We’ve had a few reports recently of blogs receiving more spam comments than usual. Although in most cases these comments won’t appear on your blog because you’ve got all comments set to be moderated, receiving the comment notification emails and having to sift through the comments on your blog can become a little frustrating.
To combat these, we’ve installed a new add-on and made it available to all users, whether you have pbPro, a free blog or are on a free trial.
As soon as the add-on is activated it should stop most of the spam comments on your blog. Although we can’t guarantee it will stop all spam comments, we’ve seen great results with it so far.
To activate the add-on, visit the Add-ons page on your blog and locate the add-on called ‘Anti Spam’. Simply click activate and you’re all set, it just works!
As always, if you have any problems or still continue to get a lot of unwanted spam, you can open a ticket here or reach us on Twitter.
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After much time tinkering, testing and tinkering some more, we are pleased to announce that all PrimaryEmail and SchoolEmail customers are to be upgraded to Exchange 2013.
Here’s a short list of some of the new stuff, coming for you in Exchange 2013
When is this happening and what should I expect?
The upgrade process will be completed by the 1st of September. If you experience any problems accessing your account, make sure you try logging on from the logon page https://login.schoolemail.co.uk.
SchoolEmail Wizards out.
A few of you have contacted us regarding the access to your blogs being denied. First of all, we’re sorry that this has happened and caused you to waste valuable time in lessons. The reason for this is to prevent malicious attacks; when people or automated programs try logging into Primary Blogger by typing passwords many times in quick succession.
Why would this affect your school?
Often when teaching, you may tell the children to follow along step by step, including when to click to log in. Because all of the computers in class are on the same IP address at the school, the software we have installed to prevent malicious attacks thinks that your IP address is being used in an attack.
How do you prevent this?
If possible, when logging on to Primary Blogger, try to make it so that not everybody in the class is logging on at exactly the same time. That way, the software won’t kick in and lock you out for a period of time.
We hope this helps to explain why things haven’t been running so smoothly and hope you continue to enjoy using Primary Blogger. You can always notify us of any problems or ideas here or tweet us @PrimaryBloggger.
The post Help! I’m locked out of my school blog! appeared first on PrimaryBlogger.
We love it when you share your feedback and ideas with us – when we heard from one of our users who’d noticed a commenting loophole on PrimaryBlogger, we got straight on with trying to find a solution.
It came to light that even when Moderate Comments is turned on, if an author or contributor comments on their own posts, there’s a WordPress loophole that allows the comment to bypass the Moderation Queue and publish straight on the site. Our user was concerned about this and wanted a way to force all comments, without exception, to be moderated.
The issue was raised with our fantastic Development Team who got to work on a new add-on. Within a matter of days the new add-on was ready for testing and it’s now been made available on the PrimaryBlogger Pro accounts. The add-on, named Approve Author Comments, adds an additional tick box to the discussion page, which allows an administrator to force author and contributor comments on their own posts to need approval.
Pretty good eh? We know how important it is to you to have control over comments for safety reasons and hope that you’ll find this extra little feature very handy! Don’t forget to let us know if you have anything in mind that you would like to see on PrimaryBlogger. Happy blogging!
Don’t forget you can notify us of any problems or ideas here or tweet us @PrimaryBloggger.
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We’ve just discovered that the Disqus Comment System Add-on had secretly started showing adverts on blogs that had it enabled. We’re obviously massively against this so we’ve now deleted the Add-on. If you were using it on your blog then you will notice that your comment system has gone back to how it used to look.
We’ve created a number of options in replacement of Disqus. Most people were using it to get around the restriction of requiring an email address for writing comments. We initially took the decision of making email addresses compulsory, due to the amount of spam we were receiving with this option unticked. We now have a lot better spam protection in place, so we decided to make a plugin to re-enable the option, to confirm that users knew what they were doing when allowing comments without the requirement for an email address.
If you wish to allow comments without a name or email address being filled in, go to the Dashboard and click Add-ons in the left hand menu. Scroll down to “Comment Without Email Address” and click Activate below it. Now go to Settings > Discussion and you’ll see an option to untick in red with the label of “” next to it. Untick this option and the one below, saying “Users must be registered and logged in to comment” and press “Save Changes” at the bottom.
We also have the Livefyre Add-on available in the Add-ons section, it will however ask you to login via different services to be able to comment, you can’t comment just using your PrimaryBlogger username. It will let you log in using Twitter, Facebook and Google among others.
As usual, let us know if you have any problems at http://support.primaryt.co.uk
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