Archive for February, 2016

User Manager and Unified Logins

Wednesday, February 24th, 2016

cPanelUnified Logins

In the past, cPanel maintained different specifications/rules for usernames and passwords for email, FTP, and Web Disk.  These different rules meant that users logins for each of these services had to be different.  Requiring different username/password combinations for different services complicates access unnecessarily.

Starting with version 54, cPanel is introducing a new username standard, with all usernames now following a typical email address format.  By implementing a common username format, cPanel account owners can now give end users the same login for email, FTP, and Web Disk, easing account management.

mail-ftp-web-diskThe User Manager

There is now a single interface with which you can quickly create, search, filter and manage User accounts on cPanel.  This streamlined interface provides improvements over existing interfaces, including:

  • A single page User creation screen which can create an email, FTP, and Web Disk account at the same time
  • A simple way to configure and maintain email, FTP, and Web Disk settings for a User in a single page
  • A simple way to link separate email, FTP, and Web Disk accounts that share the same username so your End Users can start taking advantage of a Unified Login immediately
  • Password reset for all of a User’s services in single step

The User Manager List View

manageUsers

The User Manager Create/Edit Screen

editUser

If you have old accounts that have different usernames and passwords, you will see these displayed separately, and have a link to connect them to one synchronized account login.  User accounts can very easily be edited for the users name, email address, alternate email address, and restrictions you would want on their accounts.

Where does this take us?

Usually you will connect to the cPanel using your register4less.com account by navigating to Paid Hosting > Manage Advanced Hosting.  This will then open the cPanel interface as normal.  We do occasionally get requests by domain owners to give their web development person direct access to the cPanel.  While this can be covered by creating a sub-user with permissions enabled for Manage Email hosting and Manage Web Hosting, some developers are more comfortable with accessing the cPanel interface directly.

The cPanel development team are looking to the future and building a robust User Model, which will allow for granting of access to specific cPanel feature sets in addition to the common email, FTP, and Web Disk services.

Keep Spam off your WordPress Site/Blog II

Wednesday, February 17th, 2016

Less Spam with GreylistingThis is part 1 of a 2 part post.  You’ll find Part 1 of this post here.

More Anti-Spam Plugins

WP Spam Fighter

WP Spam Fighter checks two different parameters to the comment submission.

  1. The time the commenter has taken to submit the comment, and
  2. If any hidden fields were completed with the comment submission.

If the time is too short or fields that are hidden from the screen (but visible to a bot) are filled in, the comment will be rejected outright, as these don’t follow human behaviour.

Anti-Spam by Cleantalk

captchaA lot of sites will use a captcha with the form that needs to be entered in correctly in order for the comment to be accepted.  While captchas certainly will help reduce spam, it puts the load on your visitor to fill this in correctly, and you risk annoying them or stopping them from submitting a valid comment.

The Anti-Spam plugin stops spam comments, registrations, orders, bookings and more, all without the need of a captcha.

Quick Install, Less Spam!

The recommended plugins only take a matter of minutes to install onto your WordPress site, and once activated, will go to work for you in the background to prevent spam comments and ping backs.  Disabling comments on older posts can be simply the matter of doing a quick edit on the last post that has comments / ping backs enabled when you publish a new post.  Just a habit to get into.  With these practices and plugins in place, you should see a dramatic reduction in the amount of spam that comes in from your WordPress site.

 

 

Keeping Spam off your WordPress site/blog

Tuesday, February 9th, 2016

Less Spam with GreylistingThis is part 1 of a 2 part post.

If you’re hosting a WordPress site/blog, chances are, you’re going to have to deal with spam comments being posted to your site.  WordPress is the most popular CMS (Content Management System) environment in use by developers, with over 25% of websites globally now running WordPress.  While it’s undeniably a powerful and flexible platform with which to build your site, it’s also the number 1 targeted platform for spammers.

Can’t I Just Ignore Spam?

Some people new to hosting sites will leave spam comments on their websites, thinking the appearance of comments & ping backs will look like their website is getting increased traffic and interest.  Reasons you don’t want to do this include:

  • Bad links will hurt your search engine placement.  Google and other search engines are cracking down on bad links.  If your site is linking to known unrepeatable sources, you will likely see your SEO rankings decline.
  • Spam on your website tells your visitors you’re not paying attention to your website.  Generally visitors to  your site will see spam comments for what they are.  This essentially tells your site visitors that you’re not keeping up with the management of your site’s content.
  • Spam will slow down your website.  Spam creates unnecessary additional content for your website to load, and can grow quite quickly if not managed.  This will add time for every page to load on your website, and encourages visitors to abandon the page load and go elsewhere.
  • Most Spam comments and trackbacks contain links.  More bad news for your site’s visitors.  Many of these links go back to virus/malware, which if followed, could lead to your visitor’s computer becoming infected, and possibly their computer/email account becoming compromised.

Now that you understand why it’s important to keep up maintenance of your website and keep comments & ping backs free from spam, let’s look at some approaches to help you accomplish this.

Automatically Filter Spam Using an Anti-Spam Plugin

By default, the anti-spam filter Akismet is installed and waiting for you to activate it.  To do so, simply log into your WordPress dashboard, click on Plugins, and activate for Akismet.  You will need to register with them to get the plugin running.  Akismet will trap spam and notify you by email when new comments are awaiting moderation.

Regularly Check and Approve/Decline Comments

A continuation of the first point, Akismet will trap comments posted to your site, and allow you to Approve, Trash, or mark comments as Spam.  Letting Akismet know a comment is spam also will help train its filter.  No spam filter is perfect, so sometimes Akismet will place a legitimate comment or pingback into the spam folder.  You should not just delete everything thats been tagged as spam, but go through to make sure legitimate comments get approved.

Disable Comments After a Period of Time

If you’re writing posts to your site, consider disabling comments to the posts after real comment traffic has settled down.  What this period will be will depend on your site and how active comments are given a post you’ve put up.

More coming next week.

We’ll post part two of this next week.  Until then….