Tips and Tricks

Fighting registration spam with a honey pot

Chad Butler · Aug 3, 2013 ·

I’ve had a few requests for help with combating registration spam using the plugin. To be honest, I’m right there with you all – I was getting a great deal of registration spam here on the site. I’ve been working on how to reduce that with a number of approaches.

One approach is the Security extension which has settings to set up black lists. But blocking IP addresses needs to be done with caution. Many spammers are not spamming from their own machines. Some of it comes from innocent victims with compromised systems.

Another possible solution that can work well is to use what is known as a “honey pot.” This is essentially a trap that the spam bot puts its hand into and is trapped. That is the method I will describe here.

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Dynamic redirect to referrer in login

Chad Butler · Aug 2, 2013 ·

This article is provided free. Find out how you can get full access to premium content, including how-to articles and support forums, as well as priority email support and member exclusive plugin extensions..

I have a challenge creating a title for this tutorial, so to describe what it covers, I recently had a question regarding how to dynamically put a redirect back to the original content into the link to the login page. In this instance, the user had customized how they were using the plugin and rather than having the login in place of blocked content as is the default, they had a link to the login page. Continue Reading →

Add a first name greeting to the new registration email

Chad Butler · Aug 2, 2013 ·

As much as I try to make the plugin as flexible as possible with a framework that includes lots of hooks for customization, every once in awhile a question pops up that forces me to think outside the box, so to speak. Case in point, I recently received a question in the forum about putting a first name greeting into the body of the welcome email that goes to a user upon new registration. Seemingly intuitive and simple, that particular field is not readily available to the email function. BUT… have no fear, there is a very simple customization that makes it (and other fields) available to the email filter. Continue Reading →

Working with Genesis: Stylesheet Pack

Chad Butler · Jul 23, 2013 ·

Many users of WordPress and WP-Members also use the Genesis framework (including me!). I have started to create stylesheets for the plugin that will work better with the Genesis child themes that are available from StudioPress. I’ve put together a package of the custom stylesheets currently available as well as a script for adding them to them to the dropdown in the plugin’s options.

StudioPress Genesis Child Themes Currently Available

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Adding the WP display_name field to the WP-Members user profile update form

Chad Butler · Jul 10, 2013 ·

Recent versions of the plugin have improved support for some of the WP native fields such as nickname, user_nicename, and display_name. I will be continuing to improve support for these fields. Currently, if you want to add something like the Display Name field to the front end of the plugin, you need a little customization. This post will take you through adding that to the front-end user profile update.

This needs to be done in the user profile update and not at registration because WP bases these fields on data used in registration that is not available on the static form – the nickname, the username, and first/last name. This tutorial focuses on adding it to the user profile update, much like WP’s backend (which doesn’t set this at registration, either). Continue Reading →