Anti Splog is now using the WPMU DEV API on over 100 domains!

So that means that WPMU DEV Members are getting the wisdom of over 100 paid up and comitted WPMU members, all helping each other fight splogs.

Of course, in an ideal world stuff like this would be free… but one of the great things about this being a membership based setup is you know that everyone using it has a common interest at heart, and is *highly* unlikely to be paying for the privilege of trying to skew results (we’d catch ‘em quickly too if they did :)

So, congrats to Anti Splog on your first 100 domains! It’s already much much harder to be a splogger, and in a few months time it’s going to be another degree more difficult too.

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There are many benefits to combining WordPress with task management. Who wants dozens of accounts to sign into for social networking, blogging, project management, and collaboration? Now you can have them all within your WordPress site. This plugin also works with WordPress MU 2.9.1, in case you want to create your own network for project management with multiple sites for individuals.

Features of WordPress Task Management With CollabPress

• Unlimited project and task creation
• Email notifications when new tasks are created
• Assign due dates to tasks
• Uses built-in WordPress user accounts

How to Get Started With WordPress and CollabPress

• Upload the CollabPress folder to the plugins directory in your WordPress or WPMU installation
• Activate the plugin
• Navigate to the CollabPress menu

After installing and activating, you’re ready to start creating new projects and assigning tasks using the CollabPress dashboard. You can assign tasks to any of your current WordPress users. Email notifications can be turned on or off, according to your preference for the project. As this plugin continues to develop, WordPress project management may become a viable alternative to some of the proprietary software options out there. I’d be excited to see someone fully integrate this with BuddyPress activity streams. This is definitely a plugin to keep your eye on in the near future.

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How to Install BuddyPress Classifieds

1. Make sure you have WPMU and BuddyPress 1.2 beta installed.

2. Download BuddyPress Classifieds and upload buddypress-classifieds directory to the wp-content/plugins folder.

3. Move the buddypress-classifieds/theme/classifieds directory to the same directory as your current theme.

4. Activate the plugin sitewide.

5. Create a new WPMU blog where the data will be stored. (This blog cannot be called ‘classifieds’).

6. If you want to have Categories enabled, simply add categories to your newly created blog.

7. Access your main blog. Under Admin > Blogs, edit the newly created blog and set the Public setting to “NO” (this is for removing the blog from the BuddyPress search results).

8. Configure the settings at BuddyPress >> Classifieds

If you want precise control for each of your blogs’ roles, activate (sitewide) the plugin BuddyPress Classifieds Roles & Capabilities, which is included with the main plugin. I experienced a few bumps in the road when it came to activating the Roles and Capabilities. Though the BuddyPress Classifieds plugin is still a little rough around the edges, I thought it was important to get the word out that the beta is here so that interested parties can help it gain momentum. I’m sure everything will be smoothed out as more users begin testing and modifying the plugin. It’s very exciting to know that Classifieds functionality is available to BuddyPress, with the ability to sort the listings by tags. Many thanks to Gordie Breant for this excellent addition, and I’m certain he’d appreciate your testing and feedback. Support for the plugin is available at its dedicated forum.

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How Does the WP Minify Plugin Work?

According to the plugin page:

WP Minify intercepts theme rendering at the get_header WordPress hook and puts everything that is echoed/outputted from the PHP code into an output buffer.
WP Minify then intercepts theme rendering again at the get_footer WordPress hook to stop the output buffer.
The plugin then evaluates the page content to extract all JavaScripts and stylesheets out.
The minified version of these JavaScripts and stylesheets are then re-injected into the content.
The page content is echoed/outputted as normal.

Installation is simple. Go to Plugins >> Add New. Activate WP Minify. Make sure you make the wp-content/plugins/wp-minify/cache writeable by the server. You shouldn’t have to do anything else.

How Will I Know WP Minify is Working?

After you activate the plugin, view the source of your site and you should see it outputting the CSS and JS files with paths similar to this:

wp-content/plugins/wp-minify/min/?f=/wp-content/plugins/buddypress/bp-themes/bp-default/style.css

wp-content/plugins/wp-minify/min/?f=/wp-includes/js/jquery/jquery.js,/wp-content/plugins/buddypress/bp-themes/bp-default/_inc/global.js,/wp-content/plugins/sidebar-post/js/validate.js

You should also notice a difference in your site loading speed. I noticed a significant increase in speed on my test site right away. Here are screenshots from my Firebug before and after.

My test site’s HTTP Requests BEFORE WP Minify (3 Javascript Requests @ 96KB)

My test site’s HTTP Requests AFTER WP Minify (1 Javascript Request @ 27KB)

My HTTP requests were reduced to a fraction of what they were before minifying the files. That was simply a BuddyPress test site with very little content. Your results are bound to better than mine. Take two minutes to install and activate this plugin and you will make your site a few seconds more zippy than it was before. Those couple of seconds can make a huge difference in the world of internet time where impatient users will leave unless you instantly capture their attentions. Please also note that this plugin does work with WP Super Cache. If you have any issues, check out the developer’s post on troubleshooting WP Minify.

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Can you guess who’s crazy about cats?! Fortunately your gallery will look much better than mine, but you’ll thank cat lady for the simplicity of this tutorial. ;) This is a handy way to display larger thumbnails of your members and allow users to quickly navigate to their profiles. You can use this for a featured section or an unfiltered gallery of all of your members. This example was built with BuddyPress 1.2 beta and WordPress 2.9.1. Here’s what you do:

Step 1: Create an Avatar Gallery Custom Page Template

If you’re using the default BuddyPress theme, make a copy of your page.php file and give it a new name, such as gallery.php. Add this to the very top of the template:

<?php
/*
Template Name: Gallery
*/
?>

That will tell WordPress to recognize this as a new page template.

Step 2: Add a Shortened Version of the Members Loop to Your Custom Template

I’m going to add examples of three different ways to display members: newest, popular, or random. Your can check out the different options at the BuddyPress codex section for custom member loops. I like to show the bigger 125px by125px avatars, but you can adjust the code as you see fit for your own gallery. Add this directly after the content section in your custom template.

						<!-- #gallery -->			
<h2>Newest Members</h2>
<?php if ( bp_has_members( 'type=newest&amp;max=6' ) ) : ?>
					<?php while ( bp_members() ) : bp_the_member(); ?>
						<a href="<?php bp_member_permalink() ?>"><?php bp_member_avatar('type=full&amp;width=125&amp;height=125') ?></a>
					<?php endwhile; ?>
<?php endif; ?>
<div class="clear"></div>
<h2>Most Popular Members</h2>
<?php if ( bp_has_members( 'type=popular&amp;max=6' ) ) : ?>
					<?php while ( bp_members() ) : bp_the_member(); ?>
						<a href="<?php bp_member_permalink() ?>"><?php bp_member_avatar('type=full&amp;width=125&amp;height=125') ?></a>
					<?php endwhile; ?>
<?php endif; ?>
<div class="clear"></div>
<h2>Random People You May Want to Meet</h2>
<?php if ( bp_has_members( 'type=random&amp;max=6' ) ) : ?>
					<?php while ( bp_members() ) : bp_the_member(); ?>
						<a href="<?php bp_member_permalink() ?>"><?php bp_member_avatar('type=full&amp;width=125&amp;height=125') ?></a>
					<?php endwhile; ?>
<?php endif; ?>
<div class="clear"></div>
						<!-- End #gallery -->

To adjust how many members the loop shows, change the max=6 to however many you want.
*Note: This code highlighter doesn’t seem to want to display ampersands correctly so wherever you see ‘& amp ; ‘ change that to an ampersand. ;)

Step 3: Add a New Page with the Custom Template

Go to Pages >> Add New. Give it a title. Make sure to select the gallery template you created from the drop-down box in the sidebar. Click Publish. You’re finished! You can use this same method for creating a gallery page of your groups as well, using a custom group loop. Have fun experimenting and leave a comment linking to your custom gallery if you try it out!

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Q: What is your background and how did you get involved with WordPress?

A:   As far back as my freshman year in high school I had wanted to be a teacher. I admired those innovative educators who pushed me as a student and taught the curriculum with a twist. I attended Elmhurst College in Elmhurst, IL and focused my studies on secondary education and English literature and composition. Along the way I was introduced to amazing instructional technologies and felt that the future of education rested in the hands of the Read/Write Web and its philosophies of open and collaborative content creation. This was around 2005 and 2006.

I hadn’t really used WordPress that much up until my professional seminar in the spring of 2007. My host school wasn’t doing anything with blogs, but I felt that it was especially important that my composition students were introduced to publishing for each other and the Web – the greatest of authentic audiences. I setup a domain with WordPress MU and hosted about 50 student blogs with pretty good success.

I’m still very much in a teaching capacity but I’ve made a bit of a career change and moved into library and information science. I worked first as the Library IT Specialist at Elmhurst College and now as a Knowledge and Learning Services Librarian at Darien Library in Darien, Ct. At Elmhurst, I led the development of a WordPress MU installation for over 400 first year student seminar blogs, created the library website with WordPress MU, and instructed many faculty and students on how to use this wonderful system.

During my graduate work and still to this day I develop WordPress MU course sites for Dr. Michael Stephens of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Dominican University. We began just hosting blogs but were blown away by the BuddyPress suite of plugins even when they were introduced in a very buggy beta stage. We monitored the development and then pulled the trigger in the fall of 2009 by creating a core installation of WordPress MU with BuddyPress at classes.tametheweb.com. We currently host three separate sites: LIS 701, LIS 753, and LIS 768 (the most prolific of Michael’s students)

It was a highly successful foray into using WordPress as a learning management system (LMS). The combination of communication tools like the wire, private messages, groups, forums, the site wide activity stream, and profiles – not to mention the blogs! – led to a completely immersive online learning experience for the students. They engaged with each other, read each other’s profiles, commented on their notes and reflections – it was inspiring to see. Furthermore, when students acknowledged that they had a better experience over that LMS behemoth Blackboard we knew we had hit on something that had real merit. We’ve continued to improve on the system, taking their exit survey responses to heart, by improving our set of plugins, adding more features, tweaking the information architecture, and changing the theme to encourage even more interaction and peer learning opportunities.

Q: What are a few of the plugins that are indispensable to you for running WPMU as a Learning Management System?

A:   You can host blogs with WordPress MU. You can pull in feeds and do your utmost to connect people with communication streams. But it all pales in comparison to the power of BuddyPress. Even with the current set of plugins at WordPress – now at 8,152 and counting – nothing works on its own as a LMS.

I have to say that the definition and purpose of a LMS depends on the instructor. Due to the evolving nature of library and information science (LIS) and Michael’s philosophy of teaching, his classes place a high emphasis on exploring and understanding online environments like Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and others as a way to comprehend, use, and remix information. BuddyPress gives the students hands-on experiences with this model.

But this is what makes using WordPress MU wonderful as a LMS: We’ve modified and tweaked it at the students’ request, making their learning space what they need it to be – not what some company says it should be.

Q: How have the WPMU Premium Dev services helped you to put together a full-featured LMS?

A:   We use the BP-Social Theme for the BuddyPress sites. This is the most obvious advantage of my relationship with WPMU Premium Dev. Clearly the theme was designed with Facebook in mind. To me, this is nothing but an advantage for an educational implementation. With so many of our students coming into the classroom with innumerable experiences in this social network, it’s such a blessing to be able to provide a user experience in a LMS that works in a way that students are used to and comfortable with. There are inherent stresses with online education: the lack of face-to-face communication, the inability to interpret tone in text, the discomforting anonymity of the faceless peer, so on and so forth. BP-Social helps break these stresses down to a manageable level, which I believe enhances the opportunity for learning.

Besides the theme, WPMU Premium Dev gives me direct access to the developers of its themes and plugins. If there’s a problem, I have confidence that it’ll get fixed and fixed quickly. The forums have been responsive and helpful. I love the WordPress community and have benefited so much from their expertise and collaborative spirit. I hope this interview and my other writings on WordPress are my little gifts back to the community.

Q: What are the pros and cons of using BuddyPress in an educational / classroom environment?

A:   No other LMS that I’m aware provides such a human touch on learning. We really see the students personalities show in BuddyPress – they open up to each other, they open up to the world. We get to read their academic reflections on their blogs and are provided insights into their thought process on their wire posts. If you’re an instructor and you’re looking to create a personable and personal learning space BuddyPress is the way to go.

If you’re an instructor that prefers the lectern and strict office hours don’t come near BuddyPress with a 20 foot pole. There’s a real onus on the instructor to monitor the communication streams not for behavior but to keep in touch with what’s going on in their online classroom and to be involved in a very dynamic conversation. In just over a few weeks of class there’s been over 200 different types of posts on the LIS 768 BuddyPress-powered course site.

But this the state of 21st century learning with online communication technologies and the always-on classroom. There’s a higher level of responsibility placed on the instructor to stay tuned into the collaborative online experience that organically develops.

Q: What 3rd party services do you utilize in addition to your hosted blog network and why?

A:   I tap into WordPress communities and self-identified WordPress gurus in a variety of forums and on Twitter to garner more knowledge on the system. I’m not a developer. I just understand the backend of the system really well. I’m also willing to experiment and think beyond how others have defined what WordPress “should” be or does. But when I get myself in too deep, I look to others for support. Did I mention that I love the WordPress community? The software isn’t the reason it rocks, it’s the people.

Michael hosts his blog and course sites with the wonderful Blake Carver over at lishost.net. Blake’s been supporting librarian web innovation with his hosting services for years – he knows what librarians are looking to do on the web. And when we can’t vocalize our thoughts well, he’s a damn good interpreter.

I have had wonderful service and support for my WordPress hosting at dreamhost.com. They’ve been my first and only host since September of 2006.

Q: What would you say to other educational professionals considering a switch from Blackboard to a WordPress-driven learning management system?

A:   We’re in a worldwide economic downturn and yet educational institutions – higher education, mostly – still insists on forking out thousands of dollars when we have an innovative, collaborative, and stable open source community out there that’s building great LMSs. Instead of paying subscription fees to systems like Blackboard, invest in developers of these open source LMSs who will create the customized system your community needs – not the tiered system forced on you.

With that in mind, I’d say experiment with WordPress-as-LMS. Find that instructor willing to be your alpha tester and give it a go. Build a case study with one class, gather data, and be reflective about the process. You’ll find that WordPress works excellently as an LMS in some categories but is extremely weak in others. Only you can decide if those weaknesses outweigh the benefits.

Q: What kind of plugins are on your wishlist for creating a more robust learning management system with WordPress?

A:   There’s a thirsty market out there for a suite of educational plugins. Sadly, I don’t think plugin developers have really considered this community as a worthwhile time investment. I’ve briefly described a few must-haves below but would love to work with developers to expand upon my visions for these plugins.

I’m in desperate need of a developer who will build a full-fledged gradebook. We use KB-Gradebook, which does the basics well in terms of reporting grades to the students. But I’d prefer to see something more comprehensive and built straight into the Dashboard both for instructor and student use.

In the same vein, I’d like to see an assignment plugin that pushes out assignments to the students. As the students finish them, they upload the documents or a url to an assignment library (like the media library) that is accessed by the instructor in the Dashboard. The instructor would be able to quickly see who and who hasn’t finished the assignment with the option to send a quick reminder to do so or comment on their assignment (like the quick reply function in the comments).

Most of the time I end up looking at the LMS start-up Edmodo (@edmodo) and say to myself “I want that.” Edmodo gets what an LMS needs. I just wish it were open source and locally installable… But nonetheless, I give them all the credit in the world for their innovation and vision.

Q: After your success in using WPMU / BuddyPress as an LMS, have you seen other educators inspired to use it as a learning tool?

A:   I think that the little bit of notice that our WordPress LMS setup has gotten has provided a bit of inspiration to others to begin to think of WordPress in a different light. Only one other professor, an LIS educator, has taken up the WordPress LMS mantle: Kenley Neufeld at classes.kenleyneufeld.com. In fact, we were inspired by him for his use of the BP-Social theme.

But I have to give a lot of credit to the always hilarious Jim Groom and his cadre at the University of Mary Washington for inspiring my use of WordPress MU in the first place. It’s representative of how the WordPress community works: We learn from each other, we steal from each other, in the end we try to give back to those who have helped us.

Q: Do you plan to upgrade to BuddyPress 1.2 during your Spring semester or will you wait until the courses have completed?

A:   Michael’s students are fearless. I like to give credit to him, them, and our profession for how much we tackle change constantly. When WordPress changed the entire look of the Dashboard (I believe in version 2.5) the class was surveyed to see if they wanted to upgrade. This was mid-semester. They basically said, “yea, we’ve got to be open to change – let’s try it.” That’s something to admire in my opinion.

But the difference between upgrading BuddyPress and WordPress is that you can almost bet that a new version of WordPress is going to be stable. The development team at WordPress has been doing this for a long time and generally don’t release junk. BuddyPress is still teething. It gets better every time there’s a new version but bugs do tend to pop up sometimes. I’ll continue to test the bleeding edge offline and we’ll upgrade after I know that all is well.

Q: Tell us a little bit about TheCorkBoard.org, the “WordPress for Libraries” project, and your hopes and objectives for instructional technology.

A:   I’ve been writing at thecorkboard.org since 2006. It’s always been a professional blog focused on technology and education but it gained a little focus on librarianship when I started graduate school. I like to throw my crazy ideas up on there and see what people respond to. I also use it to share what I know.

The “WordPress for Libraries” project is a brand new writing endeavor that I’m co-authoring with fellow librarian Polly-Alida Farrington. It’s a report of sorts on WordPress for libraries and librarians to be published by a section of our professional organization, the American Library Association. Our philosophy for our writing is not so much a how-to guide, but a way to gather the best uses of WordPress in libraries and outside of the field to showcase how this great system can be implemented. We’re inviting WordPress developers and practitioners, user experience gurus, and of course librarians to create a conversation around WordPress. We’ll be supplementing the publication with a BuddyPress-driven site to create a community around WordPress for Libraries and to highlight resources and screencasts.

I hope instructional technologists (and instructors as well) are always innovators, individuals who like to play and explore. And not just with the latest gadget. Play with ideas and norms – blow them apart and put them back together in new ways that help students do the same thing with their course material. Fail. Fail hard and talk about your failures and reflect on what went wrong. This is learning, is it not? This is ironic considering I’m writing about a platform on a platform-focused site, but always, always focus on teaching transferable technology skills and not a specific device or platform. I believe it’s only through this way that we develop students who can become flexible, competent professionals in the workforce.

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Spammed Blog Review Form

While developing and testing our new Anti-Splog plugin on Edublogs we have been making a lot of sploggers very unhappy. A nifty feature of the Anti-Splog plugin is that when you mark a blog as spam instead of that boring white warning screen showing when you visit the splog you get a pretty, branded notification with a review screen.

Just in case you accidentally spam a valid blog, the user gets one chance to ask for you the admin to review the blog. It sends an email notification with a link that will take you to Anti-Splog where you can see their latest posts and get an instant preview of the entire blog without having to unspam it.

When we first created this form, the spammers had the audacity to actually spam us more through the review form, so we threw a reCAPTCHA on it which has stopped that. Though what it hasn’t stopped is comments from some angry (and dumb) spammers, with very comical results! We thought you might enjoy a few laughs along with us.

Let’s start with the angry ones:

Save Your Important Documents With ClaimProof.com (http://claimproof.edublogs.org).

Its Not a spam its just a educational blog which tells about how to make secure your online data.
what the crap u had done..
i need my blog back

Forex lessons from one trader (http://learn2forex.edublogs.org)

why you consider http://learn2forex.edublogs.org/ as spam? I post releases and forex market daily information. Where is spam here? I believe this decision was made in error

Male Enhancements (http://adavis1102.edublogs.org)

mrbloggy's Latest Post

I’m adavis1102 im here to promote my bussiness oportunity to advertized my product. for our friendly user of this site ! my posting product is not spam besides all my product posting here is good and not a spam!

The Hotest Websites (http://mrbloggy.edublogs.org)

This blog is not SPAM!!!! It is my blog where I store the press releases I writer for my clients. Please enable!! or I will have to sue you for lose of earning and data.

EVO Battery (http://mybattery.edublogs.org)

It’s my blog. I have it a long time. And the url I like very much, I will no longer write the best articles, pls give it back!

And my favorite:
Links of london’s world (http://lovelinks.edublogs.org)

You are a spam!

The stupid and just plain pitiful:

(weightlossroutines.edublogs.org)

this is not a spam, i’m just posting about a weight loss program!

(laptopbatteryreplacement.edublogs.org)

I just want to introduce some battery buying informations

MoreMuscleGrowth.com – Muscle Supplements & Build Muscle Workout Diet (http://maskulado.edublogs.org)

This article is not spam. I am a journalist who writes about different topics, specific health and body building. Please return my article.

Wholesale Clothing | Clothes | Apparel (http://wholesaleclothingdepot.edublogs.org)

this is not a spam. i’m only promoting my new site, but i’m not spamming.. thank you very much..

Soul music the innovation (http://soulmusic.edublogs.org)

This is not a spam, this is a landing page created for xxxxxxxxxxx.com, please enable it so we can make the changes.

Laser Modules Review (http://lasermodulereview.edublogs.org)

hi, I just want to share some useful information about laser modules with some friends.

Aren’t these the very definition of spam?

welcome to my space (http://viviennesale.edublogs.org)

only some ads link,no spam and no one read my blog

Seo Services (http://herrybrown.edublogs.org)

this is not a spam blog we try to getting traffic on my site with your site. so please permit us to publish more blogs on your site. thanks

Male Enhancements (http://adavis1102.edublogs.org)

im adavis1102. im here to promote my bussiness oportunity to advertized my product for our friendly user of this site ! my posting product is not spam besides all my product posting here is good and not a spam thank you!

Absolutely priceless! This is in order of receiving from another splogger but with several blogs, all have exactly the same posts on mp4 converters:
Attempt #1 – http://xoxxbkq.edublogs.org – give me the reason please!
Attempt #2 – http://eypyicu.edublogs.org – I’M SORRY.But it’s not my fault.
Attempt #3 – http://rfmzxor.edublogs.org – OH ,dear! what happened?

And the saddest one of all:

blog qiao qiao kan xia (http://eolo1112.edublogs.org).

Ah…I’m a employee, it’s my job. I just do what I want to do like you. In my opinion, every person has his survival to make money ways, my job is send post, i like the job, the post most articles are written by the professionals, maybe in the past, i post some spam post, but i realised it and changed. Blogs opens to people are just let people write. Hope you give me the chance. God bless you.

Conclusion

We hope you had a laugh along with us! Are you ready to make some sploggers mad yourself? You can read about the features of Anti-Splog here, and download the plugin here.

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The screenshot shows how these items will appear on the page after following the sequence below. I tested this last night with WordPress Single User 2.9.1. and BuddyPress 1.2 and it works fine, but I’m definitely open to hearing more efficient ways to get this done. This tutorial assumes that you are using the default BuddyPress theme with the “Blog” option selected and you’d like to include some friend-specific information in the sidebar on the blog homepage. Obviously, if you have the Activity layout selected in the theme options, you wouldn’t want to include this as a sidebar.

Step 1. Add the function to show how many friends a user has to the functions.php file of your BuddyPress child theme.

function total_friend_count( $user_id = false ) {
		global $wpdb, $bp;
		if ( !$user_id )
			$user_id = ( $bp->displayed_user->id ) ? $bp->displayed_user->id : $bp->loggedin_user->id;
		/* This is stored in 'total_friend_count' usermeta.
		   This function will recalculate, update and return. */
		$count = $wpdb->get_var( $wpdb->prepare( "SELECT COUNT(id) FROM {$bp->friends->table_name} WHERE (initiator_user_id = %d OR friend_user_id = %d) AND is_confirmed = 1", $user_id, $user_id ) );
		if ( !$count )
			return 0;
		update_usermeta( $user_id, 'total_friend_count', $count );
		return $count;
	}

Step 2. Edit sidebar.php to get the total friend count.

Add this before your dynamic sidebar:

<div id="friendcount">
<h4>My Total Friends (<?php echo total_friend_count( $user_id = false ) ?>)</h4>
</div>

Step 3. Include the activity loop in your sidebar.php, filtered to display friend connections.

<div id="friend-connections">
<?php if ( bp_has_activities( 'object=friends' ) ) : ?>
	<div class="pagination">
		<div class="pag-count" id="activity-count">
			<?php bp_activity_pagination_count() ?>
		</div>
		<div class="pagination-links" id="activity-pag">
			<?php bp_activity_pagination_links() ?>
		</div>
	</div>
<h4>Recent Connections</h4>
	<ul class="activity-list"">
	<?php while ( bp_activities() ) : bp_the_activity(); ?>
		<li class="<?php bp_activity_css_class() ?>" >
			<div class="activity-avatar">
				<?php bp_activity_avatar() ?>
			</div>
			<?php bp_activity_content() ?>
		</li>
	<?php endwhile; ?>
	</ul>
<?php else: ?>
	<div class="widget-error">
		<?php _e('There has been no recent site activity.', 'buddypress') ?>
	</div>
<?php endif;?>
</div>

You can find information about how to modify and filter this and other loops to suit your own needs at the BuddyPress codex. There are many optional parameters that you can pass for customization, such as type, the number of users to display before paginating, and the maximum number of users to display. A slew of filters are available for the user ID’s, the various components and their custom actions. Have fun experimenting! Again, if you know of a better way to get the job done, please feel free to post your suggestions for simplification in the comments. If there’s a widget out there for this and I missed it, please let me know. ;)

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Finally realizing the futility of trying to hold back the tsunami of splogs, we set to work developing our new Anti-Splog plugin, not only for us but to share with the WPMU Dev community. After testing and tweaking this plugin on Edublogs for two months, it has helped us kill more than 20,000! And now our splog killing is practically on auto pilot. We just sit back and watch the Recent Splog queue pile up with new spam blogs the second those nasty little spammers try to post their annoying content.

Here is what Sue Waters, our Edublogs support guru has to say about Anti-Splog:

Working with Anti-Splog on Edublogs has been like a parent raising their own child that has become smarter and better at the task than its parent.

Spamming An IP

Initially we spent considerable time manually spamming splogs and adjusting its spamming rules to train it to identify splogs. However, as the API service is constantly improving and learning as increased numbers of splogs are spammed it is now able to detect even the most clever splogs, that most people wouldn’t spot, and automatically spam spam them immediately when they post.

And best of all there is no better feeling than clicking on spam next to the IP address and spamming 100+ splogs from the same IP, at the same time, for repeat spam offenders. We found one spammer’s IP through Anti-Splog and with one click cleared 1400 splogs out of our system!

While we still have a long way to go in clearing out older and inactive splogs, it is quite satisfying to know that we have stemmed the tide of new splogs, and the Anti-Splog API service is only getting more and more accurate. With our last test Anti-Splog was identifying over 90% of splogs automatically with less than a 3% false alarm rate. And it’s only been improving as more and more data is collected to learn from.

But don’t just take our word for it. Download the Anti-Splog plugin today and help us make some sploggers really mad!

You can read about the features of Anti-Splog here, and you can download it here.

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This plugin goes way beyond any existing splog plugin for WPMU because at it’s core is the new Anti-Splog API service hosted at WPMU Dev Premium. This means that Anti-Splog not only prevents/limits bots, it also identifies human and existing spammers automatically and with great efficiency.

Four Layers of Protection

Anti-Splog works with four layers of protection to provide the ultimate in splog killing power. Up front we have 5 methods to choose from that can limit or stop those evil automated bots that are flooding your WPMU site with splogs. These can be fairly effective, but with our experience on sites like edublogs, a large number of splogs are manually created. While every other splog prevention plugin stops here and leaves your site unprotected, ours goes 200% further.

If the splogger makes it past the initial roadblocks the plugin sends all their signup information to our API server, and we decide if it’s suspicious enough to mark the blog as spam right off the bat. The beauty of our Anti-Splog API service is that we crowdsource data from tens of thousands of splogs from edublogs and other Anti-Splog users. If anyone else has run into that splogger or spam post you don’t have to worry about it on your site.

Sometimes our Anti-Splog service may not have enough information to mark a blog as spam right at signup. But not to worry, that’s when Anti-Splog pulls out it’s most potent (and amazing) weapon: Post monitoring. The second a splogger writes a spam post, no matter how cleverly disguised, our API service analyzes it and boom, that splog is shutdown. It’s hard to describe the utter satisfaction we are getting watching splogs killed live before our eyes every few minutes at Edublogs. Evil sploggers have finally met their match with Anti-Splog!

And if all that wasn’t enough, we include an incredibly well thought out moderation queue for blogs. When our API service returns a suspicious score that’s not high enough to auto spam, they get sent to the “Suspected Blogs” queue instead. From there you can monitor suspicious blogs until you know whether they are spam or not. When you are sure just mark them as spam or ignore them to remove them from the queue. Our API service will learn from every action you take, becoming more and more accurate.

Anti-Splog Features

1. Signup prevention – these measures are mainly to stop bots. User friendly error messages are shown to users if any of these prevent signup. They are all optional and include:
   • Limiting the number of signups per IP per 24 hours (this can slow down human spammers too if the site clientele supports it. Probably not edublogs though as it caters to schools which may need to make a large number of blogs from one IP)
     

     Limit Signups per IP

   • Changing the signup page location every 24 hours – this is one of the most effective yet still user-friendly methods to stop bots dead.
     

     Auto-move wp-signup.php

   • Human tests – answering user defined questions, picking the cat pics, or reCAPTCHA.
     

     Admin Defined Questions

     

     ASIRRA - Choose the Cats

     

     reCAPTCHA

2. The API – when signup is complete (email activated) and blog is first created, or when a user publishes a new post it will send all kinds of blog and signup info to our premium server where we will rate it based on our secret ever-tweaking logic. Our API will then return a splog Certainty number (0%-100%). If that number is greater than the sensitivity preference you set in the settings (80% default) then the blog gets spammed. Since the blog was actually created, it will show up in the site admin still (as spammed) so you can unspam later if there was a mistake (and our API will learn from that).
   

   Server Registration Screen on WPMU Dev Premium

3. 

   The Moderation Queue

   The Moderation Queue – for existing blogs or blogs that get past other filters, the queue provides an ongoing way to monitor blogs and spam or flag them as valid (ignore) them more easily as they are updated with new posts. Also if a user tries to visit a blog that has been spammed, it will now show a user-friendly message and form to contact the admin for review if they think it was valid. The email contains links to be able to easily unspam or bring up the last posts. The entire queue is AJAX based so you can moderate blogs with incredible speed, not having to wait for the page to reload on every action. Click an action link (like spam) and it flashes and instantly disappears!

   

   Action Links

   • Suspected Blogs – this list pulls in any blogs that the plugin thinks may be splogs. It pulls in blogs that have a greater that 0% certainty as previously returned by our api, and those that contain at least 1 keyword in recent posts from the keyword list you define. The list attempts to bring the most suspected blogs to the top, ordered by # of keyword matches, then % splog certainty (as returned by the API), then finally by last updated. The list has a bunch of improvements for moderation, including last user name, last user IP, links to search for or Spam any user and their blogs or blogs tied to an IP (incredibly powerful, be careful with that one!), ability to Ignore (dismiss) valid blogs from the queue, and view a list of recent posts and instant previews of their content or the entire blog without leaving the page (the most time saving feature of all!)
     

     Spam an Entire IP

   • 

     Instant Post Previews

     Recent Splogs – this is simply a list of all blogs that have been spammed on the site ever, in order of the time they were spammed. The idea here is that if you make a mistake you can come back here to undo. Also if a user complains that a valid blog was spammed, a review link will be sent to your email so you can quickly pull it up here and see previews of the latest posts or entire blog to confirm (normally you wouldn’t be able to see blog content at all for spammed blogs).

     

     Entire Blog Preview (Even when spammed)

   • Ignored Blogs – If a valid blog shows up in the suspect list, simply mark it as ignored to get it out of there. It will then show in the ignored list just in case you need to undo.

Here is a flowchart to trace the functionality of Anti-Splog:

The Anti-Splog Process Diagram (Click to Zoom In)

Anti-Splog is Buddypress compatible with the exception of auto-renaming wp-signup.php. Note that it does not yet protect against spam users or their entries in status updates, forums, activity streams, etc.

We have been testing and tweaking this plugin on Edublogs.org for two months, and it’s helped us kill more than 20,000 splogs already!  Time to clean up your WPMU site and make some sploggers really mad!

You can download the Anti-Splog plugin here.

You can get your API key here. Note you must be a current WPMU Dev Premium member to access our Anti-Splog API, though the time you will save with this plugin is well worth the cost of membership!

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