Spedman975

The Simplest Way To Destroy Your WordPress Blog

There are many people out there in the world with simple blogs powered by the WordPress script. These blogs are the pinnacle of versatility and this is generally the plus side to the whole WordPress experience - and this versatility is usually delivered through a plugin!

As many of you would already know, WordPress has the function to add in as many plugins as you like to do as many different things as you like! You can change the way your blog is displayed, how the user interacts with the site, all down to the general management of the entire website. Plugins are a godsend - to some…

A can of spam¹

Earlier this evening I loaded Spedman975 admin webpanel all to notice that I had five comments awaiting moderation. Naturally I immediately thought, “I set it so comments DIDN’T need to be moderated… except if they have a lot of links in them…” So all in all, this seemed a little odd. But hey, benefit of the doubt and all - so I just thought I might as well click ONE BUTTON to check these comments. So naturally, as I expected in the back of my mind, I got a nice little list of seventeen comments - each filled with links - relating to various interesting products (mainly something to do with gambling, Viagra patches, and so on). COMMENT SPAM - the worst enemy of the new blogger. I don’t particularly want to list off three-hundred-and-seventy-four ads for various drugs and forms of gambling on my blog (thank god for comment moderation!) so I set out to stop this from ever happening again! Being a WordPress blogger I headed to Google to find a comment anti-spam plugin. After sifting though a few possibilities I found a reasonably promising plugin - one that would add in a little verification by asking the commenter a simple mathsproblem (to ensure they’re actually a PERSON). So downloading ensued, shortly followed by uploading to my web server and then the plugin was activated!

Some more spam¹

Problem solved! I leaned back and took a sigh of relief - no more comment spam EVER! Then the horror set in… After activating the plugin I got a WordPress warning, “Could not activate plugin because it caused a fatal error.” I clicked to another page and was greeted by, guess what, a FATAL PHP ERROR!!! The damn plugin RUINED my blog admin webpanel! Nothing worked, what-so-ever! (Double checked my blog - no problem - but still, no new posts or anything)!! My blog was completely ruined…

Long story short - I deleted the plugin and fiddled around with the files through FTP and the problem was EVENTUALLY solved, but still! Just have to remember, one little plugin can bring everything TUMBLING DOWN!!!

… damn spammers - all their fault really.

External Links:
1 - Google Images