Plugins updates for blogs

We’ve made some changes to the plugins available to all our users.  The important ones for most of you are the facebook and twitter plugins which allow you to embed facebook like buttons and to auto post to both services.  We made our image gallery plugin and I think one or two more (sorry, just woke up, haven’t had coffee yet) available as well.  More changes coming so if you notice anything not working or a plugin you previously had that is now not available let us know.

Take a look through the plugin options on your blogs to see what’s new and coming soon we hope to provide a few more theme options as well.

cheers!

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Blog spam

We’ve been getting hit with a lot of spam bots as of late so we’ve added an automatic captcha to all sites comments.  It’s a simple one and is meant to thwart spam bots, rather than spam people.

How this works is if the comment appears to be spam, a new page is presented with a simple captcha question to answer.  By default, a successful answer’s comments are placed in the moderation queue just as all comments are (unless the person has a previously approved comment in which case it’s automatically approved) while unsuccessful answer’s comments are placed in your Comments spam box which you can review if you wish.

To change the default settings, log in to your site and go to Dashboard > Plugins > Conditional CAPTCHA and Under “Comment Handling” you can change the action that is taken when spam is detected.  If you don’t want your spam box filling up, select “Delete the comment permanently” under the “When a CAPTCHA is not completed correctly:” setting.  If someone or somebot does not answer the simple captcha correctly, this will immediately delete the comment and you will not be notified nor will it appear in your spam box.  This also has the added benefit of decreasing the amount of junk comments in our database so free candy* to everyone who sets this to auto-delete.

Finally, your blog’s spam box auto-deletes spam posts that are more than 15 days old, you do not need to empty your spam box manually.  Comments dumped to comment trash do need to be emptied and both of these take a very long time to empty so it’s always best to auto-delete spam when you can.

Thank you!

*there’s not really any free candy, sorry.

Posted in FAQ, Support Blog | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Unused Group Deletion

Just a reminder to all Group admins that we are removing unused Groups at the end of the month. All Group admins should have been contacted about reviving their group or letting us remove it. If you did not receive this notice and would like maintain your Group please let us know. If you are not an admin of a Group and would like to take over admin responsibilities to revive a Group, let us know that too!

Thank you!
Middle-earth Network Support

Posted in Support Blog | 3 Comments

Server down briefly for scheduled maintenance tonight

A notice from our Web host:


This email is to advise you of mandatory scheduled maintenance happening on your server.

This maintenance has been scheduled for Jan. 30 at 23:00 CDT. We do apologize for the inconvenience.

The ETA for the downtime on your server should be minimal (about 10 minutes).

Thank you for your patience during this brief outage.
Please let us know if you have any questions.

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Network update notice: December 26, 2012

We made some major “under the hood” updates yesterday to our network software, specifically WordPress and many of the supporting plugin-ins we use. WordPress and all network-wide pluings have been updated to the latest versions and we’ve also updated the default theme which many of you use on your blogs. You (hopefully!) will not notice any major changes to your blogs’ functionality as most of these were behind the scenes updates and bug fixes but take some time to review your pages and a few posts to make sure everything is in order.

For information on what was changed in WordPress, please read the WordPress 3.5 changelog.

If you run into any problems please submit a support ticket above and we’ll get back to you.

Thank you and best wishes for a safe and enjoyable new year!

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Web server migration done

The server migration by our internet host is finished.  New IP addresses and servers so it may take 24-72 hours for the changes to propagate but our host should be forwarding traffic during the transition time.

Any problems accessing sites on the network please let us know by submitting a Support Ticket.

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Web Server migration has started – Important, please read!

***Web Server migration has started***

Our Internet host has begun a required server migration on their network hardware. As part of that move, our web server and all website(s) may go off-line for a short time and/or the server may be taken off-line entirely between 12pm Tuesday, Dec. 18 and Midnight Wednesday, Dec. 19 (timezone: New York, USA). We will duplicate all support updates made in the chat bar notices, on the member activity stream at mymiddleearth.com and here.

Thank you and we apologize for any inconvenience.

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Server Downtime Delayed

A quick update to the server notice referenced previously.  Our host has delayed their server move, unfortunately no other information is available.  We will update here, via chat notices and on the network activity stream as soon as we have more information.

Thank you.

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Server Downtime for Saturday & Sunday, Dec. 15-16

I never use our support blog so this seemed as good a time as any to make use of it.

Our Internet host as alerted us to a server migration they are performing on their server and network hardware. As part of that move they will be required to take our web server and all website(s) off-line for a short time. Unfortunately we do not know exactly when that will happen other than server downtime will occur sometime Saturday, Dec. 15 through Sunday, Dec. 16, EST U.S.A.

I will update here, on our network activity stream homepage at mymiddleearth.com and via our chatbar notices.

Thank you and we apologize for any inconvenience.

Posted in Support Blog | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Welcome to our New Dedicated Support Site

Greeting, inhabitants of MyMiddle-earth!

We have significantly revamped the way we handle support requests here on the network, and we are now happy to provide you with this dedicated support site.

From here you can file (private) support tickets between you and our admin team, read the latest blog posts and tutorials from our web admins (coming soon!) and also make use of our nifty “Question and Answer” section.  In the Q&A, you can pose a question seeking help or advice and any community member has the ability to respond, often times significantly reducing how long it takes to receive a response (as opposed to private tickets).

We encourage you to use the private ticket system for questions you do not want other community members to be privy to, and the Q&A system for more general questions that may perhaps be applicable and helpful to other community members browsing the Support Site.

We will do our best to respond to both private support tickets and community “questions” as quickly as possible, but we also encourage our more veteran community members to pitch in and help resolve questions people may have!

Thanks everyone!

Posted in Support Blog | Tagged | 4 Comments