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Todd, I’m not leaving “garbage.” Your reply is rude!

I did test Spam Free by logging out of my account and leaving comments. That was a no-brainer! I submitted many different comments, mostly copies of spam marked by Akismet. It appeared to work, except that it allowed too much spam through, necessitating the use of Akismet as well. I felt no need to test it further because I got no error messages. HOWEVER, that simple test does not guarantee that it continues to work!! The comment that was lost/rejected by Spam Free was a long one. Perhaps you should warn people that Spam Free does not like long, detailed comments?

Perhaps if you had warned users that the simple test is not enough, I would not have had this problem and left this negative report.

Another thing that would really help would be preserving a comment and allowing a user to go back to it with the <Back> button on the rejection form. I thought we’d find the original comment by clicking the back button on the form, but it was gone. Not great design for commenting plugin.

What my husband experienced was definitely the result of Spam-Free with the error message regarding lack of a password or “incorrect password.” His was a real user test –from a different computer than mine. I still wonder how many others experienced the same problem.

If you have worked with others who had problems, you should know that there are some plugin conflicts. Why do you not post a list of plugins which you know conflict with Spam Free? Then users can decide which they want more –their current plugins or yours.

Others have had similar complaints. Yet you continue to assert that there are “Zero false positives.” This is simply NOT TRUE!!

Furthermore, Spam Free passed through spam that Akismet correctly identified. I have no idea why Akismet is so smart, but it sure is a lot smarter than Spam-Free. Perhaps it’s because Akismet is more mature.

There’s no point going to your “official support forum” while you continue to make exaggerated claims and you are rude to users who do not find your plugin as perfect as you make it out to be. How could you possibly know that there are zero false positives?

Your users can not know how many comments they are missing, even while they are happy that their spam folders are no longer filling up.

Of course, I uninstalled your plugin. When it comes to choosing between having to delete spam daily and missing significant comments, I’ll choose the comments any day.

Yes, I should have done more testing on a test site first. But your claims were so positive (Zero false positives!) that I rashly installed it on a high-traffic site. I will test it again on a test site when I have time. And if I can make it work and verify that it does not come up with false positives after throwing a battery of comments at it, I’ll take back my negative comment.

How do we know your last paragraph above is true? Words are cheap.

Hello Daniel,

I use the Weaver ii Pro theme, and I posted on their forum re this plugin which would be very handy for me. I figured a child theme would be the perfect place to put the code to make the plugin functional. And it is — because any other modifications would be lost in the next theme upgrade.

(I like the theme because it is highly customizable, flexible and mobile-friendly, even without specific mobile modifications.)

This is what the theme author, Bruce Weaver, replied:

Well, I need to preach a bit here.

1. That approach is entirely unnecessary. The plugin should be written to use a filter for ‘the_author’. That is how WordPress is supposed to work.

2. The replacement example will soon not work. The function ‘the_author()’ is deprecated – it will likely go away from WP soon. There is a replacement, ‘get_the_author()’, and that replacement will run the final output through the ‘the_author’ filter, where a plugin should be able to replace things.

I wonder whether you could do a little more work on the plugin to make it more stable through WP upgrades and theme upgrades.

Bruce provided a hint for stability through WP upgrades, and a child theme would make the plugin survive theme upgrades.

Not everyone who might want to use the plugin is familiar with child themes. Thus a sample child theme including only the necessary modifications for this plugin would be very helpful. I might have posted the instructions, except that, if the plugin uses deprecated functions, its usefulness is rather short-term.

Looking forward to your thoughts on this.

Inge

H’mmm .. so I’ll have to check with the theme author as well.
(Using latest version of weaver ii pro)

Thanks. ??

My hosting support figures it is a plugin. But it would have to be a plugin that is designed for multisite. I guess I’ll have to go through the plugins one by one.

I’ll also try to reproduce the error.

Thanks. ??

Yes, ipstenu, multisite is active an works as expected, with the sabbathissues.org domain mapped as a “parked domain” to the root of ssnet.org.

Support staff at my host said that this is unusual behavior, and that my using a www. subdomain to make links work is a workaround, not a solution. Nothing in my hosting setup should produce this behavior.

Thanks for answering. I’m really interested in figuring this out.

When I hover over the links to https://ssnet.org, what shows up is https://sabbathissues.org.

I checked with my hosting company, and they say it is not a server issue. Only WordPress or a plugin could change links like that “on the fly.”

[Later]
On a hunch, I changes the links to https://www.ssnet.org
and https://www.ssnet.org/blog/2012/01/the-samoan-sabbath-dilemma

Note the www subdomain.

The links now work correctly.

Can someone please explain why this is to?

The code is this:
Until we have more information here, please read <a href="https://ssnet.org/blog/2012/01/the-samoan-sabbath-dilemma/">The Samoan Sabbath Dilemma </a>on <a href="https://ssnet.org/">Sabbath School Net</a>, which features regular updates through comments on the article.
Note that the link is to a file on SSNET.org.
Yet it goes to https://sabbathissues.org/blog/2012/01/the-samoan-sabbath-dilemma/ and that gives an error message.

Here’s my .htaccess file in the paste bin:
https://pastebin.com/Bqncs7Fq

dgilmour, the link is correct, as specified above. Not missing https://

You can see it by mousing over the link to “The Samoan Sabbath Dilemma” at https://sabbathissues.org/2012/02/hello-world/ (I even checked the HTML source to be sure), but if you click on the link it goes to https://sabbathissues.org/blog/2012/01/the-samoan-sabbath-dilemma/ NOTE the incorrect domain name.

(I installed the sabbathissues.org domain by parking it on the root of ssnet.org, as instructed by WordPress.)On the other hand, the site was recently migrated to another server. Could an entry in the .htaccess file have been lost?

Looks like my edit time window is closed. ??

Links from my main blog to sub-blog work perfectly.

My .htaccess file is this:
[82 lines of code moderated as per the Forum Rules. The maximum number of lines of code that you can post in these forums is ten lines. Please use the pastebin]

Thanks for that comment re plugins not being marked compatible. It makes me a little less skittish about trying plugins.

So a plugin marked compatible to WP 1.5 still works!!? That must be a very well-coded plugin. Now I’m curious which plugin that might be. ??

I wrote to the author, and here’s his reply:

Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2012 22:17:13 +0100
Subject: Re: Diamon MultiSite Widgets
From: Dániel Bozó

Hi,

Yes!
It should work with the newet release. (I don’t know any issues about incompatiblity)

I will commit soon a new version of the plugin with some fixes and some new features.

Thanks for using it,
Daniel

Hi Daniel,

Your plugin looks awesome — just what I need — but I see it’s listed as being compatible up to WP 3.1.4 and I’m using with WP 3.3.1.

Are you still supporting that widget?

Regards,
Inge Anderson

Thanks, Ipstenu.
I see it’s listed as being compatible up to WP 3.1.4 and I’m using with WP 3.3.1. It was last updated 301 days ago, and that doesn’t look too promising.

I’m writing to the author, and I’ll try it on a mirror site.

By the way, if I use a plugin and find it’s compatible with my current install when the info doesn’t say so, what is the easiest/best way to report its compatibility?

Looks like I forgot to identify the widget!

It was a tabbed widget, but I forgot which one.

Thanks to both of you. Deleting the theme via FTP fixed the problem.

My host is Hostgator.com, and email works just fine with a WordPress-mapped domain.

I was making it unnecessarily complicated for myself. ??