atdblog

Ok, I think I’ve found two solutions that seem to be working, so far (incidentally, I was incorrect in my last post – turning off the trackbacks and pingbacks did not stop the pingbacks entirely from the bogus blog).

1. In Admin/Settings/Discussion “Before a Comment Appears”, if you don’t have it selected already, select “Comment author must fill out name and e-mail”. I don’t think that was a pre-2.5 option, or maybe it was selected by default.

2. Download the wp-ban plugin and add the ip address of that spanish site you mentioned in Admin/Manage/Ban. I looked it up on find ip address and its ip address is 74.86.186.66. Check the results after future posts in Admin/Manage/Ban, “Ban Stats” and you should see some more “Attempts” by that site that didn’t get through.

These items don’t stop the bogus blog from getting part of your posts to display in their bogus blogs (you’ll still see them in your Dashboard under Incoming Links), but it has stopped the pingbacks for me (so far).

Sorry, meant to say “from different sites but the same thing”

I thought it was just my blog! Immediately after upgrading to 2.5, I’m getting exactly the same pingback and trackback- from different sites by the same thing, a partial redo of my post with varying titles. I added the bad-behaviour plugin and they got past it. I have peter’s math anti-spam but the trackbacks and pingbacks got through. I had to turn off trackback and pingbacks to stop it.

Previously, I had 2.0.10. I never had trackback or pingback comments. But as soon as I upgraded to 2.5, they started coming.

I’ve mentioned this in previous posts – there are too many new problems with 2.5 and 2.5.1 to be accidental or poor testing. I believe the download copy was, once again, cracked and they added the code that causes the problem in this post and the other critical issues in the forum since 2.5.

I’ve loved my WordPress blog, but this is a major black-eye for the company. ??

Even if you did the backup, you would likely have done it with the dbmanager plugin and still have no database backup. Since I upgraded to 2.5, the dbmanager seems to work fine and gives the message that it successfully backs up the database. However the file size is only 5.5k and there’s no data. I saw another guy with the same problem in Les Chan’s forum (the plugin author). He has no solution, but I suspect its a conflict with 2.5.

HA! Thanks for your reply. You accidentally led me to the problem.

If you look in my previous post to you, I copied and pasted the code from the custom smilies plugin homepage (see How to Install, step 5), which I had also pasted into my php editor. The problem with their code example is there’s no space between “php” and “if”!!! Both the “view plain” and “copy to clipboard” are wrong. The error message on the unexpected { drew my focus away from the problem. Oh well, it works correctly now.

I don’t see anything on the custom smilies plugin homepage where I can contact the person to tell them their code example needs correcting. It may be in that other language that I don’t recognize.

Thanks again for the reply.

mttcrlsn-

How could you possibly be “fairly sure” it hasn’t happened? It took “3-4 days” to find out the last time someone bad cracked the download version of the code (see WordPress 2.1.1 dangerous, Upgrade to 2.1.2)…

It was determined that a cracker had gained user-level access to one of the servers that powers www.ads-software.com, and had used that access to modify the download file.

I’d prefer to believe someone cracked the code a second time, rather than there are dozens of critical issues that were missed in testing by the hard-working developers at WordPress. ??

I have a question for DivaMaggie, since it sounds like you’re having no problems with custom-smilies in 2.5…

I followed the plugin homepage instructions and completed all of the text entries for the smilies (from WP’s Using Smilies listing). So the smilies show correctly at the bottom of the Write panel.

Then I copied this code from the plugin home page and pasted where it said in the comments.php before the form:
<?phpif ( function_exists(cs_print_smilies) ) {cs_print_smilies();}?>

But when I opened the post there was a parsing error saying the ‘{‘ was unexpected. Tried changing the brackets to parenthesis, but no luck. Tried moving it within the form, but no luck.

After all of that, I tried uncommenting the default WordPress smiley code in the comments.php and that worked. I actually tried to just uncomment and use the default smiley code which displayed the images for the buttonbar but did not in the saved comment (displayed the text). But after completing the plugin form with all the smiley text, it now displays the correct smiley in the saved comment.

So, this strange workaround combo works for now but I’m guessing you got it to work with the line of code pasted into comments.php as recommended by custom-smilies, right? Can you tell me how you did that?

Thanks!

thank you very much, Michael H. That worked for me, as well.

FINALLY, quicktags that work with 2.5.

see this post
and do this:

The plugin’s two file unzip to a subfolder called comment-quicktags but it (the plugin) only worked when I put those two files into the wp-content/plugins folder. So I had to delete the wp-content/plugins/comment-quicktags folder then upload the two file directly to the plugins folder.

Phpmyadmin does manual backups, only. I need to schedule daily backups.

I’ll look into the link in your second post. Thanks!

By the way, why is it that WP 2.0.x versions can schedule a post to be published at a future date and time but it can’t schedule database backups?

Well yes, of course they do, but restoring from their backup is a formal process for a fee. Too restrictive for my needs.

I’m basically looking for the new scheduling functionality of the two main WP database admin plugins offered for WP 2.x, only, with a restore function as easy as Lester’s wp-dbmanager. Lester said he can’t offer it for versions below WP 2.x, which in my experience is just not as stable as 2.0.10. Hence, the search for a separate utility.

Thanks!