Fix WordPress plug-in Breaks + Spam Again + Tim Ferris Stats

How to Fix a broken WordPress plug-in

I decided to try the plugin Ask Apache for a client site. First I did a Cpanel backup to Adrive (a backup storage site company) via FTP.

Well, guess what? The plug-in warned me! I might not be able to get into the admin area.

And you know what? I couldn’t.

What to do? I was getting a 404 page not found error for WP-Admin. I edited out the plug-in stuff in the root directory .htaccess file – no effect.

So you need to Google and see what others say on forums. Perhaps you Google “Ask Apache WordPress wp-admin 404”. It turns out you need to edit the stuff from a second .htaccess file.

It worked. This might be a good plug-in for some environments, but it doesn’t work for all.

Spam

WordPress – the fight against spam: Summing up – WordPress – the fight against spam: Summing up

You know what I like about this post? It has taken the following WordPress SPAM methods and tested them:

• Akismet
• Google Recaptcha
• Conditional Captcha for WordPress
• WP-SpamFree
• NoSpamNx
• AntiSpam Bee

There’s a couple interesting observations here:

• The plug-in WP-SpamFree took more load time. I could never get the plug-in to work properly, even though I know someone who installed it for a mutual client.
• The author couldn’t getNoSpamNx to work properly – neither could I.

Software is not only good for the inexperienced person – it often makes life easier for the experienced person too. And sometimes it takes a couple of pieces of software, working in harmony. As an example, take spam in WordPress blogs. Yet a combination of:

• CloudFlare as a first line of defense (covered in my earlier blog posts).  CloudFlare does its job so well, that second and third defensive lines are to pick off stragglers – if needed.
• Bad Behavior for a second line of defense.  Or you might try combining Antispam Bee and Si Captcha.
• WordPress Akismet and  captcha (i.e. SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam and Fast Secure Contact Form plug-ins), as a third line of defense (should you ever need it).
• Or you can use Defensio (with the previous mentioned plug-ins, if you make more than $500 per month – but don’t want to pay the Akismet fees) – see 5 Tips for Protecting Your WordPress Site

  

   

An interesting article is  3 Ways To Make Spammers Cry (On WordPress And Blogger)

This article is interesting for one observation: “Many hire citizens in third world countries or (thanks to the recession) even in “prosperous” western nations which can bypass both CAPTCHA’s and automated spam filters.”

What’s the world coming to?

Let me share a final note on Defensio.  Akismet has 4 servers and processes blog comments instantaneously.  Defensio takes a few minutes to process.  They also create a MySQL table within your WordPress database.

Akismet is the better option.  It’s worth the $5 per month, if you make over $500 a month.  However, if you have many money making blogs, then Defensio might be a better option (i.e. since it’s free to small businesses).

Tim Ferris Stats

Recently, both Copyblogger and Zen Habits (another heavy hitter, with about 200,000 readers and a Time magazine endorsement) interviewed Tim Ferris – all in the same week. Copyblogger did an audio interview and Zen Habits did a video interview.

Tim has a new book entitled The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman . It has a good rating on Amazon, with 934 reviews, and an average rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars.

Yet the Zen Habits interviewer asked a key question on his test data – what was his sample size (i.e. for example). In order to have reliable data, it’s well know in statistics to have at least 31 samples. Yet many of the conclusions in Tim’s new book, are based upon limited test subjects (i.e. 1 or 2).

But many people will read this book and believe Tim’s conclusions. Smart US people can get a free copy from their local library or the inter-library loan program.

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