Again, With the Semi-Functional

UPDATE (25 Oct. 2013): Well, I seem to have sorted out 90% of my problems. It was email spammers who were causing my CPU minutes to be gobbled up like hotcakes at a lumberjack soirée, and modifying .htaccess to limit remote access to the login and comment systems cut off a lot of the unnecessary traffic.

I’m out of the woods, but I’m going to spend a bit more time tightening up the way the ship runs… installing caches and disabling WordPress’s waste cronjob system on the other installations I have of WordPress on this site. (There are quite a few!)

Also… it probably didn’t help having a bunch of semi-broken, old versions of WordPress installed on various neglected former classblogs that I hosted for my students to share writing work on. I’m in the process of sorting those out, installing caches, and figuring out whether I want to somehow condense them into a single blog. It’s a lot of work, though, and to some degree I feel like it might be more fruitful to just lock comments, output pure HTML pages, and then delete the WP installations. Maybe some kind of code freeze is possible as an alternative. We’ll see…

UPDATE (23 Oct. 2013): Aha. Looks like I have a winner, as far as explaining what the hell is causing this:

Spamscreenshot

Looks like I got more spam this month (and a few other months this year) than I’ve gotten in most years operating this blog; and this year I’ve received so much automated comment spam that it almost (not quite, but almost) adds up to more than I’ve received in all previous years.

I’m trying a few things to cut access to the comments system for anyone not directly accessing from a comment window. It might still take a day to cut things down to size, but this, at least, seems like a likely candidate for why my CPU minutes have been almost constantly depleted. Way more likely than just “you have too many plugins installed!”… right?

UPDATE (22 Oct. 2013): Well, after some investigation, I’ve done a few things that may sort out some of my website problems. I’m not sure. For users who actually sign in–I don’t think there’s many of you–you will not be able to access your account on this blog that way anymore. I think this won’t be an issue: you can still comment, you just can’t log into the main admin, at the moment. (I’m not feeling inclined to port the accounts from the blog to the password protection for the login page, which has been targeted by brute-force hacking attempts over the last few months, it seems, but if you’re dying to access your account, let me know.)

Still working on sorting out what else might be gobbling up CPU minutes; will be running a malware scan tonight. Any other advice would be much appreciated. I’m at the point where I’m starting to wonder whether it’s not the theme itself that’s causing this… in which case, I may have to just hire someone to design a theme for me…

ORIGINAL POST: Turns out that what I thought was a fix, wasn’t. I’m having problems with my blog overloading the CPU on the server where it’s hosted, and the support guys aren’t able to help much since everything’s routed through WordPress. So the reduced functionality is going to be prolonged, it seems, with me reinstating a couple of plugins at a time.

Then again, I’ll probably do my best to avoid reinstating some of those plugins anyway. A few of them seem to be things I could do without resorting to using a plugin anyway, and it’d probably be better to do without… we’ll see.

In any case, that’s why things are wonky around here for now.

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