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Re: BerkeleyLUG site anti-spam enabled, comments & registration / sign-up opened up.



The anti-spam seems to work quite well enough - at least to stop
spam comments and such.

The only "issue" with opening up registration / sign-up
... we do now have lots of users - 112 - way up from when we opened
up the registration / sign-up, and looks like most of those are
from spambots and the like and not legitimate users.

Anyway, perhaps a general adjustment plan, perhaps roughly like:
o add some captcha or the like to raise the bar sufficiently on
  registration / sign-up
o user hygiene - once the above is in place and seems to be working
  well enough, ask legitimate users to take some action to reasonably
  show they're not something from a spambot ... and after some reasonable
  time to respond to such, those not having taken the requisite action -
  remove those users ... at least applying that users created after we
  recently opened up registration / sign-up.

Anyway, that's the general plan/idea ... at least I think so (and for
lack of a better?).  Not an extreme priority - though sooner would be
better.  Anyway, cleaning that up will get us better to set of
(legitimate) users on the site - then that + list gives us a better idea
of folks at least interested in following BerkeleyLUG (even if many may
mostly be quiet "lurkers" - or at least most of the time).

From: "Michael Paoli" <Michael.Paoli@cal.berkeley.edu>
Subject: BerkeleyLUG site anti-spam enabled, comments & registration / sign-up opened up.
Date: Mon, 02 Sep 2019 18:35:37 -0700

So, ... I went ahead and enabled anti-spam (most notably for
comments) and enabled essentially "anyone" to comment,
and opened up the registration / sign-up.

Although the site gets a fair amount of traffic and ranks pretty well
with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), seems in earlier times it was
more "active" - not only with posts, but comments.  Hopefully opening
that up more will breathe a bit more life/activity into it.

"We"'ll just have to keep a reasonable eye on spam (most notably
in comments and the like) ... I'm guessing that's what got the stuff
clamped down earlier.  I'm hoping the anti-spam "plugin" is good enough
that it handles most all of that pretty well.  We shall see.

I did also put an updated post on the main page ... likewise for where
the old stuff is hosted on WordPress.com (essentially all that content
was migrated) ... mostly to point folks to where it is now and the
"live" site (same URL as old was), ... and for the other URL,
left it "public", but disabled search engine indexing of it and
the like ... since that never was the "main" site anyway, and just
HTTP 301 redirected before anyway.  Mostly just "cover the bases"
if anyone/anything still pokes around there - effectively leaving a
"pointer" behind - at least for now - and also if anyone/anything has
need/reason to compare the content and appearance details, etc. (there
are some minor appearance differences).

We've got a few folks that have Administrator access to the new
(on balug VM) hosting location, at least 2 of which are rather to
quite active in BerkeleyLUG.  We also have additional persons/roles,
- roles being: Administrator, Editor, Author, Contributor, Subscriber.

From: "Michael Paoli" <Michael.Paoli@cal.berkeley.edu>
Subject: BerkeleyLUG site/WordPress migrated!
Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2019 07:25:21 -0700

The BerkeleyLUG site:
https://berkeleylug.com/
has been migrated from WordPress.com hosting, to
being hosted on the BALUG host (virtual machine).
Things should mostly be as they were - differences should mostly be
cosmetic (and speed/availability - not a high availability host nor
hosting, nor high bandwidth).

The old site content may temporarily be accessible at:
https://berkeleylug.wordpress.com/
but looks like that's presently still redirecting - so
can't (yet) see there to compare, etc.

If you have an account on the site, you should be able to use
the "lost password" functionality:
https://berkeleylug.com/wp-login.php?action=lostpassword
to get an emailed link to reset your password (passwords were not
migrated).

Shorter term we'll probably leave it relatively locked down,
most notably only those with accounts can comment or post or more.
We'll probably start loosening that up more (within reason)
after things are a bit more settled in and tested out (and we
activate some anti-spam bits).

And, ... what did the migration process look like?
There's a pretty good outline of it here:
https://www.wiki.balug.org/wiki/doku.php?id=berkeleylug:digital_resources

From: "Michael Paoli" <Michael.Paoli@cal.berkeley.edu>
Subject: BerkeleyLUG site/WordPress migration
Date: Wed, 28 Aug 2019 06:54:07 -0700

So, ... not quite done yet 8-O ... I was theoretically to be
done/completed by 2019-08-27T09:53:17Z[1]
But getting fairly close :-)
In "worst case" scenario, I could always migrate/"promote"
what I've got so far.
One may "preview" it here (not the permanent URL, and that (sub-)domain
will get removed in the relatively near future):
https://temp.berkeleylug.com/
Some of the more notably various remaining issues:
The import causes everything to be attributed to (authored by) one user,
... well, at least pages, looks like comments may have their proper
original attributions.  Theoretically on import, one should be able
to (re)map users from import to users on site being imported too,
but I don't seem to have gotten that to work or work fully.
Comments aren't displaying who posted the comment.
Missing the tux logo being displayed on page headers.
I need to properly configure email sends (it semi-works
at present, but may very legitimately get rejected by mail
servers that are persnickety about spam and proper sending best
practices).

Footnotes/references:
0. https://lists.balug.org/pipermail/balug-admin/2019-August/000998.html
1. https://www.wiki.balug.org/wiki/doku.php?id=berkeleylug:digital_resources
"per earlier communcations, intending to migrate of the WordPress.com
hosted by 2019-08-27T09:53:17Z (that would be 6 months after
Michael Paoli was notified of having been granted admin access for the
BerkeleyLUG site on its WordPress.com hosting)."

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