All you need to do is specify the file name in the Exclude these files setting in the plugin.

    3) The list of file changes in the email is already planned and it will be available from the next update ??

    Looking forward to hearing from you.

    Thread Starter ig_communitysites

    (@ig_communitysites)

    Hi,

    Thanks very much for getting back to me, and for your thorough reply.

    1) It really connects with the third point – the one about having a list of any file changes since the last scan in the email. Once that facility exists – and we’ve put in a temporary hack to make it happen for now – then we’d quite often not need to go to the site to do a review at all.

    As an example, if I deploy some custom theme or updated plugin code to all of our 125+ WP sites, then the monitor will rightly flag those changes at its next scan. If I look at the emails and can see that those are the only changes I’m being notified about, then I can be reasonably certain that all is well and that there’s nothing to review. Having to visit 125+ sites and delete the notifications is just rather a lot of time wasted at that point.

    In other words, the occasions when we’d actually need to review notifications are far, far fewer than the occasions when we’d look at the list in the email, mark it as read and get on with the day. For that reason, it’d be great if the plugin could manage itself as much as possible, particularly when it comes to clearing up stale notifications.

    But this is only how we’re using it. No offence taken if you decide to go down a different route. You can’t please everyone. ??

    2) I can add .htaccess as an exclusion, but I assume that’d exclude all .htaccess files regardless of location. If I attempt to add /home/blah/public_html/.htaccess – thus being specific about one particular file – then I get a message about invalid characters. Am I missing something?

    3) Awesome.

    Best wishes,

    ian.

    Plugin Author robertabela

    (@robert681)

    Hello @ig_communitysites

    1) Thank you for your explanation. Now I better understand why you have such requirement. It is certainly something we can do, and it can be optional. I have added it to our feature request list and it will be added for sure, though I am afraid I cannot tell you when exactly it will be added.

    2) I am afraid that at the moment you cannot exclude just a specific file in a specific location. As in if there are other files with the same file name, they will all be excluded. We never thought of such scenario! However, the same as with the above, we are looking into how we can make this feature available.

    I am sorry I couldn’t be of more help today and thank you very much for the feedback. Since you are already using the plugin, I would appreciate if you can rate it and our service. These ratings really help us.

    Thank you very much and do not hesitate to get in touch in case of any other questions.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • The topic ‘Expiry of events / Exclude specific file’ is closed to new replies.