Ron Strilaeff

Ok, I guess I can answer my own questions:
1. Yes
2. No

This line (73) of ban-hammer.php
if(stripos($user_email, $blacklist_current) !== false)
Says that if any part of the blacklist string is included in the registering e-mail address, then it will be rejected.

Also as you stated in your documentation, the blacklist strings are copied from the comment blacklist strings.

So… we have to be a bit careful not to put potentially legit domain names in the comment blacklist of words. (I can’t think of one off-hand though.)

And I just tested that on my live site to verify. Nice job ipstenu!

Hi,

Thanks for putting this together.

If I put in just “infoblasters” (without quotes) in my discussion blacklist will it prevent something like [email protected] from registering? Or do I have to actually put in the full “@infoblasters.com” ?

Thanks,
Ron

bloofrog, I really only have experience with bluehost. But somewhere on your account admin front end (cPanel?) there should be an option called “PHP Config” under Software/Services. Click it and then select the option for:

PHP5 – All files with the extension .php will be handled by the PHP5 engine. Current, most reliable and best performing version of PHP

That will use mod_suphp as a php interpreter.
It may take a minute or two to become fully active, but should tell you that your config change was made. If you’ve made changes to your php.ini file (in your public_html/ folder), you can replace it with a clean, default “master” copy that your host has somewhere, and then delete all other copies in your sub-directories. That should put you back to the default configuration.

I’m glad this thread is not closed and I sure how other jump in.

Assuming that the fundamentals of using updated code, eliminating bad plugins and activating a good caching system, I need to know from the gurus which PHP interpreter works better with WordPress sites on shared hosting.

I’ve been going back and forth between regular PHP5 (mod_suphp) and PHP5 (FastCGI) (mod_fastcgi) on my bluehost shared hosting account. There are many users/wannabe techs that say that FastCGI is obviously better, but my recent experience says the opposite! For me, the regular PHP is far more stable and better performing than FastCGI. When I had FastCGI running, I would randomly get 10 near-zombie FastCGI processes running for several minutes while visitors were getting 500 errors or garbled pages. The last bluehost tech I talked to on the phone during one of these spikes switch me back to regular PHP and said “WordPress doesn’t need FastCGI” (or doesn’t work well with it or something similar).

Here are a couple of relevant links for discussion:

Jacob Tirey says here:

SuPHP = Higher CPU but Low Memory Usage
FastCGI = Lower CPU But High Memory Usage

WordPress has an abundance of tiny database queries, multiple file/image loads and PHP is interpreted, so I think that means WordPress is already CPU intensive.

And bjourne says here:

The only problem with fcgi is that it is slightly more complicated and error prone than plain old cgi. For example, if there is a memory leak in the process that serves requests it will cause instability on the server as it slowly eats more and more memory. Memory leaks in cgi won’t be noticeable because the processes are restarted all the time. You also need a watch dog process that can restart crashed fcgi processes. Usually, the web server comes with those features builtin, but it is not always the case.

These both indicate to me that FastCGI would be better IF it was configured right.. .right?

So what say you?

I’m in the middle of researching and documenting what works for us (since it is really important to me), so even if no one responds here, I have an article started on allza.info (to be posted later this week).

Thanks, Ron

Byron is a great guy and very smart, and the plugin filled a need at the time, but most of the functionality there has been made obsolete by built in features of newer wordpress versions. I’m still figuring out what those are myself, but I would run away from photosmash and not look back!

We have been using it for about a year on two of our sites chowstalker.com and dessertstalker.com and Byron helped us configure it but our version 2 will not use photosmash and I advise you to look elsewhere for the functionality you need.

The custom tables and complex multi-joins for its images, custom fields, ratings and photo-tags etc are real messy and it is very difficult to figure out what the code is doing. That photosmash code is a victim of feature creep driven by user requests and it kind of got out of control.

I also suspect that it is the underlying cause of random super-slow queries leading to cpu throttling and zombie fastcgi processes on my bluehost shared server. There may also be some chaotic bluehost behavior (as in thousands of mostly idle websites on that same server that may come to life at the same time, bringing everything to a grinding halt.. but without actually crashing) causing random browser sessions to get 500 errors or refresh times of several minutes! I can’t control bluehost but I can streamline and simplify my WP installations.

So, save yourself some headaches and piece together your own solution using NextGen (or something) and more well-behaved accessory plugins to do ratings and searching and stuff.

Just my .02 …Ron

Yeah, #2 wasn’t a very clear question, more like a brain dump. But I think see what it is doing now. All the old subscribers get the feed_url that I typed in and then feedburner gets to do its magic that I can configure at https://feedburner.google.com before it gets to the readers.

Thanks again.

RavanH, you seem to be having good success with so maybe you can clarify something for me. I have two questions if you have the time to help:

1. Is it true that this plugin does NOT change the .htaccess file?

2. Can you confirm that this is how it is supposed to work…
After it’s activated and I enter the new feedburner link (like https://feeds.feedburner.com/mysite) into the field “Redirect my feeds here:”, that existing feeds in other people’s readers (like https://mysite.com/feed) will automatically show the config that I set up in google adsense -> feeds -> feed ads ?

I hope #2 is clear..

Thanks, Ron

Hi,

Great idea, this might work for me! But why just seven? I’m looking for something like this but I may want a different, customized affiliate/adsense/amazon/whatever link on each of hundreds of posts. Is there a way to just use the same master shortcode with a parameter to an ID of an Ad (like this [adsenseyu id=234]) which will then insert the body of the Ad numbered 234 in place of the short code.

Your admin dashboard will facilitate creation of new Ads ad-hoc style, with maybe even a plain text description of what it is for since the javascript or html code of the ad-body woudl be hard for a non-programming, post-editor to read.

Thanks,
Ron

Another update:

It IS also possible to install WordPress Multisite using subdomains even when the multisite installation is in a folder under your public_html directory. (The previous discussion was about using the sub-directory multi-site install option which also works).

On the bluehost side you must create your rootsite.com as an add-on domain mapped to whatever install folder you like eg: public_html/rootsite

Then create a subdomain named * on that rootsite and assign it to that same folder. Bluehost will want to create a folder call “wildcard”, but you must change that to “rootsite” before saving. This looks weirdly recursive when you see it in your bluehost config so it took me a few minutes to visualize what was happening.

It is a good idea to do that host side setup first so the WPMS install does not choke when it gets to the point of re-logging in after that step where you modify your wp-config and .htaccess files.

Then go ahead and install the WPMS with sub-domain option following these directions (but ignoring the part about “You cannot choose Sub-domain Install in the following cases: WordPress install is in a directory (not in document root).”)

I also discovered the
define( ‘NOBLOGREDIRECT’, ‘https://rootsites.com/’ );
to put in the wp-config to prevent strange behavior if someone types in an non-existent subdomain.

Then lastly, to create a new subdomain/blog in WPMS just add a new site. You don’t have to do anything more on bluehost since the * (wildcard) subdomain maps <everything>.rootsite.com to the rootsite installation folder.

So, by the end of the day (tomorrow), I plan on having this under one bluehost account:
3 multisite installations, each with its own database (and database super user).
– 1 of them will be using the sub-domain option
– 2 will be using the sub-folder option and use the “WordPress MU Domain Mapping” plugin to make all the sites look totally separate.

This is pretty close to magic in my opinion and I’m so thankful for the real WP developers that made all this possible.

Ron (formerly tulacat… who is now dead ?? )

Thanks bh_WP_fan,

This is no longer an emergency and I will change the status to resolved.

I did install the Quick Cache plugin and activated it with the default settings. The last few days have been better, as in no white screens saying, “Error establishing database connection”.

But the webpagetest.org (on https://www.chowstalker.com) still gives me an “F” on “Cache static content”, which is what I thought a cache is supposed to fix. Almost everything that “failed” is a static 250×250 image, so I will continue to figure that out and tweak as I go.

Besides that, it seems that of the biggest culprits are monster javascript and css files from the Atahualpa theme and all the google adsense and social icon external requests.

The other factor is a lot of inefficient or redundant queries related to getting my images into the Photosmash galleries. So that will be replaced with newer normal wordpress functionality. So for now… it seems to be working and I truly appreciate your advice.

You also helped me with some good links on the BH forum in this thread. My name there is Engineerly.

There is lots to learn as traffic and complexity increases and the fragility of shared hosting rears it’s head.

Ron

ps: I’m going to repost most of this on bluehost to maybe help out someone there.

The_gaq.push([‘_trackEvent’,’SocialSharing’ …. gets put in immediately before each button <img (from your code).

But the GA plugin logic with the _setAccount’ statement and all gets put in the <head> section, but has the option to place it manually.

Thanks for replying. I’m using yoast’s goggle analytics plugin which I know uses the new version.

I was able to get both working at the same time by switching the order of the _gaq.push and the window.open parts of the script, but left the that=this; assignment first (btw, what does “that” do… since I don’t see it referenced anywhere else?). That’s all under the if($urls[$button]['popup'] != 'false') statement.

Yeah I read a bit about that, but since I’m on bluehost which uses Linux and Apache (near bottom of page), that’s probably not the issue. I used to have an SSL setup with them so maybe there is some strange artifact getting picked up. It is not a problem for me anymore since I modified that bit of code.

HA!! Guess what?

Turning the google analytics off in this plugin’s admin options form magically allows the popup to start working. hmm… but I need both …

I don’t care if this is a monologue, at least I’m making progress.

Does anybody else use this plugin? Do the popups work for you?
Is the author still alive?

I cannot figure out why the popup either opens in a full size new browser tab or in a window that completely ignores the height and width parameters. At one point I did see it make a smaller popup window but it just stopped. I hope someone sees this post. Thanks.

fyi: I just discovered the site below which uses this plugin and apparently that post was written by someone on the EcreativeIM team.
https://www.warcrafthuntersunion.com/2011/04/wordpress-social-media-icons-plugin/
It also does exactly what I’m trying to do to finish this part of my project:
1. Popup in a smaller window
2. Put a description into the facebook sharer.php UI. Right now, the fb sharer callback can’t find the meta description from my page so it sticks in some weird google_ad_client script. That is why the FB icon is temporarily taken off.
(So I’m going to “inspect” that page)

You can see my progress on https://dessertstalker.com