Some Clean Up

Some Clean Up

Just thought you’d want to know about some technical changes you’ll never see or know took place, that help keep this place running.

We recently converted from “http” to “https”. This should eliminate the warnings in search engines that our address is not secure. What prompted the move was not just those annoying warnings, but also an alert from Google:

We haven’t noticed any problems from the switch, but it “might” be best for you to clear your cache if you experience any problems.

We also switched CDN (content delivery network) providers because our prior provider could not handle https. We are now at Cloudfare, which also should provide some protection if we ever experience a DDOS attack.

We also performed a clean up of user accounts. As mentioned in a prior post long ago, in the early years we didn’t have a “CAPTCHA” screening mechanism to prevent spam and bot User account signups. We did implement CAPTCHA several years ago, but just noticed an increase in phony/bot account sign ups, many using a “.ru” email address. It turns out that the CAPTCHA program we used was compromised and people were able to create scripts to overcome it. So we implemented a more robust CAPTCHA program.

We also deleted from our USER database several hundred thousand phony/bot accounts. If you have a User account and ever commented, your account was NOT deleted. But if you had a User account that never commented, it might have been deleted. You don’t need a registered User account to read the website, you only need it to comment or to vote thumbs up/down on comments. (No, we’re not going to reinstitute thumbs up/down for posts themselves, we here at Legal Insurrection don’t like being judged. Commenters, on the other hand ….)

This clean up *hopefully* will allow us to continue using WordPress commenting, rather than a third party program like Disqus. We currently have over 518,000 comments to date, and over 15,000 Users who have commented. That’s a lot for the WordPress commenting database, but we’re trying to keep it alive.

We are dinosaurs in continuing to use WordPress commenting, but I think overall it’s for the best. Helps keep down the drive-by commenters who only want to throw hand grenades into the comment section.

At least one commenter is glad we didn’t go to a third party program:

https://twitter.com/AmyA1A/status/916483858958299136

I can’t *guarantee* that never will happen to us, but we do everything in our power to protect the website and its data. Our website technical team at Sound Strategies is very experienced in security issues, and there have been times we’ve had to block all traffic from certain regions of the world because of server farms trying to hack us and probably thousands of other sites 24/7.

You may have noticed an annoying autorun audio ad recently. I sure did. We don’t run autorun audio ads, unlike so many other sites. They drive me crazy. When I heard it, I alerted our ad manager. Usually it’s an easy fix of blocking an advertiser from the ad feeds the ad manager uses. This time it was a little more pesky. Hopefully we have solved the problem.

You can always contact me here if you notice autorun audio ads or other problems with the website functionality. (Be aware, about 90% of problems users experience can be solve by clearing your browser cache and rebooting your computer. So try those before contacting me.)

Hope this gives you some sense of what it takes to run the website. You’re welcome.

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