Activity – FiatLux – The Giza Forum (Legacy)

FiatLux posted an update 5 years, 4 months ago

About website issues, my two cents (feel free to correct me–some of this is just guesswork):

First, I imagine the problem with making any major website changes is the time and cost involved. It’s worth remembering that, with few exceptions, people who write for a living aren’t usually rolling in extra cash.

Regarding WordPress and censorship, it’s important to note that “WordPress” can refer to two different things:

(1) an open-source software package you can use for websites and blogs (available from WordPress.org) that can be used with any web-hosting service;

(2) a website-building and web-hosting service provided by WordPress.com.
I can’t imagine the open-source software itself is auto-censoring anything. An anti-spam add-on to that software could cause comments to be sent to moderation or rejected. To my knowledge, when comments (to a blog post at any rate) are subject to moderation, a message to that effect is displayed after you hit the Post button.

As for outside censorship, it would have to take place at the level of the ISP or the web-hosting service. I’m pretty sure it’s scenario (2), where WordPress.com is used as the web host, that censorship “by WordPress” has occurred. I don’t know, but I’m guessing WordPress.com is not the web host for this website.

Most of the technical issues with comments not posting and things not appearing on this website are, I assume, most likely due to some incompatibility between, or the normal functioning of, one or more of the following:
– the WordPress software
– some WordPress add-on, whether a spam filter or other
– the web-hosting service (e.g., the amount of server space allocated under the particular hosting service plan)
– some issue with the website’s database
– the browser one is using
– add-ons to the browser one is using

It’s not necessarily a quick, simple, inexpensive problem to definitively untangle and fix.

That’s not to mention the possibility of website attacks/hacks. Securing a website against those is not quick, simple, and cheap either–and no website can be made 100% secure.
- Giza Developer replied 5 years, 4 months ago
  
  This is correct. There has always been SOME level of content rejected by the core toolset (WordPress+Akismet+a very basic moderated phrase list). So we have a pretty standard response which is usually ‘try different phrasing’, try a URL shortener, etc. We don’t usually know the exact reason a post is rejected. However, in this case, it’s an add-on designed to limit spam registrations. It’s not supposed to be interfering with comments and posts. Those features are disabled. But it looks like the coders didn’t account for our forum, so it is indeed misflagging some things as spam, notably certain URLs. We’ve pulled it back down for now, until we hear from the developers. But you are correct: that was the cause.