Author: Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

Community Driven Design

WordPress 3.3 is on the horizon, and already there’s a minor kerfluffle over the flyout menus. Regardless of if you agree with the change or not (I do, Otto does not, for example), it brings to mind the reality that every time there’s a new change to the Admin UI, someone demands to know ‘Who’ requested the change. One time, the answer was ‘Matt.’

While WP is open source, and that means it’s community driven, that’s only to a degree. Remember, at the end of the day the folks with commit access are the ones who decide what they want to support and have in their app. Theirs. WordPress isn’t a Democracy, it’s at best a parlimented monarchy, but really more of a benevolent dictatorship. This is neither good nor bad, when you put it in perspective, and I’m afraid that with products, especially free and/or open-source products, we as a user base consistently lack that perspective.

The company I work for recently switched to Office 2007. Yes, I want you all to take a moment to reflect on the fact that we didn’t move to Office 2007 until it was 2010 (and didn’t finish until summer 2011), it’s important. The reason we didn’t switch sooner wasn’t for anything technical. In fact, we really wanted to switch so we could upgrade SharePoint and have functional integration. No, there were no app conflicts or weird database issues preventing the upgrade. It ran on our operating systems without issues. But why didn’t we upgrade? Because some of the people in “very important positions” had trouble with it, and we were concerned that the UI change, which was rather dramatic, would overwhelm our help desk.

To put this in perspective even more, there are about 20k employees at my company (give or take, I’m not counting consultants here, or non-computer-using people). Of those, about an eighth are what I’d call techies. That is, maybe 2500 of us are really nerdy people who use foam swords or even know who Stallman is. Another 2500 of us are technically inclined, and capable of trouble shooting the basics. Another 2500 are smart enough to know how to explain their problem to the techs. That means over half the company are ‘real users,’ you know, the ones we make fun of for deleting DLLs that are taking up space, or who reboot their monitor. Every time we make a change to software used across the entire company, we have to put that 50% clear in our minds. How will this affect them? What training to we need to provide? We’ve pretty much accepted that no change will be universally accepted, and at a certain point we have to agree that this is ‘good enough’ for people, and deal with the fall out.

Coming back to Open Source, when a project like WordPress or Drupal makes a major change someone’s going to hate it. This is just the way of the world, and even if you love the change, you need to work to make sure your replies to these people aren’t ‘haters gonna hate!’ or ‘you suck!’ Neither of these are productive. Part of the problem here is that people get passionate and sulky, like a nine year old who viscerally dislikes something, but lacks the language to fully explain it. This is not to say people are incapable of explaining themselves, but that part of their problem is the ephemeral ‘feeling.’ The other major part of the problem is that no two people hold a hammer the exact same way. And of course that people who are complaining at the ‘beta’ stage of the product are in too late.

Understanding how these designs get made goes a long way into making people accept changes they don’t agree with. It doesn’t make them like the changes, but understanding how and why they happened can get you to the ‘agree to disagree’ point. John O’Nolan (who currently is living on the road by choice) wrote an amazingly informative post about how he got involved in WordPress UI back in the 3.0 days. He lays out how you can get involved more, if you’re inclined. There’s a great Make WordPress UI P2 blog, and of course WordPress Development blog that you can follow along to see what’s going on and there’s always looking at the tickets in Trac flagged for Needs User Experience/UI Feedback, but I’ve found the first way you should get involved is to start using WordPress trunk: the live latest and greatest, but not ready for prime time players, version.

That seems like a departure from theme, but it’s not. We all start out as basic WordPress users. We use the product, we know how to add/edit/remove posts, we move on to using plugins, and eventually we hit a wall. Either we start to adapt and become power users, who understand how to tweak things in wp-config.php, play with SSH/FTP, and make a quick child theme, or we resign ourselves to using WordPress as it is presented. Neither use-case is better or worse than the other. If you’re a ‘hard core’ WordPress user, though, you will find yourself wishing for small fixes, and you’ll make a plugin for yourself. Then you share it, and then you start to suggest things in the forums, or report bugs in trac. Now we’re cooking with fire, and it’s not long before you start tossing out code or css ideas for trac.

The point of this is that if you start ‘testing’ the new versions of WordPress at the beta or release candidate iteration, you are too late in the game to make a UI comment. The Beta and RC releases aren’t for making drastic changes, but for making the changes that are in there work correctly. Like how the ‘close’ button on the admin bar pointed isn’t working on IE 7 or 8. That’s a bug. But not liking the admin sidebar menu flyout and disagreeing with it entirely isn’t a bug. Did you know the head of the UI team didn’t like the Admin Bar back when it came about?

You don’t have to like everything about a product to use it, and sometimes changes mean you need to rethink how you use it. Also, WordPress has a policy similar to Apple and Amazon: Release, then iterate. That’s why in the last three releases of WordPress, we’ve had one major change and two noticeable tweaks to the whole admin UI. The 3.0 release was a huge overhaul, and in both 3.1 and 3.2 (and now 3.3) we’ve had significant variations on a theme. They feel big, but compare it to the 2.9 to 3.0 jump and it’s really pretty small.

If you want to guide WordPress’s UI, get in on it earlier than beta. If you want to iron out bugs, join at Beta, but take the time to learn the difference between ‘I don’t like…’ and ‘this is broken….’ If you want to get new features early, join at RC. If you want to wait till we’re ready to go, wait for the final release. If you just use WordPress and trust that most everything will work, use the final releases. If you’re annoyed that little bugs get missed, use RC. If you know you’re using a fringe case, or setup that uses normal WordPress but on an obscure server or configuration, RC or Beta is where we need you. Remember, not everything can be tested, but you can help test more. However. If WordPress is your life, if you live and die by WordPress and support people who use it or need to be testing it in your corporate environment, then you need to step up and start using SVN. Make a second install and set up a job to update every few hours, pay attention to release dates, and don’t treat this like ‘traditional’ software and wait for a release to be notified as to what’s going on.

But that is another post all together.

Perhaps the best thing about a cooperative design, like in an open source app, is that if you don’t like the changes, most of the time you can find someone else who doesn’t, and who wrote a plugin/extension to change it. When you compare that to, say, Microsoft Word, and remember that you, as a user, have very little say in things unless you luck into their market studies or beta tests, and even then, the locked down systems don’t always permit changes, well, you’ve actually got a lot of freedom. And if you’re not a techie, well, make friends with one or hire one. I hear a lot of them like beer.

26 October, 2011
Smart Servers

I upgraded the server that runs this site. Well, I should say I transferred from a traditional VPS on CentOS 4 32 bit server I’ve been on since 2009 to a CentOS 5, 64 bit, fully managed Smart Server.

What’s a Smart Server?

You know this whole cloud hosting thing? It’s like that, but not. I had serious concerns about the cloud. Certainly I was worried when I heard people running WordPress MultiSite had weird issues with caching and things not syncing up when new server slices were made. Reason enough to hold off for me. But then my host says “We have these in-between servers.”

LiquidWeb Smart Servers are kind of like Cloud Servers. First, I’m the only person on my server (which is a step up from VPS), and I have a set amount of bandwidth. I’m charged per-day, too, so if I need more CPU/Memory for a couple days, I only get charged for those days. That’s really nice. There’s a lot of normal ‘cloud’ features too, like I can spin up new images on the fly and use them (maybe 30 minutes total to do all that).

Yeah, 30 minutes. Thinking about how long it took to just migrate from host2 to gamera(Gamera (ガメラ?) is a giant, flying turtle from a popular series of kaiju (Japanese giant monster) films produced by Daiei Motion Picture Company in Japan. Created in 1965 to rival the success of Toho Studios’ Godzilla during the daikaiju boom of the mid-to-late 1960s, Gamera has gained fame and notoriety as a Japanese icon in his own right.), being able to move things around on the fly with only an hour of outage is nothing. When I moved my three WordPress sites, they took about an hour or so each (give or take). When I moved my forum with a 4gig database, it took about eight hours. We made jokes about how it was the size of Liechtenstein.(The problem with a 4gig database is when 400megs is in one table. Takes a long time, no matter what you do. The file copied over fast, but the exploding of it took long enough for me to nap.)

None of that was why I upgraded/moved though. The real reason for the upgrade was that my server’s been having weird issues, and most of my research said it was because I was on CentOS 4. I couldn’t upgrade SVN, I couldn’t upgrade PHP for much longer, and I was sure that come February 2012 (when CentOS 4 is EOLd) I was going to be increasingly in the cold. So I made a list of everything I’d ‘done’ to my server, all the upgrades and tweaks, and I went for broke.

For the most part, I can’t tell the difference between my old VPS and my new smart server other than the speed (much faster). What I did notice, and didn’t like, was that the memory tends to run ‘hot.’ With nothing going on at all, it was hitting 90% usage. With nothing going on for my old site, it’s at 50% (and normally hovered around 60-70%). Gamera definitely runs heavier, though I’m still using the old caching. I did have to up PHP memory to 64megs, from 32, after I ran into weird issues on one site, but for the most part, I’m in a ‘It Just Works’ state of mine. Oh and I will very much need to sort out external SSL, since everything’s on one IP now, and you can’t use multiple SSL like that.

Yet I’ve still not answered the question. What is a Smart Server anyway? Thankfully LiquidWeb isn’t the only site using this designation.

We know what Cloud Server is, and we know why it’s good. It’s flexible, it can add on memory and diskspace as I need it, and take it away if (when) I don’t. I’m charged for what I’m using, not a blanket ‘This is what I need on my worst day’ sort of deal. But the problem there is a lot of people actually need that flexibility but don’t have the brainpower to handle running their own server. Two years ago, I didn’t, that’s for sure. In fact, two years ago, Cloud scared me. But, just like VPS.net came up with Cloud Shared Hosting (which I jokingly called Cloud for Dummies), LiquidWeb and some other said that some of us really need a VPS, but we’d like some of those cloud features too.

This is the middle ground. Too many places were looking at Cloud Dedicated hosting, which is expensive, and not something we all need, and then was also that race to the cheap hosting. I pay $60 a month for my hosting, and it’s worth it. I know, it’s a lot of money to some people, but think on this: If I pick up the phone right now and call Tom, my sales guy, or Benny, the tech I know pretty well, they’ll take the time to help me. And if I call the 1-800 number at 1am? Someone is there who speaks English and knows what I’m talking about.(Not that I don’t love OffShore support, I know I love the ones at my office! Many of them are fantastic in their fields and well worth the price of admission. But too many companies force these intelligent people to stick to a script, and don’t teach them the hows and whys of the code, the company, and how to work with American customers. If you’re going to support Americans, you must learn how to deal with them, for better or for worse, you learn to deal with your customers. And yes, that means being fluent in their native language, and their technologies. This holds true for India, Mexico and that moron from Nebraska who wanted me to go into the registry on my Macintosh. AT&T.) So while I’m willing to pay more for someone who will bail me out, I’m not willing to pay more for something I don’t use. Like extra minutes on my cell phone, I don’t like to pay for hypothetical ‘in case I get the Digg effect or Matt links to me again’ CPU and memory.

While a Cloud Server would handle all that, it also requires consistent and constant management. You have to know what to expect, and be ready to go. Those of us who do all this as hobbies or as a side-gig don’t have the time. Also, sharing resources in the cloud makes some of us sketchy. The whole reason we self-host anyway is that we want to be in control. Cloud sharing started to sound a lot like Shared Hosting, which has issues of it’s own. Resource contention is s concern, as are bad neighbors. The cloud is great for hosts because it shares everything, and complicated for users because we don’t want to share.

It sounds a little repetitive to call this Cloud Light. In fact, it feels really repetitive to say “This is like a VPS, but with Cloud Add-ons.” Part of this is because understanding what the Cloud is, after decades of the old way, is hard for our brains to wrap around. For most of us, the cloud doesn’t matter. In fact, it barely matters for me. The cloud is really what the internet has always been to most of us: ephemeral and mystical. Don’t let the smoke out of the cloud, or your website will crash! See? You don’t know anything more than you did before, now do you?

The Cloud is synonymous with the Internet for many people, and I think the future of it is aimed that way. For me, having the ability not to be tied to hardware and to add on more space, memory and CPU as I need it is invaluable. Being priced reasonably for those things also makes me pleased. The Cloud gave me freedom, but a Smart Server gives me even more: the freedom to control my destiny on my server. And that’s just cool.

So what’s the downside? There are some.

Understanding memory usage has been the big issue. I mentioned before that Gamera uses 90% of the memory, normally, and after my database crash I came to understand why. See not being tied to hardware means I’m not tied to hardware memory either. So linux, being linux, uses up all the memory it can. I watched, and when I start doing more intensive stuff, like importing a 4G database, the memory dropped to about 75%, and then bounced back up to 80-90. This is what it’s supposed to do! When it starts running out of memory, it goes to swap. Now on the traditional VPS, this was bad. Swap meant you were ‘out’ of memory and about to crash. On a Smart VPS, this is okay. My swap sits around 10% right now until I clean it out.

Cleaning it out is where things get weird. Smart VPS memory doesn’t clean out. If I hot-swapped my memory, some genius at MIT sorted out I could actually read data off the memory. Of course, if you have the physical access to my server I have other problems. But swapping memory, well that means the computer swaps data to the hard disk and back to your RAM as needed. I’m not entirely sure how this all works, and I’m doing some research now (and asking the tech from last night for info he said he had about all this). As for the crash… My database crashed on Saturday because the table was 600mb, and the space I’d allocated for swapping like that was 400mb. Liquidweb’s support moved the SQL temp drive to a place with more space to allow for that and everything started working again.

SSL was pretty straightforward. I bought an extra IP, since it’s cheaper and easier than sorting out multiple domains on 1-IP for SSL for only two domains. The other domains don’t need SSL yet, so they can wait until WHM catches up with SNI and other weird acronyms you don’t care about.

Basically, I’m very happy. I’ve even started to forget it’s something novel.

24 October, 2011
Request: Multiple Domains, One IP SSL Certificates

This is actually a request. The server that runs Ipstenu.org hosts three other domains. I set up my self signed certificate just fine for *.ipstenu.org, but I want to add on the other domains. For some reason I seem to be failing.

I somehow managed to get it half-baked. If you go to https://otherdomain.com it kicks you to https://ipstenu.org/wp-signup.php?new=otherdomain.com which isn’t what I want at all.

I’m using WHM on CentOS 5.6 and I’m a total newbie when it comes to all this! Links to tutorials with pretty pictures, advice, or directions are all welcome!

18 October, 2011
SEO Doesn’t Auto Post Anymore

I don’t auto post to Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Google Plus or LiveJournal. I stopped about a year ago, and since then, I’ve stopped crossposting to everywhere except the places I actually frequent. That’s not to say I don’t skim Tumblfeeds (the spam monsters than they are) or check in on my LJ communities. It means that I no longer have any code that automatically posts to those places when I make a new blog post. Any time you see a link to my posts on another site, made by me, that means I took the time to log in and fill in the data by hand.

Why? Well, I’ll jump around chronologically and tell you that a pair of articles hit my feed recently. First, one about how “3rd party APIs […] are punished in Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm” (Source: Edgerank Checker — Does Using a 3rd Party API Decrease Your Engagement Per Post?) and the second, which linked back, said that pages that auto publish lose 70% of ‘likes’ and comments. (Source: Insider Facebook — Study: Auto-Posting to Facebook Decreases Likes and Comments by 70%)

Both of those back up what I’ve always said about SEO and HEO. If you want people to come to your site, you have to engage with them. That means you need to interact, not spam, and converse. Find out what they like and how they like it. They hammer home a point that was obvious to many of us old hats know, but many young bucks ignore. You have to be in touch with your readers, and no automated system in the world can do that for you.

Now, certainly, I use tools like Google Analytics’ Campaign feature, and Crowdrise, to help me determine what posts of mine are popular, when and where, and attempt to comprehend the why of it all. It’s a very fuzzy science. I know I hit paydirt when my @-replies on Twitter are coming so fast I can’t keep up, and my comment-feed is burning a hole in my screen. But until we perfect an AI that knows, before I do, what I want, we’ll never have one that can predict accurately what we need to do to make our sites popular. And we all know that popularity is the end game.

Popularity has a strange converse, though. For example, you may think that auto-tweeting your blog posts is a great idea to get the content out there and read. This is true, but I found that the more I auto-tweeted, the more splogs came to my site! That’s right, I was increasing the attack of content scrapers, and tweet bots that spam, which in turn decreased any SEO benefit I might have acquired. Sucks, doesn’t it? Thankfully, manually crafting a quick tweet, and taking the time to phrase it right, got me more traction than anything else.

The other massive downside to auto-posting on social networks is that you rarely get to make the post look the way you want to. I want to pick which image I’ve attached to be the thumbnail, and I want to make sure my custom excerpt (which I always write) is picked up, and I want to maybe put in an extra explanation on G+, but not on Tumblr or Facebook, and … you know, I want people to know I’m thinking about them.

There is a huge desire to share everything with everyone. To tell your friends in one social network the same things you tell them in others. And for self-promotion, this is big as well. But as the media is learning, a blanket advertisement like you see on TV doesn’t work so well anymore. How many commercials can you remember well? I can remember the Old Spice guy and the Most Interesting Man in the World (also a couple weird phone commercials), but we don’t always remember the products, nor do we actually always buy the product being advertised. I don’t use Old Spice or Dos Equis. Still, blanket ads are hard to land, since you don’t know who’s going to read your site. Similarly, blanket ‘Hey look at me!’ is hard to make efficient, because you’re not reaching out to your audience and making them a part of your process. You’re shouting at them, not talking with them.

What about those of us who aren’t advertising. If you’re crosslinking just to share with friends, an automated system seems fine, except these are your friends and don’t you want to be personal with your friends? Don’t you think they deserve the time and effort of a real ‘Hey, this is what I’m up to!’ instead of a blanket letter? Wouldn’t it be nice to say “Bob, I thought of you when I wrote this because of that conversation we had about …” Or if you send it to a group of your friends and Bob’s, then Bob feels great because you’ve brought him into the conversation and your friends know you think about them.

The funny thing about this is I also stopped scheduling posts. I used to set posts up to run once a week, minimum, even if I was going to be off line. Now, because I want to interact with people, I post them only when I know I’ll be around.

The next time you see a social media post of mine, linking back to a blog post, know that I took the time and effort to link it. If it’s styled pretty, I did that on purpose. I try to make it personal and not just slap a link up, and I think that effort shows, and comes back to me in pageviews, comments and likes.

17 October, 2011
GPL Freedoms – Yep, Porn’s Good!
Did you know you can use WordPress for a porn site?

Did you know you can use Drupal to show autopsy pictures?

The freedoms of GPL don’t just extend to the software itself, but to how you use it. See, most of the time when we talk about GPL freedom, we’re talking about how you’re free to take the code and turn it into a monkey if you want to. But lately, there’s been an effort to remind people that part of GPL also means we don’t restrict your usage either.

WordPress has a link to ‘Freedoms’ at the footer of all admin pages, and that duplicates the Bill of Rights found at WordPress’s Philosophy:
WordPress is licensed under the General Public License (GPLv2 or later) which provides four core freedoms, consider this as the WordPress “bill of rights”:
- The freedom to run the program, for any purpose.
- The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish.
- The freedom to redistribute.
- The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others.
Drupal doesn’t spell it out as clearly, but given that they have fetchgals, which can pull in thumbnails of porno pics (if I read that right), I feel confident to say that Drupal doesn’t care what you use Drupal for. Joolma! puts a lot of stock in people using their product for their communities and nowhere did I find note of a limitation of what you cannot do.

The point is valid, however. You can use WordPress, Drupal, Joomla! and pretty much any GPL software for whatever purpose you want, moral or immoral, legal or illegal. This is interesting when you compare it to most EULAs, like Microsoft Office:

7. SCOPE OF LICENSE. The software is licensed, not sold. This agreement only gives you some rights to use the features included in the software edition you licensed. Microsoft reserve reserves all other rights. Unless applicable law gives you more rights despite this limitation, you may use the software only as expressly permitted in this agreement. In doing so, you must comply with any technical limitations in the software that only allow you to use it in certain ways. You may not
[…]
• use the software in any way that is against the law;

GPL doesn’t tell you that you can’t use it in a way that’s illegal, and perhaps Microsoft only does to escape a potential lawsuit for someone saying “Aha! You used Office to draft your Mainifesto!” We live in over litigious times. Open Source, by telling us ‘Do what you want, it’s not our beef.’ removes themselves from those issues cleanly and without ass hattery.

One of the tenets of American Law is our freedom to speak our mind. Part of being an American Citizen is that you have the right to defend your beliefs, no matter how much I oppose them, and so long as no one breaks the law, that’s fine. I can ask you to leave my house if you do it on my private property, and you can ask me to leave yours. But if we meet on the street I cannot have you arrested for that. I will defend your freedoms just as you must defend mine, regardless of any agreement or lack there of.

This applies to Open Source because I have the right to use WordPress, Drupal or Joomla! in ways you may find distasteful. As long as I’m not violating the agreement of my ISP, the laws of where my server is located, and the laws of my nation, I’m allowed to call you names, insult your heritage, and show nudie pics of pretty girls. On the other hand, I cannot publish your personal information (it’s a violation of invasion of privacy) and I cannot post naked pictures of you without your consent. Actually, my webhost won’t permit and naked pictures at all, so there’s that.

So when you see a site run by WordPress, Drupal or Joomla! that’s doing something you hate, there’s very little you can do about it. Report it to their webhost if you think it’s breaking the law, but otherwise celebrate people in their freedom.
10 October, 2011
Running My Own Social Network Falls Short

I say this having run a variety of social networks, from blogs and forums to MUSHes and Facebook ‘Wall’ type things. I’ve been around and I’ve had to manage cats in myriad situations.

The problem they all have is managing spammers and trolls.

Spammers are, weirdly, easier. You use a decent plugin/extension, you block the idiots, you move on. But trolls. Oh lord, trolls. You know those users you just want to take out back and kick until they find a clue, but you know they never will? Right.

When I was on a MUSH, I came up with a tool called the ‘Ban Hammer.’ If you’re not familiar with it, the basic idea is anyone can log on, make a character and join a role playing game. Sounds great. If someone breaks the rules, the people in charge (Wizards) can delete their character. The problem I had was someone was coming and not breaking the rules, but had made himself basically unwelcome. The Wizards wouldn’t delete the account because “Being a Dick” isn’t against their rules. I decided to write a tool that looked for this user and locked every room, door and exit against him. On top of that, if he tried to teleport into a room, it booted him out. And he got a message “You are not currently welcome here. Please speak with Ipstenu.” (or whomever was the local area boss). Then I shared it with everyone on the game.(If you can’t tell, I’m a huge proponent of sharing and Open Source. I gave people the source code too.)

As I see it, the problem is that most social extensions are fantastic in a closed system, but the minute you open things up to anyone, you have the problem of user management. Facebook and Twitter are failing at it today. There’s just too many spammers and trolls to manage. Most people spend time and effort hunting down spammers, which is probably why managing morons falls by the wayside.

The other interesting point I’ve noticed is that most programmers don’t run social sites. They use them, but they don’t manage them as an end-moderator. These are totally different skill sets and, as with all separate skill sets, there’s often a disconnect between what one sees as a need and what the other sees as a want.

I have to rewind here. My high school had a big emphasis on teaching us the difference between a want and a need. You need food. You want hot water. “a simple life school, where one learns to get on without” (Paul Squib – Founder of Midland School”) A lot of my decisions in life roll back to that simple premise. If you needed something, the school provided it. If you wanted something, you worked for it. I learned how to chop wood and make a fire in order to make enough hot water for 14 teenage girls to shower because we wanted the water hot. (Funny Midland story. We basically had an old propane tank, fitted with a small stove ‘hole’ to make the fire. You started the fire, added the logs, and stoked it for about 2-3 hours to heat the water, often augmented by the solar panels. If you made the water hot enough, however, you created steam, which would flip a switch on the safety switch so people didn’t get scalded. It was called the ‘Steam Lock’, and we measured our abilities by how efficiently you could activate it. I learned how to do it on my second shower fire, having been taught by Amber and Katie. Thanks, girls!) Because of that, not a day goes by that I don’t think “Is that a want or a need?” And I am ruthless with myself about that. Because of that rigorous crucible, I am confident what I say that I know what I need, I really mean that.

The tools I need to deal with trouble-making users aren’t many.

Track IPs – only to keep tabs on repeat offenders. A spammer’s IP doesn’t matter. Bob the troll’s does. This is going to always require a level of manual intervention, that a human will have to go in and think about things, but that’s not a bad idea anyway. I made a WordPress plugin called Register IP Multisite to handle that for both single and MultiSite.

Flag as spam – I need to be able to say ‘Bob’s acting an ass. I want him to go away.’ Really this should be ‘flag as bozo’ as he’s not a spammer, but I’ll take either one. A time out feature to put people out of sight from the users for a while. Obviously, again, there’s a level of manual work required. You can do this on WordPress MultiSite, but not single site, and it’s silly to think that you would have to go to MultiSite to enable this.

Bad Words – Sometimes it’s easy to stop the jerks. Sometimes I just want to keep a place clean for kiddies. Most tools, blogging or otherwise, have a way to clean words, but then you have strange problems. If you use, say, “cialis” as a bad word, you block “socialisim.” Ooops! Also, I would like to block people from using bad words in their ‘name’, and not just comments. But again, this needs manual monitoring.

The tools I’d want, but don’t need, are also few:

Report users – Most forums have this ability, to let people patrol each other. Google+ has it. If you’re opening up your site to the world, you have to be able to let the crowd help you. But within reason. You can only report people once, for example, and after X reports, someone should be just blocked for now until a moderator manually steps in.

What about you? What tools do you know you can’t live without?

5 October, 2011