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Fighting terrorism, one managed challenge at a time

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Given the current explosion in viciously evil advocacy for genocidal anti-sematic terrorism, and its inevitable bleed-over to murderous anti-Americanism, I decided to add a CF firewall rule to annoy the worst-offending countries with a managed challenge. For good measure I added a few additional nefariously evil countries. I was sadly unable to find a way to include the diabolically depraved pro-Hamas wing of the U.S. democratic party, and its barbaric supporters.

 

Read more Fighting terrorism, one managed challenge at a time ›

A slope gets slippery, just as Cloudflare’s Matthew Prince predicted

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In August 2017, Cloudflare terminated service to the despicable website Daily Stormer. CF had never previously terminated service to any website based on objectionable content, and had stated repeatedly that it would never do so. Two years later, in August 2019, CF terminated service to the equally despicable website 8chan.

Read more A slope gets slippery, just as Cloudflare’s Matthew Prince predicted ›

Blocking those pesky RSS feeds and Sitemaps

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Every time I create a new post or page using WP, the post or page is automatically duplicated in an RSS feed – for example wppov.com/mynewpost/feed. It isn’t exactly an evil twin, just antiquated and – by 2023 standards – more troublesome than useful.

RSS feeds were popular and useful a decade or two ago, but not so much in 2023. These days feeds are more likely used for content scraping, data mining, and spamming. No thanks, I’d rather block this bad behavior.

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2021 in Review: WP Highlights

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  • WP continued to increase its market share from 39% of the web to 43%.
  • WP 5.9 release delayed to 2022 (that’s a good thing – wait till its ready).
  • The WP People in Charge (PIC) dug in their collective heels even deeper on the unfortunate Gutenberg editor, doubling down on it as “the future of WordPress for the next decade”. Thank goodness for the Classic Editor plugin.
  • WordPress 5.8 added support for the WebP image format.
  • The Wix/WP Kerfuffle provided some of the best, funniest entertainment of the year.

The Cloudflare CAPTCHA Kerfuffle Continues

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In early 2020, Cloudflare switched from Google’s reCAPTCHA to Intuition Machines’ hCaptcha. It was a business decision – although CF made a ridiculously hypocritical attempt to excuse the switch as a moral imperative. hCaptcha is much less expensive for CF than the Google alternative, but hCaptcha provides a lesser user experience. The CF community was – and remains – unhappy about the switch. Read more The Cloudflare CAPTCHA Kerfuffle Continues ›

One click HTTP to HTTPS ?

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Way back on December 16, 2018 the good people at WordPress Christmas-gifted the community with the rollout of WordPress 5.0, introducing Gutenberg as the default content editor. Each subsequent release of WP has included improvements to Gutenberg (rebranded as the Block Editor).  So many ‘improvements’. This ongoing need for multiple improvements is validation for the vast majority of WP users – including me – who loudly but hopelessly railed against Gutenberg being forced upon us far before it was ready – or we were ready for it.

Maybe one day it will be ‘improved’ enough for me to give it another trial.

Anyway, the recent rollout of WP 5.7 includes the latest set of Block Editor improvements. It also includes a much-touted new feature:

From HTTP to HTTPS in a single click

Starting now, switching a site from HTTP to HTTPS is a one-click move. WordPress will automatically update database URLs when you make the switch. No more hunting and guessing!

Uhm, really? A single click to switch from HTTP to HTTPS? Turns out no. I still need an SSL certificate like Let’s Encrypt. The certificate is the foundational piece of the conversion, the rest is pretty straight-forward. The “hunting and guessing” was admirably solved by The Better Search Replace plugin. This new feature just moves the functionality of the Really Simple SSL plugin into WP core.  I tried out the Really Simple SSL plugin in the past and found that, for me at least, it didn’t do anything that I couldn’t do about as easily without.

Argh! So many admin emails!

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The new WP feature to more easily auto-update themes and plugins is working fine for me. But … WP sends me an email every time any of my sites auto-updates anything. I have around a dozen sites, each with a bunch of plugins that get updated frequently, so I’ve been getting *lots* of admin emails. WP core doesn’t provide a way to turn off these emails. Fortunately there are a couple of ways to do this. Read more Argh! So many admin emails! ›

WP 5.6 Release Squad to be All Women

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WordPress Plans All-Women Release Squad for 5.6.

Yep. No one who identifies as having a penis need apply. Also no non-binaries. Presumably gender-fluid people are tolerated, but only during moments when their identity matches the only permitted state, in other moments they must be excluded. And what about people transitioning from one gender to another? WP is silent on this.

I have to believe this is a monumentally misguided (i.e. indescribably stupid) initiative that will be corrected, that WP has not suddenly become as viciously, hatefully non-inclusive as this suggests to any reasonable unbiased observer.