WordPress MU

Is there any way to prevent blogs from being activated until a site admin can approve them? I am looking for something similar to what happens with comment moderation, so a blog can't be made live until a root level admin has reviewed the signup.

Maybe I am missing something obvious.

If there is no feature for this currently, then consider this a request for one! :-) I can see that an admin can go in and deactivate a blog if it is spam/unacceptable. But it seems it would be good in some situations to not even allow the blog to be activated until it has been specifically reviewed.

Thanks
Tom

Good idea, and no, it's not in there somewhere already. :)

WOW, I was just wondering this myself. I have a church youth group and want to be able to moderate student-blogs! Thanks andrea_r...

You can limit the domain from where folks can sign up from. That's at Dashboard -> Site Admin -> Options.

You can also get rid of the signup php file and just add users and folks in manually at Dashboard -> Site Admin -> Users and Blogs.

Hope this helps,
-drmike

Thanks DrMike, I might just get rid of the signup file and add blogs manually for now as you suggest. The domain restriction is a handy feature but doesn't really solve my particular conundrum (we will be using WPMU to run a set of topic-based communities, but want to restrict the number of communities to a focused set).

So yeah, it would be great to see a signup moderation feature in a future version. Keep up the good work everyone, WPMU is a great tool!

Cheers
Tom

It sounds like you have a predefined and controlled group. Any reason you couldn't just password protect signup.php and just give them the password?

Freq---

Frequent: yes we do have a predefined group. This is basically for an intranet. But with several thousand people.

We'd like to have say, 10-20 blogs based around special interest groups, and have many people contributing to each blog. As opposed to allowing everyone on the intranet to have their own blog and potentially having several thousand different ones.

But we do want everyone to have the ability to suggest a new interest group that they believe should be covered, but this needs to be approved centrally, in order to ensure that the number of blogs stays manageable and that they are relevant.

I also want to control who is adding a blog under my domain. Only people I know should be creating a blog. Maybe blog names could "wait" to be approved, as comments are...

I agree with moderation but wanted to present you with a workaround.

Feel free to submit the idea to teh trac at http://trac.mu.wordpress.org

I'm testing Mu in conjuction with VBulletin, and what I'm wanting to do is give users 'journals' to keep track of projects. However I don't want any Tom Dick or Harry signing up - is there no real way to control sign ups ?

It seems like it would be great idea to be able to turn registration on and off via Site Admin. Rather than having to go around deleting wp-signup and then trying to create a 404 error page.

Please read the thread that you posted in. I believe I made a couple of suggestions up there.

The software is designed to be an open platform.

Mike, I maybe blonde but I'm not blind.

Yes you can restrict the domains people apply from via Site Options, however that's not what I'm talking about, it is an arse about face way to do something quiet simple, which is allow an administrator to control how registrations take place.

Again referring to the OP's point, he asked was there anyway to moderate signups, which I don't think was dealt with either.

We may not be the power users like Harvard etc, but I hope to give my users the best solution that there is to have a journal on my site and I thought Mu was it, however the terse replies in here from moderators and they way that suggestions are dealt with seems to make me think otherwise.

You can use the 'wpmu_activate_blog' action to deactivate a newly created blog. Look at line 1131 of wpmu-functions.php.

I'd set the deleted field in wp_blogs for the new blog to '1', filter the welcome message using the 'update_welcome_email', and/or edit it through the site admin options page to inform the user that they're blog must be moderated.

You'll have to build a page to moderate new signups too, but that shouldn't be too hard. It should of course send a welcome email to the new blog owner :)

How about...

Create a WP page that resembles a sign-up form.

Those get sent to the site admin, then the site admin either creates the blog in the back or simply ignores the request?

You could even use the Dagon Design secure mailer contact form generator to make it.

Or you could just grumble and pick on the kind users here that are trying to help you. :P

junior-san, if what you're really asking is there anything laready *built-in* to moderate signups, it's been answered. Which was no. (second post)

Then people ofered various ways to go about it.

Feature request, moderating blog signup makes good sense.

I am running MU and want to prevent blog spam, especially porn spam on Christian blog community.

Is it so hard? To make it simple?

Any hope?

/me bangs his head against the keyboard.

And in a thread that I suggested reading the thread that one posts in. Hmm, imagine that.

We had this issue. I am kind of surprised at the signup options for MU, that there is no approval process for new blogs. Anyways, I have coded up something... basically it has a signup form similar to the default one, but the details are sent to the admin. The admin then manually installs the blog from the backend. It works for us as we were getting more splogs than legitimate bloggers signing up. I even added some extra zing, if your mail() function on the server is not working, it adds the signup info that was submitted to an email link (example: mailto:admin@yoursite.com?subject=yoursite_signup&body=signup_details_submitted)

If anyone wants it, email me at gmail. Same username. If you email in summer, be patient... I'm at the lake.

DrMike,

I know you keep suggesting to make changes at

Site Admin|Options

and I assume you are talking about these two fields:

Limited Email Registrations:
If you want to limit blog registrations to certain domains. Separate domains by spaces.
Banned Email Domains:
If you want to ban certain email domains from blog registrations. One domain per line.

However, I don't get how that is suppose to solve the problem of unwanted spam blogs or the request for moderation of blog signups.

What am I (and it appears others) not understanding about how these fields work to solve our problem?

Why is it so difficult to have moderation on blog creation just like moderation of comments?

Thanks for your patience and understanding for my rudimentary questions.

Bob

Banned Email Domains: this field is for listing the domains that splogger use to sign up with. For example, a large number of splogs I had ALL signed up with someuser@mail.ru. So in that field I put mail.ru. It stopped them. Using this, you *can* change the signup page to something like"request a blog" and people can email you, then you can manually create the blog in the backend for them.

Limited Email Registrations: work the opposite way. If you plunk in your domain name, it will stop all signups unless the email is someone@yourdomain. This effectively shuts them down if you haven't given out emails. But, if you know all or most of your legit users are coming from certain domains, you can put them here.

Moderation on signup isn't practical for sites with literally hundreds, if not thousands of blog signups a day. That's what the base code is for, so I doubt a feature like this would make it into final code.

Someone could make a plugin though. :)

"I am running MU and want to prevent blog spam, especially porn spam on Christian blog community."

Do you mean spam comments or new blogs with unacceptable content on signup? If they're signing up for a blog, then posting porn, see above.

Andrea...

In reading many threads here, it seems evident that WPMU is designed for folks intent on hosting a large number of blogs on a network.

Personally, I am interested in hosting just a few blogs (5 or so) on the same database so the usernames persist across all blogs and users must create a login to post comments. It sounds like this is either not the proper software for me to use or I'm going to be hacking it. I've already gotten this running for the most part and yes, sure enough, people are posting spam blogs.

What do you suggest?

I'd lock down signups, which does require some hacking to do on a permanent basis, or the suggestion I wrote above under "limited email registrations".

I had to turn off signups on my own site for a while, and they were down a good six months. That certainly stops spolgs. :D

"What do you suggest?"

My multiple domain hack.

I respect the decisions on the final code, and perhaps a plugin would fit this bill, but I feel the need to chime in two cents.

It would make the most sense to me that we could set all new blog registrations to not show up on the first page and not ping (something mentioned in another similar thread that I hadn't even thought about!). Until a moderator approves it.

This way a user can create a blog and post / modify it and link to it if they want, but it would not show on front page or technorati automatically until we approve of it. It would be hard to judge a blog before it is added to anyways, so moderating just the signup would not be as helpful in the long run.

The hacks that were proposed in the other thread were very interesting, but ultimately spammers will just post six posts instead of 5, etc. With a default setting to stop the front page and pings we could decide if created blogs should make it that far.

PLUS this could toggled as a paid option somehow and be beneficial to some blog hosts perhaps. A very cool feature that would not have to hinder and it could be turned on and off.. perhaps even add another field that would say something like "all singups from thse domains do not go through moderation" but the rest do.. something like that.. kind of a spinoof of the limited domain emails, which wouldn't stop other domains from signing up, but would only allow the entered domains to be unmoderated for front page etc..

"The hacks that were proposed in the other thread were very interesting, but ultimately spammers will just post six posts instead of 5, etc."

So far, from my experience, I haven't had a spammer bypass my limit.
They simply post once, and move on to the next target.

I've had a couple post twice, but the common traits thus far have been either just modify hello world, including title (but not the slug), and then move on, or they make another post real quick and leave.

Of course, that's not all of them, mind you, as there are a few freaks in every crowd, but thus far it's worked. Not to mention that the restrictions aren't mentioned anywhere on the site.

- addition:

I should note though, that eventually with any setting or fix that is generated, they'll figure out a way around it. Then we figure another move, they counter. And the cycle keeps going.

Spam filter for post content... now that's something that might have merit. Although Akismet isn't an option (unless you have the money), surely we can put our heads together here and figure something out.

Where if a post is suspected, it is set to pending, and can only be approved by a site admin. I dunno, what I'm doing at the moment works, so I guess I'll worry about it later.

I agree luna your workaround is good and the thought of the ping thought was a great, here is the link to the other thread for those who find this one looking for the same issue and interested in a workaround:

http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic.php?id=4064

So long story short is there a way to do this already?

I thoroughly need something like this. Essentially the exact same moderation for comments but for blog sign-ups.

We are trying to do a community blog site and want to moderate the blogs to make sure they are appropriate for the purpose we intend for the site but if the concept works there would be ALOT of blogs so I wanted to see if we could do like a suggest box which would send the request to a blog moderation que (exactly as comments are handled) while we find out whether the blog is appropriate and or spam

I'm intermediate php and willing to hack i just would like to know if I need to

Yes, you'll have to make this functionality yourself. It is not a part of the core, nor is there a plugin (that I know of) that does this.

The "easiest" way to go about it would be to make a simple contact form, that mimics the sign-up page. It would take that information, send it to the site admin, and then the site admin can go into the back end and add the blog.

great thanks! :)

But um seeing as this could be pretty helpful to everyone in the community. I'd like to go ahead and do like a plugin but I wouldn't know where to start any suggestions?

you think I could take the code from the comments moderation and rework it for blog sign-ups , i'm intermediate php but decidedly under that in wordpress hac... extending :)

>Moderation on signup isn't practical for sites with
> literally hundreds, if not thousands of blog signups a day.
>That's what the base code is for, so I doubt a feature like
>this would make it into final code.

It would be logical to me that these large sites also have large amounts of splogs, while they probably do not want to restrict domains like gmail.com, yahoo.com etc.

Can someone share how these splogs are handled by admins of larger sites if there is no approval system in place?
(or share your approval system as this is the most requested feature for wpmu as far as I can see :) )
Thanks