Internet Profits Blog

Spammers are attracted to WordPress blogs because they can leave their name and have it hyperlinked to their website to create a valuable link.

Instead of encouraging such spam, or having to moderate comments to delete spammy name links, why not simply delete the option to submit a website?

Our point of reference is the Mandigo theme, which we love, but this procedure should be universal across Wordpress blogs.

What you want to do is from the Theme Editor find the comments.php file.

About 3/4 of the way down there will be a section where you see the input requests if someone is not logged into your blog. The requests ask for the person’s name, email address, and website url.

Here is the code requesting the url:

<p><input type="text" name="url" id="url" value="<? php echo $comment_author_url; ?> "size="22" tabindex="3" /> 
	<label for="url"><small><?php _e('Website', 'mandigo'); ?></small></label></p>

Simply delete this code. Problem solved and it will not affect your blog because this is not a required field (unlike the name and email fields.)

Now, the only way a spammer can leave a link is if they post a link in the comments portion of the field. By moderating the discussion so that any comments are held if their contain one or more links, the spammer is stopped cold.

Wordpress offers both posts and pages, and the differences between the two are not always obvious.

Posts can be associated with categories. Pages cannot.

If you associate a post with a category, and only have that one post for the category, then it can look like a page for website linking. Normally, each page can be linked in the sidebar, but each post cannot. Instead, the category for the post can be linked, or a plugin can be installed that might, for instance, display the last 5 posts. But if you want a table of contents that is harder with posts than with pages.

Pages can have subpages. That is, like a directory structure there can be subdirectories. Posts cannot.

Consider the Michael Jackson Funeral Website. Along the right-side of the page is a menu. Everything under ‘Memorabilia’ is a page. Everything under ‘Topics’ is a post. Each page displays one page of information. Each link under Topics displays the various posts associated with that category. There could be subpages listed under each page, but a decision was made not to clutter the menu with subpage listings.

Also, not all pages are listed in the menu. You can select certain pages not to be displayed. That cannot be done with posts.

What is going on is that the normal default terms of Pages and Categories have been changed to make the menu more attractive for the website.

Also, by default only posts appear in the Wordpress blog’s rss feed. Pages do not. This means if you only use pages and not posts, then you do not have an rss feed.

If you want pages to appear in Wordpress rss feeds then you need a plugin called RSS Includes Pages. One undocumented issue with the plugin is that it will not work if you only have pages on your blog. What you need to do is create some posts, then this plugin will be able to add your blog pages to the rss feed.

Sometimes a website will experience a spike in traffic or have other issues which result in the web host suspending a WordPress script. This means your WordPress blog will not be accessible, which could mean your entire site is not accessible.

Instead, people trying to access your site receive an ugly 403 Permission Denied error.

Very bad.

What is happening is that your web host is disabling access to the index.php in your blog’s main directory.

To quickly circumvent this problem while working matters out with your web host, you will need a copy of your index.php file. Since you will not be able to access or view the code in the one that has been disabled, copy an index.php file from another blog you have, or create a new blog on a new domain just so you can copy the text of a basic WordPress index.php file.

Then upload that file to your disabled blog, and call it index2.php.

Now, in your .htacess file add this line:

ErrorDocument 403 /index2.php

Problem solved. What will happen is that the index.php file that WordPress needs to function is still disabled and returns a 403 error. However, the .htaccess file now traps that error and instead of displaying an ugly error page, redirects all traffic to index2.php. Since index2.php just happens to have the code from index.php which displays WordPress pages, your WordPress blog will continue to be displayed.

Your web host may not be happy about the circumvention, but you may need to be creative to keep your site up and money-flowing while issues are resolved with your web host.