Articles about Online Business Technology

I recently discovered that my username was being exposed in the WordPress classes for comments as comment-author-[myusername] and being scraped and abused by some sharp spammers. Here’s how I fixed the issue.

I’m working on a site where I want to pull out just one single category of blog post, “Case Studies”, into its own URL structure.

I’m doing this so that I can see how this category of content is performing in Analytics, and also to send a signal to Google about the more important nature of this content to this website.

Initially I used a plugin, Custom Permalinks, to make this change, but there were a few issues with this option.

So I decided to create a solution in PHP instead.

I’ve recently begun getting spam messages through my contact forms that are submitted by humans, not bots, so they don’t get stopped by the standard honeypot setting in WPForms, my form plugin of choice.

If you’ve ever used Contact Form 7, you might know that it uses the values that you enter into your Comment Blacklist field to stop spam messages being successfully submitted by people.

I wanted to create something similar for WPForms, that was easy to maintain, and add new terms to, and used the existing comment blacklist. I also didn’t want the overhead of another plugin just to do this, so I created a solution in PHP.