In this post I take a look at how to remove redundant accounts set up by spammers.

If you are suffering from spam on your bbpress forum, I have posted up my own list of bbpress anti spam plugins here.

MySQL Access

I assume that you have access to your site’s MySQL database and know how to execute queries. If you are not familiar with this then I suggest using Google to learn more about running queries on your site’s database. You may also need to contact your host to gain access to the database.

Identifying Spam Users

Step one, how can you quickly pull out a list of all the spam accounts on your bbpress install?

Unfortunately there is no “one sized fits all” way to identify these users. And to make the challenge harder, you’ll want to be really sure you aren’t deleting genuine user accounts.

The first query here will select all users who have never posted, this is the brute force approach and will get rid of the most number of users. However you may be deleting users who have registered but not posted yet.

SELECT *
FROM wp_users
WHERE ID NOT IN
(SELECT post_author FROM wp_posts
UNION SELECT user_id FROM wp_comments)

I wanted to be quite cautious about who I deleted, so I looked at users who had registered at least three months ago but never posted. I also looked for those with ridiculous user names (ie they were very long, or full of obscure letters such as q, x, z etc) and those that originated from outside the UK (my forum is UK focused).

Any one of these things on their own could be a genuine account, but once you start to combine these factors, the chances of them being a real user become very slim.

How to batch Delete bbPress Users

When you are happy to proceed, you need to run a query such as the one below. Here I am deleting all users that have registered before April and who have not posted or commented on the site.

I am also checking the user activation key field, if this is populated it means they have requested a password reset at some point, this seems like a good indicator of a real user.

DELETE
FROM wp_users
WHERE ID NOT IN
(SELECT post_author FROM wp_posts
UNION SELECT user_id FROM wp_comments)
and user_registered < '2013-04-01 00:00:00'
and user_activation_key =''

Warning: This will permanently delete users, make sure you backup your database and test carefully. This method could still remove genuine user accounts so be prepared to deal with any complaints.

Cleaning Up the Meta Data

Once you have removed the user you need to carry out one more step to tidy things up. Each user will have several rows in the meta data table and these need to be removed before WordPress will correctly return a count of users.

You can see how WordPress derives user counts here.

To remove the meta data, you can use the following SQL code snippets.

First, check what will be deleted:

SELECT user_id,meta_key, umeta_id FROM wp_usermeta
LEFT JOIN wp_users ON user_id=ID
WHERE ID is NULL


Once you are happy with the clear out, commit with the following:

DELETE A FROM wp_usermeta A
LEFT JOIN wp_users ON user_id=ID
WHERE ID is NULL

And there we go, hopefully your user count will now better reflect the number of active users on your site. It was getting a little crazy on mine where I had thousands of users but only hundreds of threads, it just didn't look credible.

Links Photo

Well, it’s been about a year since I posted up my last Skimlinks review so I thought it was worth putting together a 2013 review to reflect my current thoughts.

In this post I’ll take a look at what’s new, and how I’ve been utilising SkimLinks to monetise my hobby blogs over the last year.

What is Skimlinks?

For those that aren’t familiar with the SkimLinks affiliate network, the company offers a way to seamlessly monetise your website with minimal effort.

With the addition of a simple script to your website pages, any links around the site will be redirected through the Skimlinks servers. They will ananlyse the link and see if there is a money making opportunity, if so they’ll take care of that and you’ll see the cash show up in your account later in the month.

How easy is that?!

If you haven’y already done so, I would recommend signing up to Skimlinks right away, it doesn’t cost anything to join and you are free to experiment with how and where to use it.

Sign up here: SkimLinks

What’s New at Skimlinks?

So what’s new in the last year or so? Well the big update is the new publisher hub which provides a new and improved view over your account activity. The summary view gives all the key information you need to get going, and all the key performance indicators you need are only a few clicks away.

Here’s a look at the new overview page:

Navigating around the hub is just a case of clicking through the menu options on the left.  There are a few other KPIs on the right that I’ve cut out for privacy reasons.

The merchant view gives a very quick insight into which companies are making the sales for you.

As before, you can also get a similar break down of site performance so that you can see which of your properties are driving the most revenue.

What I’ve been finding very useful however is the page view, this gives you a page level breakdown of where the sales are coming from.  This gives you the opportunity to improve those pages and maximise that income, and also, if you have a direct affiliated relationship with that company then you can swap in your direct links if required.

Update to Tools

As far as I can see the Skimlinks tool offering has moved disappointingly slowly.  There was a time when there seemed to be new features being released regularly but the Product API is still in Beta and SkimKit is now unavailable.

However there is one new widget which looks useful.  Skimlinks have provided a search widget for both ebay and Amazon that allows users to make searches directly on your site.  This in itself isn’t too revolutionary but it does promise geo locating so that your users get sent to their local site.

The labs area of the site seems unchanged, with only the WordPress plugin and RSS feeds features up there.

Hopefully we’ll see some movement on new features in 2013.

What I Like to See Added to the Service?

The one problem I have on my sites, which I think SkimLinks could solve, is geolocating affiliate links. By that I mean I get a mix of US and UK visitors to the site and it would be nice to ensure I maximise earning opportunities from both sides of the Atlantic.

This only really applies to Amazon, but I’d like them to redirect US people to Amazon.com when they click on an Amazon.co.uk link. This is made all the more easy as the two sites have common structures and products share a common unique identifier (the ASIN).

But, please don’t overwrite my Amazon tag unless the geo-location redirect is done!

How has Skimlinks been Working for Me?

To round up my Skimlinks review I would like to talk briefly about my own success with it as a part time hobby blogger.

My results from Skimlinks have been very up and down, some months have proved to be decent earners, and then following months have barely reached the minimum payment threshold.  But I think this is down to the nature of how I use the service.  It is really only there to sweep up missed monetisation opportunities.

For example it’s saved me a few quid of lost income where I’ve pasted a non-affiliate link into a post, it’s also great for capturing the odd forum post that attracts a high number of views.  But in general I prefer to automatically create my own direct affiliate links.

I would definitely recommend signing up to the service for the above reason, there seems to be no down side but the potential for additional income is there.  One of my favourite stats in the reporting hub is the lifetime earning amount, essentially it represents all the money I would not have if it weren’t for the Skimlinks service, and over time, it all adds up.

Haven’t signed up to SkimLinks yet? Go and do so now!

Spam and spam Photo

I’ve been running the WordPress forum plugin bbPress 2 since it was released and have really enjoyed the ease of integration into my WP based sites.  Like all forum software applications, bbPress unfortunately attracts a great deal of spam.  The more popular your site gets the bigger the problem becomes.

As I tend to run small forums it is important that posting is easy, I therefore like to have anonymous posting switched on where possible. This of course makes spam management that much harder!

Fortunately there are a few ways to keep the problem under control.  In this post I take a look at the plugins I use to keep spam out of my bbPress forums.

Akismet

This plugin comes with WordPress and is a great start when it comes to spam protection.  You are probably already using it to protect your posts from spam comments.

Akismet is easy to integrate with bbPress, there is a little tick box near the bottom of the Forum Settings page, make sure “Use Akismet” is checked.

Homepage

Stop Spammer Registrations

This a great little plugin that hooks up with the Stop Forum Spam site. New registration attempts are checked against their central spammer database and are very quickly rejected if there is any history of spam from that ip / email.

The plugin also has a range of other common sense checks, such as looking for sensible header information, checking the time it takes for a bot to navigate the site, etc. And a few sneaky tricks too, such as setting traps and fake forms to trip bots up.

Homepage | Download

bbPress Moderation

Stop Spammer Registrations goes a long way to solving my spam problem, it brings it right down to a manageable level. However some rogue posts do get through and this requires my time to sweep them up – I hate having spam on the forum!

The moderation plugin allows me to leave my forum alone, I can do my periodic approval of the moderation queue but mostly my forums can live spam free.

It works by holding back any new posts in a queue, they won’t show on the forum until the post is approved and subsequent posts from that user will go through. This is a minor inconvenience to new users but one that most people understand and accept.

Regular users are unaffected and can go about their business.

Download

reCaptcha Plugin

I add this one as bonus, it could be worth a look if other solutions aren’t working for you. reCaptcha requires your forum users to read one of those squiggly words and type in the answer before the post is accepted.

Unfortunately this type of anti spam device, whilst effective, provides a horrible user experience to your users. I would really consider this as a last ditch attempt. Or used in conjunction with anonymous posting.

It’s not a plugin I have activated at the moment, but it’s there if I need it.

Download

Other Plugins?

I would love to hear from other bbPress users, how have you got your forum’s spam problem under control?

The Cloud Photo

I recently migrated all of my sites to a new host and thought now was a good time to write a review of the new company, Vidahost.

If you are looking for a new host yourself, or if you are looking for some feedback on Vidahost then read on. I’ll talk about why I moved from my old providers, why I picked Vidahost and what I think about their service having used them for a few months.

Why I Moved Host

Most hobby bloggers will want to start out with a cheap shared hosting option, there’s nothing wrong with that. One of the attractions of setting up a website is the option to get started with minimal investment.

However as time went on my needs changed and I outgrew the shared site.

I wanted:

• Consolidation of my sites on one platform
• Reliable performance
• Greater bandwidth allowance
• More control over configurability

Why I Chose Vidahost

My previous hosts, UK2.net and eukhost.com served me well, I didn’t have any particular grievance, I had just reached the limitations of shared hosting and needed to move to the next level.  Both of these hosts offer more comprehensive hosting options, but there was a big jump between the shared hosting price and their virtual or dedicated hosting options.  The hosting solutions just didn’t seem cost effective for a hobby blogger.

I went on to review cloud hosting options but struggled to find something that offered the right amount of resources for a decent price. I was also put off by hosting options with a variable cost, I didn’t want to be worrying about processor cycles etc – these are hobby sites after all.

However the Vidahost cloud offering seemed to match my needs perfectly. The starting price of £11.99 (with VAT included) comes with decent usage allowances:

• 20gb Disk Space. My usage was way under this, generally if you aren’t hosting music or video and ensure you images are sized appropriately for the web you’ll struggle to come anywhere near this.  More space can be purchased when needed.
• 200gb Bandwidth. The combined bandwidth usage of SammyNetbook and NXTab does use a good chunk of this allowance but it is still well within the limit. It is easy to add bandwidth and fortunately as traffic increases so does revenue so the sites should be self-sufficient.
• 25 Site limit. I’ve probably attempted that many sites over the years, but most of them are retired projects so this was no problem. Again, if you need more than 25 then this can be accommodated for an additional fee but I would encourage hobby developers to concentrate on a small number of good sites. I’m not convinced one person can run more that 25 sites effectively in their spare time!

Your sites are effectively load balanced so you don’t need to worry about CPU or RAM resources, even if you are fortunate enough to receive a temporary traffic spike.

Vidahost Review

My experience of Vidahost has been very positive to date. The cloud hosting solution comes with a bespoke admin panel that is intuitive and easy to use. It is also very comprehensive allowing you to setup sub domains, redirects, cron jobs and even access to a secure shell. You can switch between Linux and Windows hosting at no additional cost and MySql dbs are easy to create and administer. SQL Server dbs are available at additional cost.

Performance has been routinely stable and I have not noticed any down time to date. The web server configuration seems to be setup well and it is a relief not to have to worry about many of the configuration problems I had when running on a shared host, everything just seems to work.

When I have required some additional help the guys on the end of the support line have been very helpful and have always managed to resolve any issues quickly and satisfactorily.

Now I appreciate that I am supplying an affiliate link in this review and it is in my interest to promote Vidahost, however I want to stress that these guys have been great and I am very happy with the decision to consolidate onto the Vidahost cloud.  It definitely feels like an upgrade.

If you are interested and do want to click through, you can use a Vidahost discount code to get 10% off an initial order. Just enter “blogercise” when prompted at the checkout. Using this coupon code will bung a couple of quid my way and will save you some money too. Win win!

Click through to Vidahost

U

But I didn’t have time to mess about and wanted a quick hack. If you want to change WordPress title tags you need to add a filter to wp_title. By doing this you can do a quick replace on the “Topic:” part of the title.

I also decided to change how the site name was appended to the title at the end.  My quick hack is as follows:

add_filter( ‘wp_title’, ‘bbpress_title_jez’, 20, 3 );

function bbpress_title_jez($title, $sep, $seplocation){
if (is_bbpress()){
$title = str_replace(“Topic: “, “”, $title);
$title = str_replace(“NXTab.co.uk”, “NXTab Forum”, $title);
}
return $title;
}

I then placed this code into my theme’s fuction.php script.

Like I said, this is a bit hacky and will potentially cause some odd titles to come through if I’m not careful – the function will replace indiscriminately. It might also potentially interfere with other plugins that filter wp_title, so use at own risk.

I hope that this ability is added to bbPress in a future release, WordPress is normally very good at allowing you to configure these things. Let me know if you give this a go or come across a better way to do it.

Photo

You can see it running on my Nexus 7 Tablet forum here.

bbPress 2 Adsense Plugin

Here is a screenshot of the bbpress plugin running live on my own website, once installed your forum will look a bit like this:

Adding Adsense to bbPress

The first draft of the plugin is very straight forward, it allows you to enter an advert, for example an Amazon banner, or and Adsense block, and it will display between the first post of a thread and the second.

You then have the option to hide the ads from your regular users (you don’t want to annoy them, or encourage them to click off the site!). If you chose to hide ads, a message will be displayed to encourage visitors to join the site.

The admin screen looks a bit like this:

The plugin is published to the WordPress plugin repository and can be downloaded directly from there.  Note that this plugin makes use of various filters and may interfere with other plugins.  Remember to check carefully before using this on a live site. If you do have problems, it is likely to be an issue with the order in which the plugins are applied.

Future Plans

This is just a first draft and proof of concept, I plan to add more feature in due course:

• Fully configurable text, makes translation easy
• Add ad units to various locations, in the forum, at the end of threads, etc
• Any other ideas, let me know…

First revision now available.

Download it Now!

Photo

You can see an example here: Nexus 7  Cases.

The plugin allowed me to place different product types right in amongst the content and I can now leave these pages rest assured that they will continue to update and display the most popular Amazon products based on the keywords I’ve entered along with up to date prices.

Rapid Deployment

I remember producing similar pages for SammyNetbook before I was using this plugin or even WordPress and each page was built manually using Amazon widgets and hard coded friendly URLs mapped through the .htaccess file.  That took a couple of weeks to set up and was a nightmare to maintain.

This time it’s taken a couple of hours and will be self-maintaining!  If I want to change the layout of the Amazon units its a single update to a template held in the WP admin area, and changing the contents of the unit is a quick tweak to the shortcode.

Easy!

I am using the bbpress 2.1 forum with the Genesis theme framework in conjunction with the bbpress Genesis Extend plugin that helps sort out a few niggles and gets the two products to play nice with each other.

However I noted a small “bug” that prevents it working correctly when placing bbpress shortcodes onto pages.

Specifically in my case I wanted to place [bbp-topic-index] on to its own page, but the formatting of the table was kinda messed up. It turns out that the plugin does not load the associated CSS stylesheet when shortcodes and pages are used together like this. Hopefully not a problem for the devs to fix, there’s a note about it here.

I am using WP 3.4, Genesis 1.8, bbpress 2.1 and Genesis Extend 0.8.1

The promised quick fix is to manually load the CSS file yourself, I did this by switching to HTML view in my WP page and pasting in the following code, there may be better ways of doing this:

<link rel=’stylesheet’ id=’bbpress-genesis-extend-css’ href=’http://dev.rightquestion.org/wp-content/plugins/bbpress-genesis-extend/style.css?ver=3.3.2′ type=’text/css’ media=’all’ />

Hope that helps, you can see an example on my Nexus 7 New Posts page.

Nexus 7 Blog UK

In honour of my new purchase, I have set up a little blog to share my initial thoughts and gather any tips that I come across whilst learning how to get the most from my Nexus 7.

Check it out…

[button type="icon" icon="j" color="orange" link="http://www.nxtab.co.uk"]Nexus 7 Blog[/button]

The site will be useful for any other owners and also anyone considering whether to buy one of these tablets for themselves.

I’ve been wanting to buy a tablet for a while, but didn’t really want to spend a lot of money on one, as to be frank, it’s just going to be a handy gadget for the living room, I can’t see it getting  displacing my other gadgets (but won’t mind if I’m wrong on that).

So now that the Nexus 7 has come to market at a decent price I think it’s time to take the plunge.

Own one, looking to buy one?   Pop over to my new Nexus 7 blog and let me know your thoughts on the Nexus.

The idea behind this is that once you have bought the product the staff will submit 250 (or more depending on your package) “social bookmarks” to a whole range of sites.  These submissions will then form back-links to your own site that will then get picked up by search engines and will hopefully improve your ranking.

I’ve decided to purchase the $65 slow building Social Bookmarking service that operates over a period of 30 days.

Photo

What Kind of Links Can I Expect?

SubitEdge give a sample of the sites that they will submit to, they clearly have a large database of sites that they can use to build links.  As usual this catalog of sites varies widely in quality with a few at the high PR end but most with a low rank.

By the very nature of this service these links are going to be “user created” which are typically less well respected by the search engines, after all it is always going to be possible for anyone with the right resources to create a load of these links themselves, they aren’t therefore necessarily an indication of quality.  Which leads me on to my next question…

How Valuable are the Links?

This is a question I hope to answer through my experiments with these services.  In my last test, I looked at article submission and I noticed a small but distinct uplift in my search engine traffic.  So what kind of effect will the Social Bookmarking Service have on my numbers?

My gut feel is that these kind of links can’t be overly valuable.  For instance, one of the Page Rank 9 sites that they submit to is Twitter.   But I think it’s a bit cheeky to suggest that this equates to a high quality back link from a PR9 site.  In fact in this case the Page Rank is totally meaningless as a link on twitter is quickly going to be lost against the backdrop of millions of tweets that are posted every day.

In fact it isn’t quite clear how effectively Google crawls twitter at all since they were disconnected from the “fire hose” data steam.

But Twitter isn’t the only site they will submit to, and I’ve read positive feedback from others who have tried this service, so I still think it is worth trying for myself.  And of course I’ll publish the results below.

A brief aside, I was recently looking at the SubmitEdge forums and found it a strange place, it looks rather artificial to me. The majority of user names are in the same pattern firstname lastname, and many of the threads seem to be nonsense. Check out this discussion on CMS software. I guess it is a “made for SEO” forum?

Setting up the Order

Once ordered, the next step is to let SubmitEdge know which URLs you wish to promote.  My package allows two to be submitted, and for each of those I can specify three descriptions and keywords to be used alongside the submission.  So before booking this service you do need to have an idea about what you want to target.

In my case I chose to use my site’s homepage, and I selected a category page that I believed would be a popular destination for visitors.   The process is fairly quick and easy to do, there is a video to help you if you get stuck and you can even pay a further fee to get them to fill the form in for you – but this shouldn’t be necessary.

Here is a quick run down of how I approached it:

• Title: You are advised to pick a title which contains your keyword. There are lots of resources on the net discussing how to write good titles but remember your goal is to get people’s attention, inspire curiosity, encourage that click.
• Keyword: With the basic package you get to promote six keywords. I went for a combination of my main target generic term and a series of increasingly niche keywords.
• Description: You have to write at least 100 characters for each description, the advice is to make it sound like someone else who is using your site.

So How Effective Was the Social Bookmarking Service?

SubmitEdge will supply you with a report that details all of the sites that your links are submitted to so you’ll get to see exactly where you are getting links from.  This is actually useful as a reference as there is nothing to stop you using these sites yourself in the future.  You might also want to go “vote up” your links on sites such as Digg!

At this point you will be wondering what kind of sites do they use?  Unfortunately the list seemed very random to me:

• The Good:  You’ll find the normal high profile bookmarking sites such as Twitter, Digg, Multiply, etc.  Although as mention before, one tweet is hardly useful, and in my case I gained no referrals.
• The Average:  The bulk of the sites look like they are set up to run the well known bookmarking script Pligg.  It isn’t too hard to use the search engines to seek out these sites, and it’s possible that SubmitEdge might even own some of them.
• The Awful: Some of the links are just awful and, given the promise of expert run campaigns, it is hard to see how SubmitEdge can justify this.  A link from medical-articles.net does not seem to fit the profile of my site!

I guess we should expect varying quality as not every site is going to be high Page Rank traffic driver, so perhaps this doesn’t matter just as long as we see some improvement in search traffic.

Impact on Referral Traffic

The first point to make is that, to date,  I have just got one solitary referral from these 250 or so new links!  The referral was from tagza.com and even that person bounced straight off!  Given that social bookmarking should be a great source of referrals this is a little dissapointing.

There are two possible reasons for this:

• People saw the links but chose not to click on them.  Perhaps the text that I created failed to engage those that read it which is quite possible as I am not a professional writer.  However I am familiar with the basic concepts of headline writing so I find it hard to believe this is the complete story.
• No one actually saw the links.  This is possible if no one is actually paying any attention to the sites that were used, or the accounts that they were posted with.  For example, it is hard to believe that anyone is paying a whole lot of attention to the Twitter account used!

But perhaps this doesn’t matter if I still see the boost in search engine traffic that I am looking for?

Impact on Search Engine Traffic

Here’s a quick view of search engine traffic over the last two months, so the first month is a baseline, and the second gives us an idea of the impact this service has had:

As you can see, traffic has fluctuated a fair amount over the last month, so I believe that these new links have had some kind of an impact.  However there is no obvious uplift in this case, not like the one observed with the initial article marketing service.   I also suspect that the long term impact will not be as effective as these new links will quickly slip away and be replaced by newer ones. However more time is needed to get a good feel for this, be sure to sign up to our RSS Feed to see what the long term results are.

It’s also good to see that page views increased and bounce rate stayed at around 50%, which means that the search engines were driving some decent traffic and my site is managing to hold attention, this is some good news for me.

Note: In an attempt to make the test fairer, I have not engaged in any other link building activity nor have I posted any new articles to the site.  In theory, and we have to remember this is not hugely scientific, fluctuations in traffic should be down to the SubmitEdge social bookmarking service.

Would I recommend SubmitEdge Social Bookmarking?

If I am honest, I am not sure it is a service that I would use again, at least not in isolation.  I think this could be a good thing to do as part of a wider link building program, but if you are like me, and trying to chose the most effective link building program at a reasonable cost then I think I would chose other services ahead of this one.

If you really want to get the most out of social bookmarking I think you need to go and build your accounts and attract genuine users who will be engaged in your posts.  My netbook twitter account only has a few hundred followers but when I make a tweet I know that it will drive more visits than all these purchased links put together.

I don’t think social bookmarking is something you can fake, it takes time to build up trusted relationships with people – it’s not something you can buy.  However, at the end of the day my hit count did go up, and perhaps that’s all that matters!

To find out what happens next, sign up to our feed: [button type="icon" icon="B" color="orange" link="http://www.jezza101.co.uk/go/RSSFeed"]RSS Feed[/button]

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