Educational Technology

Voices is under attack by a distributed botnet. Prior to requiring off campus bloggers to connect to VPN before they can login, the login page was receiving over a 100 login requests per second. So what are the attackers trying to do? Well, they are trying to brute-force (keep guessing until you get it) passwords. They are most likely trying to brute force the password for admin, but we do not have a user with that username. We would suggest that if you haven’t ever changed your password on Voices or haven’t in a while that you change your password and make it something reasonably secure. You can use The Password Meter to check the strength of your password. We are investigating ways to protect Voices that will not require VPN.

“Should I be worried?”

“No.”

This type of attack happens to popular websites all the time. Usually the attack results in the server crashing due to the incredibly high number of requests being made. These attacks make the news when the site that goes down is for a major corporation. We have things under control for now and will hopefully be able to remove the VPN requirement soon.

We will be upgrading the site to the latest version of WordPress on Thursday, December 20th. The upgrade should take about thirty minutes and then it will take roughly another hour or two for the upgrade script to process each site. We will begin the process at 8 AM and it should be done by noon. During that time users should refrain from trying to interact with their sites.

You can learn about the new and updated features at http://wordpress.org/news/ Probably the most notable improvement to users will be the new media upload interface. The new interface reduces the number of clicks involved in adding media and also makes it much easier to create photo galeries.

We have completed upgrading Voices to the latest version of WordPress. All plugins and themes have also been updated. We also took this opportunity to modify how the Course Sites page displays. All departments and programs will be collapsed when first visiting the page and hovering over a department or program will display its course sites. We hope you find this a welcome change that makes viewing the Course Sites page easier.

Thanks to Dr. Holt we now have two course templates that faculty can select when creating a course. You can view the templates at http://coursetemplateone.voices.wooster.edu and http://coursetemplatetwo.voices.wooster.edu. We plan to add We have added a third based on Dr. Wilson’s course sites http://coursetemplatethree.voices.wooster.edu.

There is one known bug at the moment. When creating a site, if you try to use a course template you will receive an error and the template will not be applied. We have contacted the maker of the New Blog Templates plugin and our working with them to resolve the issue. In the interim you can contact Jon Breitenbucher (jbreitenbucher or 2207) and request to have a course site created using a course template. This does not impact students or anyone creating a site who leaves the template drop down set to None.

Congratulations! You have written a post that for whatever reason has made its way onto the radar of comment spammers. You may not even realize that the comments are spam. I mean they are just complementing you and your post, “Great Post!! Thank you very much!” and “This web site is really a walk-through for all of the info you wanted about this and didn’t know who to ask. Glimpse here, and you’ll definitely discover it.” are two recent examples from sites hosted on Voices. These comments look innocent enough but it is the links used for the commenters URL that are the real issue. The commenter’s URL usually points to an adult site or a marketing site. So what can you do to stop such comments?

All sites on Voices already have some hidden comment spam plugins working to stop such comments, but these plugins are just checking the text of the comments for words associated with spam or excessive links in the comments. Notice that both the examples above seem like they could be legitimate and so the plugins checking for spam let them through. Dealing with comments like these involves either changing the Discussion settings under the Settings panel or enabling another plugin on your site.

If your site really only needs to get comments from classmates then you should be able to check the Users must be registered and logged in to comment box in the Other comment settings section of the Discussion settings. While you’re in the Discussion settings you might also consider checking Automatically close comments on articles older than, An administrator must always approve the comment and Comment author must have a previously approved comment boxes. This should eliminate all unwanted comments from displaying on your site. If you would like to allow comments from the general public then you should Enable the WP-reCAPTCHA plugin in the Plugins panel and check the An administrator must always approve the comment and Comment author must have a previously approved comment boxes in the Discussion settings. After doing this visit the reCAPTCHA settings under the Settings panel and configure reCAPTCHA as you would like it to operate. As always you should feel free to stop by the Instructional Technology lab in Taylor 205 if you need further assistance or have questions.

Edit: Also, see WordPress.org for some more helpful information on dealing with comment spam.