Lance Willett

face,

Did the errors all come from that same plugin? Plugin authors should be using security checks in their code to avoid access from outside the WP environment. For example, the check_admin_referer function checks if the referrer is accessing the page from the admin site, and has a valid nonce value (more on WordPress nonces).

I’d suggest posting this topic to the WP-Hackers mailing list as well to see if anyone there has hardened their setup to avoid such random access. Here’s a possibly related thread on that list (from the plugin author’s viewpoint).

Note: there may already be a WordPress plugin that does this type of security check. See https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Hardening_WordPress.

Here’s another WordPress security tactic that also uses htaccess to limit access: Securing WordPress: A passive method for preventing unauthorized requests to wp-admin and wp-login.php.

Author comment is highlighted differently
It seems like they are all pretty much the same, even on WP approved sites.

davidzs,

Not all themes have author highlighting enabled, but it’s a recommended practice. Especially for long, long comment lists! It helps you scan the comments quickly and see the author’s replies easily.

Since WordPress 2.7 the wp_list_comments template tag outputs an automatic class attribute for each comment which can be used to style author comments separately from normal comments.

If you want to dig into this and create your own author highlighting styles, here’s a great tutorial from ThemeLab: Highlight Author Comments in WordPress, The Easier Right Way.