Announcements – Page 2

Old Users Cleanup

Posted on November 4, 2016 by Stephen Guglielmo

As mentioned in a previous post, an old users cleanup was executed last night. Users who no longer have an AccessNet account were deleted. If they authored any content (posts or pages), the content was reassigned to another admin on the site. If there were no other admins, the site was deactivated. We always avoid deleting any content if possible.

Here’s some stats from the cleanup process:

Total Users: 11032
Users Deleted: 2063
Sites Deactivated: 31

If there’s any questions or problems, open a ticket!

Old Sites Cleanup

Posted on October 19, 2016November 4, 2016 by Stephen Guglielmo

According to the Sites policies, sites that have not been updated in two or more years will be removed. Recently, an old sites cleanup was executed. Sites that had been previously deactivated* were permanently deleted. Sites that had not been updated in two or more years were deactivated and will eventually be permanently deleted. All users of deactivated sites were given several email notifications prior to the cleanup.

Here are some numbers from the cleanup process:

Total Sites Before Cleanup: 2,423
Sites permanently deleted: 302
Sites deactivated: 804
Active Sites: 1317

Another cleanup to delete users who are no longer at the university will be run within a few weeks. Keep an eye out here for details!

* When a site owner deletes their own site, it becomes “deactivated” within WordPress.

If there’s any questions or problems, open a ticket!

Moving to New Servers

Posted on October 17, 2016November 9, 2016 by Stephen Guglielmo

Edit: The server move was successful! Please open a ticket if any problems are noticed. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

On Wednesday, November 9th from 6 to 10 PM, the Sites.temple.edu infrastructure will be moved to new servers. The URL will not change and all sites will be moved to the new servers. No action is needed by site administrators or users.

Starting at 6 PM, all logins will be disabled while the data is moved to the new servers. Downtime will be minimal. Please note that any Gravity Forms on your site will be temporarily disabled to prevent any submissions from being lost.

The new servers are more powerful, have an updated operating system, and have the latest version of PHP installed. The site will also automatically use secure HTTPS connections.

In addition to the new server infrastructure, all plugins and themes will be updated to the latest stable versions. The login code will also be updated and, as a result, departmental accounts will no longer be able to login. Please use individual AccessNet accounts instead. Multiple users can be added to a site if required.

As always, if there are any questions or problems, please open a support ticket.

Announcement for Gravity Forms Users

Posted on September 30, 2016 by Stephen Guglielmo

Gravity Forms is a plugin that allows site admins to create contact forms, polls, quizzes, and other types of HTML forms on their site. Learn how to create a form using Gravity Forms.

We strongly recommend that site admins add a CAPTCHA to all forms that are publicly accessible.

A CAPTCHA is a test to determine if a user is a human or not. Automated bots/scripts can submit forms, which can spam your email address with invalid form submissions. A CAPTCHA will prevent this from happening. It can also prevent valid users from accidentally submitting a form multiple times.

To add a CAPTCHA to an existing or a new form: