dougandrews.co.uk

WordPress MU and BbPress combine to make a powerful social network, but this is prone to Spammers and Spam so controlling who can register and what they can do is important if you want to maintain any level of control over what content is displayed on your site.

The site I have been developing, ScienceAfrica, is a social network which is limited to the students and staff of a number of Universities. Despite the site not being advertised, optimised or officially launched in any way it has already attracted unwanted registrations.

Controlling this however is easier said than done – most of the plugins I tried seemed to have unwanted side effects or just didn’t work and I also found that it was necessary to consider WordPress MU and BBPress registrations as separate, despite the fact that a user of one is automatically able to login to the other.

My solution? I have decided the easiest thing to do – for this specific project – is to remove any online registration and make it on request only. This means we have to manually add members but gives total control.

I would however like to come up with a solution that gives the best of both worlds, i.e. a system that allows you to :

- limit online registrations to specific domains / blacklist certain domains

- have a process of authentication of users

If anyone has any ideas let me know.

I received an interesting envelope in the mail yesterday, with a newspaper cutting and a handwritten post it note headed ‘Douglas’ and signed curiously ‘J’.

Reading the cutting I very quickly became suspicious – it is written in the ‘advertorial’ style, i.e. blatently advertising a particular product but written in a sycophantic editorial fashion. The idea behind this is that people trust an editorial article, in which a person has put their name and reputation behind recommending something more than advertising which has just been paid for by the company in question.

[edited]*

Looking at the piece more closely there was no by-line and nothing to identify which publication the cutting had come from. The paper had been ‘cut’ in a strange way that almost looked perforated. This along with the fact that I couldn’t for the life of me think who ‘J’ might be led me to look more closely at the post-it note and envelope. Both carried very distinctive handwriting but something did not look right – there was no indentation on the paper, and the lettering was so exact that I could only conclude it was printed.

After doing the legwork I decided to check out Google and came across this post which confirmed my suspicions – thanks to SEO Creative for putting it online.

Here’s my pretty much identical version*. Before finding the SEO Creative post I actually found a number of people saying that Chris cardell’s material was OK(ish) and some had found it useful. Doing this kind of marketing is (in my opinion) stupid – which is clearly (in my opinon) what they think we are.

* following the receipt of a cease and desist letter from Chris Cardell’s lawyers I have now removed my copy of the marketing, as well as a sentance included within the content of my blog post. The removal of the sentance does not imply acceptance that it was in any way false or incorrect but has been removed pending further investigation.

It was not my intention to infringe on his copyright and I have therefore removed the image.

The envelope and post-it note were addressed specifically to me, are therefore mine on receipt and will remain on the site.

See my installation notes on setting the whole WordPress/BuddyPress/bbPress installation up.

1. install wordpress MU, BuddyPress and bbPress

Although that gets the basic setup going if you want to use display the forums as part of a Group you still need to do one or two other things to integrate these two together:

2. go to example.com/wp-admin
3. click on forums setup, click to use existing bbpress installation
4. enter URL (may be autopopulated, check it has correct folder, I had to append /forums/)

using forums with groups
1. click to add a new group, enter name and description
2. ensure ‘enable discussion forum’ is checked
3. follow the instructions

Notes on privacy:
Something that I had not appreciated initially, is that while a group may be private or or even hidden so that posts to the group cannot be seen by anyone not a member of that group, forum posts are displayed in both the group forum AND the public forum. Group members need to be aware that forum posts are NOT private regardless of the settings of the group itself.

I’ve been granted access to Google Wave for use on an international collaboration web-project between Canterbury University and several African Universities.

I haven’t yet had opportunity to test it out but will be interested to see how it performs and will post feedback here.

it’s obviously too early to say if the latest round of economic woes in the banking sector will hit sales directly, but the distraction appears to have had an immediate effect on visitor numbers. Visitors to selfcateringhols.com are extremely cyclical: Monday is our busiest day of the week declining to a week low on Saturday. Sunday leads to Monday and so on. For the first time this year we saw more visitors on Sunday 16th March than we did on Monday 17th. It’s difficult to make a direct comparison because we were expecting a moderate increase due to marketing efforts during the week. As such Sunday saw a 3.22% increase on the previous Sunday, while Monday showed a 7.52% drop. No great surprise, it remains to be seen what the longer term effects will be.

Because I’ve been meaning to set up a blog for such a long time I’ve had the domain dougandrews.co.uk registered for some time – it was only when I came to actually set it up that I realised that I’d also registered dougandrews.net.

As I’ve both names I’ve decided that I’ll use the .co.uk address for work related issues and the .net address for non-work issues.

I should apologise to any doug andrews out there wanting to register a domain in their name – it seems a little greedy to have both but that’s just how it turned out.