Noisepages

After our upgrade to WordPress 3.0 we’re under a bit of a spam attack. So until we can find something that makes it less easy for human spammers to sign up and post pointlessness to the site, I’ve switched the Noisepages user signups to an invite-only system.

An important part of our Noisepages development roadmap is creating a system which prevents as much blog spam as possible, as well as allowing us to quickly remove any that does get through. While we’re working on that, we’d prefer to err on the side of caution, rather than getting a user database which contains “sleeper” spam accounts, waiting to spring.

Anyone who’s had an account for more than 24 hours should be able to invite as many people as they like.

If you would like an account, and don’t already know someone who can invite you, please leave a comment on this thread, using the email address you’d like your account associated with. I’ll get an email notification of your comment and should have you up and running in no time.

Let’s face it: social networking sucks. The tools are primitive, they waste your time, they’re unintelligent… you know. What if they could be different? What if your browser could actually inspire you to make stuff, and make it easier to connect, so you can get on with your life away from your browser?

We’re big believers in what WordPress and BuddyPress can accomplish, aided by open APIs and open Web standards. And now, the magic of JavaScript and HTML5 can even connect to music and visual making, from OSC controllers to Pd and synthesis in the browser to Processing.js generative visuals. It’s a great time for the Web.

So, we’re starting small, here on Noisepages. We have a timetable for implementing general awesomeness over the course of the summer. And we’d love your input. If you’re a coder and want to learn more about WP and BP, if you want to develop some highly marketable skills for how to work with these platforms (since some of you do Web work as your day job), or if you just want to get your hands dirty with some code to make it do what you want, we want to hear from you.

A blog that connects intelligently to Bandcamp? A Processing.js sketch that visualizes information so you can find it easily? A way to plug into your Xbox gamertag so you can distract yourself with a little Battlefield 1943? We’re open to ideas. Get in touch by messaging me here on Noisepages.

Everything that we develop will be open and free, too, so this is a chance to learn this stuff together.

See also our dev group: http://noisepages.com/groups/noisepages-developers/

Community members likely received a blast spam email last night from a spambot calling itself “Joy.” Since this impacts everyone, I’ll share with the whole site, not just the developer group. We’re making headway to blocking spammers – part of what I view as essential before formally “launching” Noisepages.

Just be aware, this is a problem BuddyPress in general can experience. The good news is, that also means the whole BuddyPress development community is working to solve the problem.

There’s a thread on the BP forum:
Here come the spammers

The BP dev group is having an IRC chat on Wednesday. I don’t want to clutter that group with Noisepages users, but we could use a couple of volunteers to lurk, and we’ll make sure someone from the CDM dev team is onboard. That chat is Wednesday 19:00 UTC on FreeNode at #buddypress-dev.

Also, I’ll do my best to push my own recaptcha code this week. I think in this case, the benefits of having fellow developers review the plug-in far outweigh the potential for bot makers to do the same.
http://github.com/peterkirn/wp-recaptcha

Tomorrow is the Preakness Stakes, the horse race that makes the second leg of the Triple Crown. And at long last, after some alpha testing and a long hiatus, Noisepages is off to the races.

I’ve reopened registrations, thanks to two fixes:
1. A patch to BuddyPress, the system on which we’re building Noisepages, fixes a critical spam hole.
2. I’ve got the 0.1 release of a plug-in I’ve written to use ReCaptcha to further secure the sign-up process.

If you’ve been waiting to join up, go for it!

Also, we’ve stopped most spam signups by hand, but if you find one we’ve missed, send it our way.

You can read about this issue in more detail in our Noisepages dev group:
Registration issues resolved, with more fixes coming

If you’re interested in WordPress development, I’m working with developer Jorge Peña to bring my ReCaptcha hooks for BuddyPress into the new, refactored code base for his wp-recaptcha plug-in. Nothing there yet, but very soon I’ll push some changes to this GitHub repository:
http://github.com/peterkirn/wp-recaptcha/tree/oo-refactor

Group email subscriptions: you can now subscribe to groups via email. Pick a favorite group, and adjust your settings right in the email settings tab. For me, this is great, as it means the ability to replace Google Groups for this application.

Developers and advanced users/bloggers, join our dev group! If you want to keep track of the work we’re doing, see what WordPress and BuddyPress implementation and integration look like, offer your skills, or just offer your input, hop in. (And now you have email notification if you like.)

Noisepages Developers

Get help. The developer group is for development discussion only. If you just have questions about using WordPress and Noisepages, or questions you want answered, please join the user group:

Noisepages Help

Neither of these groups has been well-maintained (okay, maintained, period), but that will change from this point on.

Thanks for your patience; I’m glad we’re finally getting this underway, and the codebase of BuddyPress and WordPress is maturing in such a way that our timing may wind up working well.

At long last, we’ve got design, development, and server efforts in place to finally begin delivering on the promise of Noisepages. Thanks to everyone who’s been patient during the kick-the-tires, alpha, no-actual-functionality phase. (I’ve been pleasantly surprised to find some people find the site usable before we’ve actually done work, partially I think a testament to the great blogging a handful of folks have done!)

Now, with a new version of BuddyPress, some cool design things happening, and lots of potential for simple PHP hacks to make BuddyPress and WordPress more functional, we’re ready to get into the fun part – the real work.

And yes, we’re catching up with registrations / fixing the registration system.

If you’ve got some experience in WordPress, in PHP, and/or in CSS and JavaScript, and you want to help with open source projects to better these platforms and make communities more functional on the Web, let us know. We’ll have a lot of small projects on which people can work, and opportunities for creative ideas and problem solving.

It seems that we’re in the midst of a bit of a spammer signup storm. It’s reasonably trivial for us to identify and delete these accounts – spammers are nothing if not predictable and uncreative – but Peter and I are both AFK for a large chunk of this weekend, so we’re going to temporarily suspend manual signups.

If you’d like an account, please contact us with your email address and desired username and we’ll get you hooked up.

Hi NoisePagers! If you’ve been unlucky, you’ve noticed that we’re being hit by quite a few spammers at the moment. Fortunately it’s reasonably trivial to remove them, and as spammers they’re nothing if not predictable in their username patterns and obviously named spam blogs.

However, given the nature of artistic projects, band names and the like, it’s possible that we might  mistake your legitimate signup for a spammer. If this happens, please contact us so we can reinstate you.

Since we first flipped the switch on noisepages, some users found that spam filters were blocking the receipt of messages – most disturbingly, the message that allows you to confirm an account. That problem should now be fixed. If you have any issue, let us know, or chat on the #cdmblogs channel on IRC freenode.net

Dormant accounts are automatically deleted, so if you had a userid/email address you wanted to use, it should again be available. Apologies for the inconvenience.

I resolved the issue I was having with Sendmail by replacing it with Postfix. Duh.

For more on the latest updates, check out yesterday’s post.

Okay, quick updates:

• Posting to forums: working! This fix wound up taking all of last night, so anyone interested in running BuddyPress, drop me a line and I’ll try to share what I figured out with the help of a fantastic person on #buddypress-dev.
• Registration: nearly fixed! A server configuration issue is causing messages sent from the registration to be blocked by some mail servers. If you haven’t been able to sign up, I hope to fix this later today.
• Main page: kinda screwy! Yeah, the default template isn’t terribly pretty, is a little clunky to use, and also is now including images on the main page regardless of whether they scale to the column. But…
• Now it’s template time! I’m going to make minor cosmetic alterations to this default template to make it more usable, but in the meantime we’re focusing on a ground-up redesign, which will in turn be open source. If you’re interested in CSS, PHP, WordPress, or just providing feedback, let us know.

Chat regarding noisepages for now will take place on freenode.net IRC channel #cdmblogs. Eventually, noisepages will also have its own Jabber-based chat server. You can also reach me through my noisepages account, though, to provide feedbaack, or if you’re having trouble signing up, just use the CDM contact form.

We’ve now fully upgraded noisepages to the new platform, which will allow us to move effectively from alpha into beta. The platform on which we’re building is now fully stable, so it’s up to us to build a community platform on top of that.

Posts from the forums remain here:

http://noisepages.com/forums/

But that setup wound up being difficult; we never really got the hacked-together integration the way it was supposed to work. My apologies to everyone who was frustrated.

Anyway, the reason we’re so excited about this upgrade is that forums now actually work properly. Unfortunately, in order to do a fully clean install, that has not migrated the few dozen posts made to the group forums previously (though the content is at the link above). Wire posts are unaffected, but the Forum posts are. But we do now have a fully permanent solution, and one that should be relatively bug-free. (Any bugs we find we can now actually fix!)

Please – don’t leave those forum sections empty. Now we’re actually free to hammer away at this. I’ll be posting to CDM proper as we hit high gear for the beta phase, and also talk about how we can do real-time feedback. Stay tuned, and post away.