Christarchy!

I just spent the last hour-ish checking profiles and deleting user accounts that had been registered but not confirmed (as well as accounts marked as spam). I’m pretty sure I didn’t get any active accounts, and I tried to err on the side of caution, but in the event that your account got deleted contact me with your info and I’ll set you back up. None of the deleted accounts had any posts or site activity, so there won’t be anything to restore other than the account itself.

I’ve just created a “fan page” on Facebook for Christarchy! Network. I’m in the process of exploring more ways to integrate Christarchy! with socially-oriented sites, without compromising the integrity of information available on Christarchy! (e.g. not making Christarchy! user profiles directly available to these sites). Of course, the end goal is to drive people from other sites to this one, not to inform users here that Christarchy! has a presence on these sites, but interactivity does require a 2-way movement. Here’s to hoping some of that movement comes back here, eh?

Well, that experiment didn’t work so well. I instituted a new “Anti-Captcha” plugin that is supposed to use a Javascript string to take the place of the captcha so end users don’t have to deal with the annoying things. Evidently it doens’t work with Buddypress, only with the default WP login page, because it’s working great at my other sites but not so much here. So after deleting a spate of spam registrations I’ve put the captcha back in. I’m sorry for any inconvenience, and if you’re trying to register and have problems with the captcha contact me and let me know you’re an actual human and I’ll help you get started.

Well, sort of. It doesn’t publish to the activity feed, which is extremely annoying, and you can’t set privacy settings for it so by default events can only be created publicly available. In fact, when you go to that screen during the create process there’s a fatal pHp error. The event still gets created, but you have to go to the events page and then click on your event in order to set the avatar. It’s annoying, but it’s better than a calendar that basically didn’t integrate with the site at all. You can invite members to events, and there’s a widget on the sidebar that shows upcoming events and whatnot. It’s definitely an improvement over what was there before.

Now if only that promised Google Summer of Code event plugin could hurry up and get here…

The rebuilding of Absolution Revolution is underway, and I’m pretty excited about this. One thing that is going along with that is the intent that the site should be more collaborative, with multiple contributors. To that end, I’m asking any of you who might want to contribute to head over to the main site and sign up for an account. I have forums set up to discuss the vision for the new site, as well as policies for contribution and editing and whatnot. For a good idea of what I envision for the site, as well as a chance to add your thoughts, see this forum topic.

The vision can be summed up like this: a knowledge base for Christian radicals that seeks to not only engage theory for Christian radicalism, but also to bridge the gap between theory and praxis, encouraging and enabling the development of radical communities and a revolutionary consciousness within the church. If you are interested in this, and believe you have something to contribute, then I urge you to register ASAP and get in on the discussion.

I’ve just added some Facebook synchronization functions to your profile options as well. As with the Tweetstream settings, your Facebook settings can be accessed from the “Settings” tab on your profile. Also, as with Tweetstream, the Facebook plugin was written by a developer whose first language is not English (the same one, in fact), and I have not yet had time to go in and correct spelling and grammar issues.

Anytime Facebook comes into the equation, matters of privacy have to be addressed as Facebook has some well-known (even notorious) issues related to privacy. Due to the way Facebook’s application developer settings are set up, there is no way for me to set it so that I cannot have access to your Facebook profile data. The only thing I can do is promise you that I will not take advantage of the ability to do so, should you authorize this site to connect to your Facebook profile. As with all other items you post to or through the Christarchy! site, it is our policy that you maintain ownership of all material you post, including in blogs, forums, your profiles, activity stream, etc. and we will not use them without your consent. Also, we will not ever share any of your personal or profile information with any third party beyond the extent to which it is publicly viewable (i.e. what anyone who browses the site can see), because we obviously have no control over who views that material.

The purpose of the Facebook functionality Christarchy! utilizes is solely for synchronizing your status updates here with your Facebook profile, as well as things like links, photo uploads, and so on. To the extent that is possible given our technical platform we want you to maintain control over all your data and personal information. Also, Facebook cannot access any of your information on the Christarchy! site beyond that which is publicly visible and the sync feature does NOT send them your information. It is our express goal to make sure you have as much control as possible over who has access to your information.

Just another quick update – the Tweetstream plugin has been fixed and the developer claims to have fixed the issue where when Twitter was down it caused the whole site to crash. So you should be able to import your Twitter status into the activity stream again and post site activity to your Twitter account. Please let me know if you notice any problems with this feature or if it crashes the site.

We have a couple of people, including myself, who are now syndicating their external blogs into the Christarchy! site, in a similar fashion to how Facebook allows you to import a blog feed as notes. Our syndication has many more features, though, and one of them could cause some confusion.

You will notice, when you set up your syndication, that under the author settings tab you can set it to create a new user for authors who are not already users. Apparently this still works even though I’ve theoretically disabled users’ ability to add new users to the site through their blogs. There doesn’t appear to be any way for me to keep this from happening, so I’m going to have to request that if you syndicate a blog into the site you set it so that all its posts, regardless of the original author, are credited to your username. If, as you have the option to do, you set it so the activity stream notification (e.g. “orpheus42 wrote a new blog post on Absolution Revolution: lorem ipsum etc. etc.”) links to the original post, instead of the Christarchy! blog to which you are importing the feed, then you will have nothing to worry about if your original blog has multiple authors because the author information will be available on the original site.

This should only affect users who import posts from blogs that have multiple authors. If you cannot figure out how to make this change to your settings let me know and I will walk you through it. If time goes on and this is not fixed, I’ll have go into your blog dashboard and do it myself.

Speaking of users, I think the spam prevention measures I have in place (captcha, email notification, etc.) do a pretty good job of keeping illegitimate users out, but I’ve still had to delete a couple of questionable users and “splogs” (spam blogs). I will be deleting any user who does not have all the profile fields required at registration filled out, as I can only assume these are not legitimate users. One shouldn’t be able to sign up without filling them out, so there must be some registration bug (probably similar to the above) I have not yet found. As always, if you see a problem or someone spams you please contact me.

Ok, the blogs are ready to go. There are currently no limits on blog creation, and I’d like to keep it that way – so be cool with making blogs, y’all.

You have a lot of freedom with how you set up blogs and whatnot. I’m still looking at plugins that might be useful to activate across the network, so let me know if you think something might be helpful. Also, themes are severely limited right now because I haven’t had time to look them up. If there’s a theme out there you really, really want then let me know and I’ll see what I can do. Also, you will have to set comments permissions – you can make it so that people who are not Christarchy! members can post on your individual blogs if you so desire. If you do that, I would HIGHLY recommend signing up for an account at WordPress.com to get a user API key so you can activate the Akismet spam prevention plugin. You’ll also be able to take advantage of the blog stats function if you have a WordPress.com key.

I’ve also re-instituted some Twitter functionality that hopefully won’t break the site like the last plugin. It’s tied to the Global group, and you’ll have to let me know your Twitter @username either by private message or via the contact form so I can put it in. It’s not optimal, but it’s better than having the site break everytime Twitter is down (which is a lot lately). Then once I plug in your @username your tweets will show up in the group activity stream (or at least they should, I haven’t tested that yet).

That’s most of what I’ve done today, we’re getting ever-closer to a full launch. I’m excited, how about you?

Group blogs are enabled, but there’s a small bug in the plugin. Blog posts and comments don’t automatically import to the group activity feed so group administrators will need to remember to import them via the external feed function in the group admin menu.

The feed URIs to import will be structured like this:

hxxp://christarchy.com/[blog name]/feed/

and

hxxp://christarchy.com/[blog name]/comments/feed/

with tt instead of xx in ‘http.’