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Nothing to see here.

We’ve just updated our network-wide post indexer! What does that mean? Well, hopefully it means all Tripawds Blogs are being indexed, and everypawdy’s posts will continue to appear in the Blogs Directory and Recent Posts widgets throughout the Tripawds News Blog.

UPDATE: While this update did fix the Blogs Directory, we are still working diligently to resolve numerous other issues it caused…like broken feeds, widgets and main site indexing. Oh my!

Big News for Tripawds Bloggers!

Basic Tripawds Blogs will always be free. Jerry wouldn’t have it any other way.

In order to do this, however, we have updated our Supporter framework to offer three levels of support with even more enhanced features to those who wish to help keep this community online with an ongoing PayPal subscription. Please review the updated Tripawds Supporter account feature comparison for complete details or consider upgrading your blog now.

Act Now to Save on Supporter Upgrades

We are offering a discount to the first five lucky Tripawds Bloggers who upgrade their account! Use coupon code TRISUPP25OFF to receive 25% off your first payment of any Tripawds Supporter level! This coupon code can only be used five times so upgrade your blog now and save!

A Few Things All Tripawd Bloggers Should Know

Tripawds Supporter BadgeIf you have not yet upgraded your blog, you may notice some new content being inserted into your posts and pages. (See links at the top and bottom of this post.) Consider upgrading your blog to immediately remove these ads and Support links.

Supporters can remove ads from other favorite Tripawds blogs from their Dashboard -> Supporter Status -> Disable Ads.

There are now three Supporter levels to choose from for showing your appreciation of this community and enabling enhanced features on your blog.

Certain plugins are now only available for Supporter II blogs. If you are a current Supporter, do not deactivate these plugins or you may need to upgrade to get them back.

Premium Themes are now only activated for Supporter III blogs. If you had previously activated a premium theme, do not change it or you will need to upgrade to switch back.

If you are a subscriber and had the Supporter Badge displaying in your blog, you will need to replace it with your current level badge by dragging the Supporter Widget back to your sidebar from the Appearance -> Widgets tab in your dashboard.

You can upgrade, modify or view the current status of your Tripawds subscription anytime from the Supporter tab in your dashboard.

What do you get for your money?

Most importantly, Tripawds Supporters gain the satisfaction of knowing that they help us maintain the largest online community for three legged dogs and their people. Below is a comparison of all account features. Please visit the Supporter Upgrade page and select your site to see additional monthly or quarterly payment options and pricing.

Tripawds Blogs Free Supporter Supporter II Supporter III
Banner Ads on Blog included not included not included not included
Disable Ads on Other Tripawds Blogs
included not included (5) not included (10) not included (25)
Basic Comment Spam Protection included included included included
Subscriptions to Blog Comments
not included included included included
Enhanced Spam Protection not included included included included
Simple Contact Form Creation not included included included included
Enhanced Video Embedding not included not included included included
Search Engine Optimization not included not included included included
Blog Statistics & Shortlinks not included not included not included included
Premium Blog Theme Selection not included not included not included included
Personal Tech Support not included not included not included included
Upload Space 25 MB 100 MB
250 MB 1 GB
Cost FREE $25 / year $49 / year $129 / year

Did we mention the coupon? Act now to save 25% off your first payment of any Tripawds Supporter level with code:  TRISUPP25OFF (Only 5 coupons available!)

How did we do it?

The Tripawds Supporter framework is powered by the simple to use yet massively configurable Pro Sites plugin from WPMU Dev. After network-activating this multisite plugin, we were able to easily create the Supporter options and associated account features above by enabling different modules and assigning certain plugins and themes to each Pro Site level.

We created these Supporter levels to automatically remove ads and enable enhanced blogging features for sites with recurring PayPal subscription plans. Many other payment gateways are also available. A few options we chose not to apply include the ability to:

  • Prohibit or limit publishing of posts and/or pages for selected Pro Site levels.
  • Provide “unfiltered_html” permission to specific user types for selected levels.
  • Restrict XML-RPC and Atom Publishing to selected Pro Sites.
  • Only allow blog access for paid sites.
  • Limit BuddyPress group creation and messaging to users of a Pro Site.

Pro Sites includes far too many features for me to list here. The multiple Supporter levels, ease of use, coupon codes and robust statistics were reason enough for us to upgrade. Check out the Pro Sites plugin in action to see how you might use it for your multisite network!


WPMU DEV - The WordPress Experts

Tripawds Joins SOPA Strike

On Wednesday, January 18th thousands of web sites will go dark to protest SOPA & PIPA, two US bills racing through Congress that threaten prosperity, online security, and freedom of expression.

Stop SOPA Widget Pop-up MessageTo join this effort to spread awareness about this vitally important news, two plugins have been activated across the Tripawds network:

Stop SOPA Ribbon
Help stop American Consorship by putting a ribbon that says Stop SOPA on your WordPress site or network.

Stop SOPA Widget
This plugin adds a widget that will show a modal window to increase awareness about SOPA/PIPA on Jan 18th.

Due to the sensitive nature of this community and the helpful resources all our blogs and discussion forums provide, we will not be shutting down the Tripawds network in protest. These plugins, however, shall remain activated to help us show our solidarity by doing the following.

  • As of now, all sites throughout the Tripawds network will display the Stop SOPA ribbon in the top right corner.
  • The Stop SOPA pop-up message shall display on all sites during the scheduled SOPA protest blackout time on January 18th from 8am-8pm EST (1300-0100 UTC). It is easily dismissed and will only be shown to each visitor once.

We shall keep these plugins network-activated through January 24, when congress votes on SOPA and PIPA. The pop-up message will only display during the scheduled strike but you can show it anytime until the 24th by adding #stopsopa to the end of any link to your blog like this:

Please help us put an end to these bills before they become law and end the internet as we know it.

Feel free to comment below, or chime in on this discussion about SOPA. But better yet, contact congress now!

 

Quick Fix for WordPress Trackback DoS Exploit

One thing about the WordPress development community, is that they are on top of things when it comes to potential exploits of the system. Just this morning there were numerous reports of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks upon hosted WordPress websites and WPMU blog communities, like this one. Steve Fortuna quickly posted a fix. Within minutes I found the detailed WordPress DoS Attack Script Solutions described in the HashBangCode blog and implemented them on all our sites. The last thing we need is another mysterious server load spike bringing down the Tripawds server.

For anyone interested, and daring enough to follow my directions — note this blog’s tagline — the fix is relatively simple:

Just insert the following to your wp-trackback.php file at line 47:

// DoS attack fix.
if ( strlen($charset) > 50 ) {
die;
}

The HashBangCode blog goes one step further and recommends adding the following at line 57 (assuming you added the above already):

// DoS attack fix.
if ( strlen($title) > 200 ) {
die;
}

For those who may be uncomfortable with editing core files, this plugin stops WordPress trackback DoS attacks.

I understand this all may mean absolutely nothing to Tripawds Bloggers, except to know that we too are on top of things when it comes to keeping Tripawds Blogs Community up and running. But I figure the faster news of fixes like this can be spread, the more likely we are to stop spammers and hackers in their tracks.


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Many thanks to drmike for first bringing this to my attention in the WPMU DEV Premium discussion forums. Yet another reason we are happy with our WPMU DEV Premium membership!

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