Complex Forms are now Available

Mainly for Home-Starts

I switched over to Contact Form 7 several years ago and am now familiar with several plugins which extend the functionality, particularly in the area of complex forms.

I now have available:

Professional and Self Referral Forms (£130 for both)
Volunteer online diary (£80)
Volunteer Application Form (£80)

The first professional referral form took 1 week to create from scratch. I start with an off the shelf copy of one of the forms, and take feedback to modify the form for your organisation.

The form has two major components; what you can see online, and a formatted email which is returned to the organisation with all of the data in it. It is also possible to include the data as a CSV string of characters which you could import into a spreadsheet or database. The email is human readable and annotated to clearly list the data submitted by the user.

You can see some examples on this site and have a play: https://wingrove-media.uk

Contact me for more details. I can also point you to live examples which are currently in use by various organisations.

Client Data on Websites

GDPR and your website

When you created your GDPR conformance policy, you should have given consideration to where data is located in your organisation. If you do not know where it is located, you cannot really claim to control it.

The websites I have created over the last 5 years do not contain a lot of user data by design. The data in the site, other than what is visible to the public is generally limited to the administrators and editors on the site, things such as email addresses and where subscriber lists are present there may be subscriber names and email addresses held in the site. But not much else.

This means if a hacker gets into a site, there is not really very much there which might be of value to them.

I am aware of some sites though that contain copies of forms being submitted through the site. This can occur if someone else has added a form manager that does this, or a database extension to collect and store user submitted information.

There is no value in keeping copies within the website if the email function is working and all user submitted data is sent to your organisation for processing. In fact retaining copies of previously submitted forms will likely contain sensitive information which could represent a data breach if the data fell into the wrong hands.

Check your website

It is worth checking your website to make sure there are no records of previous form data being retained in the website. If you find something and you know this data has been submitted to the organisation through an email account, you do not need copies on your website. So delete them all. It is worth considering whether it is possible to stop copies being retained, or if you cannot stop copies being retained, make a note to revisit your site and delete them regularly. A form manager that does not retain copies might ultimately be a better choice for the future.

← Plugin is crashing sites (11th July 2022) Beware of Phishing →

Plugin is crashing sites (11th July 2022)

Important for WordPress Website Owners using WP Crontrol Plugin

This does not apply to everyone, but I do use this plugin to help debug and analyse websites. It has been stable for a long time with no issues, however over the past 12 hours an update has been released which is causing a critical error on websites. If you see a white screen with either Error 500 or a message about a critical error has occurred on your website, then this is likely cause.

I am currently working my way around all sites and removing it. Once removed the site continues work ok.

If you have noticed that your site has a critical error, or have not checked recently, please take a look and let me know by return if you are affected. Those that let me know will be dealt with first. I will go through all sites over the next two days and remove it.

What does it do?

It is an analysis tool which allows you to check the condition of the wp-cron function in your website. It lists the tasks that need to be executed, and when. I use it from time to time to determine if the website is behaving normally. It is not a critical component in your website. Removing it will not affect the core functionality.

Any questions please give me a call.

← Home-Start Volunteer Diary Form Client Data on Websites →

Home-Start Resources Page

I currently host around 40 Home-Starts with a couple more in the pipeline. I also started working with Matt Hann and Tanya Freedman (HSUK) and look after another 40 sites there on a three month rolling contract. The additional 40 sites are based on one promoted by Rutland Online who are no longer developing sites for HSUK. These sites are also in the same hosting you are in, just in a different account. My role is to maintain them each month.

I have hit quite a few problems in the way these new sites were set up. To help people there is a page you can also use here https://wingrove-media.uk/hsuk/ which lists those websites, but of greater importance, at the bottom of that page are some self help guides. You are free to use these if you wish. Some relate to the way that the hosting works, some relate to specific issues in that design of website. Many are relevant to you as well.

#BehindTheMask

I have just added one which contains a specially built slider to add the existing slides used on the Home-Start home pages to help promote #BehindTheMask. Please do help yourselves and download your copy of the pre-built slider and the instructions. It only takes 5 minutes and I have done the hard work for you. Note that the dimensions of the sliders used on your sites are different to the ones used on the HSUK sites. I have done two sets, just take care to pick up the right one.

I also have a couple of posts prepared which you could also import and publish including the graphics. Contact me for more information.

← Page Redirect crashing some websites Home-Start Volunteer Diary Form →

Page Redirect crashing some websites

On most websites I use a plugin which redirects a user to a Thank You page after they complete a form. This is a trivial function, and not one you might think could bring a website down. I have had six cases over the past week where sites have stopped working due to an upgrade of this plugin. It appears that the authors have substantially rewritten it, and there is probably a bug in there somewhere causing the problem. Can you all check your websites and let me know if you have a message about a critical error has occurred.

That is the symptom. It is easy for me to fix and will take a few moments to do so, but right now I have not been through all of the websites. You can help me to help you.

Normally this type of incident is very rare, and it is clear that not all sites are affected either, so it is probably a combination of things. Around a year ago WordPress made some changes to error monitoring, where a site may have continued to work in the past with some issues, they seem to stop working now.

You may occasionally see a 500 error on your website, these are transient and indicate that the server cannot respond. They will clear themselves. You should never see CRITICAL ERROR. If you see that flag it to me immediately and I will sort it out for you.

← Another Phishing Scam - You may be targeted Home-Start Resources Page →

Beware of the peaks!

For much of the past month I have been working my way around sites and making sure the sites are updating correctly. In some cases they have not been doing this without additional input. I have not got to the bottom of why, some of it is related to the Divi template. I spent a very tortuous 2 days seeking support to find out why. It would have been more productive watching paint dry.

However I digress, I looked at around 70 of the sites I am hosting. I had to make changes to them to get the last version of WordPress to manage the updates. After I have done this the sites should in theory look after themselves.

In the dashboard of most sites is a Google Analytics summary of the last 30 days of activity on your site. I noted the image below which has a strange peak in it on one of the sites.

This is not normal

Then I found another one

And another one

And another one

Unravelling the thread

I found five in around 70 sites, so it was not everywhere. But what is it? I chose one site and decided to check Google Analytics to see what it recorded. The peak in most cases occurred over a 5 minute period when allegedly around 350+ people from around the world decided to visit your website at 9am in the morning. And I do mean from around the world, not just in the UK. Any country in the image below that is a shade of blue, means people (allegedly) came from that country.

The image on the left shows the top 31 countries and how many computers in each country. Click on the image to see a larger version. Not listed here, but I did check, looking at Russia countrywide, the visits did not come from one computer, but came from many across Russia.

What is going on?

Given the attack which is still going on some 4 weeks after I was notified on another site, I am very conscious of how long that took to sort out. I checked in with the hosting company to ask about these and what they thought they were. I did not get a straight answer, other than any attack will be handled by special measures in the hosting and the site will continue to work despite this.

It is unlikely that these sites were affected in any way, the visits in this case were no different to UK based visitors. The only difference is they came from everywhere in a very short period of time, apparently altogether or in quick succession.

Speculation

A few years ago I witnessed an attack on one of my sites while with another hosting company. I documented it at the time in this site. The site in this case had a protection mechanism built in that if there were too many visitors arriving at once, or trying to log in, they delayed any further activity from that IP address. As soon as one was blocked another one started. When that was blocked another one started, and they skipped all around the world in a few minutes.

The site was not taken down, but this is basically known as a DDoS or Distributed Denial of Service attack. The expectation being that if enough computers hit your site it will consume the server resources and your site will grind to a halt.

Click on the image to see a larger version

BOT Network

It is highly likely that I was witnessing a Bot network which is a set of compromised servers from around the world controlled by one central resource and they were testing it. When I last came across this I had all of the IP addresses of the computers, and could do a geo location search and also identify the owners of the computers (if they were a server for example). In many cases they were corporate servers owned by respectable companies that probably had no idea that there were additional processes running off of their computers.

The system might be targeted at some point on a corporate server and financial demands made to turn it off.

Things for you to think about

If you see a massive peak in your statistics that you cannot account for, let me know ASAP. I will look into it. If you have one of these it means your statistics for that period are no longer valid. So do not use them in any promotional documentation.

You may have seen in the past messages like “We checked your website and it was not getting many visitors pay us ££££ and we will increase the number of visitors to your site” Well this is one way of doing it. It will not however generate any more business because the visitors are not real.

I can selectively turn off countries from accessing your website and take some other measures with the hosting company if you see anything like this.

However it should not really impact your website, or your existing visitors. If you are not sure about something; drop me a line.

Complex Referral Forms

I have had several requests for complicated online forms from people over the years. The problem is if you try to copy all of a typical referral form and build an online one it just looks as intimidating as the paper copy.

I have been working with Home-Start North Somerset over the past 8 weeks to develop an online referral form. This is now live, it does not cater for all of the fields in a referral form, but it does capture a lot of it, which will help in handling the referral.

The forms (Professional and self referral) generate an email and package the data up in an easy to use format. If you think you might benefit from something like this, or need a custom form, please get in touch.

You can see the launch page here: Referrals Page on Home-Start North Somerset.

There are two buttons on the page which will guide the user to one of two forms.

As described last month, or was it the month before?? I have a page here which demo a version of a complex online form, you can try it out for yourself and see what it generates by going to here: https://wingrove-media.uk/generic-application-or-referral-form/ At the bottom of the form you can send the email to yourself.

← Spring Clean? Case Study - Extreme Spam! →

Virtual Private Server

Following a request for faster performance, I have taken out a new account in February, and have been experimenting with it. It is called a Virtual Private Server (VPS).

When you look at the range of hosting services available they start off as shared hosting where there may be several hundred, or even over 1000 websites all sharing the same server platform.

I am a reseller, so I purchase a block of resources on this shared platform and add websites into this system. The hosting company monitors the performance of the servers and makes sure they do not crash, or fail, or run out of hosting resources.

However this model means that while each website is physically separated from the next, you can be affected by the overall operation of the server. I know from my dealings with the hosting company that they are pretty good at managing this, and it is very rare for a website or server to go down. If it does, by the time I have alerted them, they are generally already aware of the situation and have some remedial process underway.

I spent a lot of time in January and February trying to identify why some sites ran more slowly than others, and what could be done to speed them up. I have a series of support threads in this area with the hosting company. Your sites have many local tweaks on them to help them to perform well. But sometimes there are server related issues where a site might be slowing down, or less responsive because of something else going on, on the server. You are also spread across many different servers, not everyone is on the same one.

There are also some complexities with the caching system used and what it does with code used by the website. Sometimes deleting the server side cache (Stackcache in your dashboard) can clear things up.

Checking out some competition

I took out some hosting with another UK based company in early February to establish if we were seeing “good performance” compared to a competitor. I tried several sites there and recorded the difference in speeds. It turned out that where we are now for this class of hosting is very good. The cache provided by the server is also effective in giving each site an edge over competitive shared hosting.

The Next Level

When you look at hosting plans, the next level up from shared hosting is Virtual Private Hosting. This is where an instance of the operating system runs on platform where you have finite resources such as processor cores, memory, disk space, disk input/output and network bandwidth. Unlike the shared model, you are not sharing this model with anyone unless you choose to do so. There are several levels of performance, and you can scale up (or down) as required.

Wingrove-Media VPS

I have taken out a relatively small configuration, but it is almost as expensive as the shared reseller hosting on an annual basis. It is based on a two core processor, 50GB disk space, 100Mb/s network speed and 2GB of memory. I have been running several websites in this space over the past 3 weeks.

Site access speeds are notably faster, editing is much faster, which tends to indicate that the Divi editing system is quite processor and memory intensive on the shared platform.

I can scale this area up from 2 processors to 10 processors and over 400GB of space 1000Mb/s port speed at £250 per month! Well that is a long way off. How this all goes is highly dependent on people moving their sites into this space.

For now this platform is available for the next 3 months and under review. I will provide more information on pricing and terms and conditions a little later.

If you are concerned about your site speed, and would like it all to run faster, I can demonstrate the benefits by moving your website into my VPS account for 2 weeks. Contact me for more details.

Slow site? Check your browser

One notable thing I did find out during this exercise was that Chrome was not as fast as I expected it to be. I ran multiple tests by working my way from left to right loading the top level pages on a website, and timing how long it took to load every page at the top level. I did this with Chrome (my normal go to browser), Microsoft Edge and Firefox. Chrome produced consistently lower results than Firefox and Microsoft Edge. (This was on a Windows 10 Professional platform).

I have started to use Microsoft Edge as my go to browser, and this has increased editing and browsing times. I would also add here unlike your Chrome Browser I have a few plugins loaded into mine, so these may have contributed to slowing it down. I did try unloading most of them, it was still slower than MS Edge and Firefox. That all said, I would recommend giving them a try. Unlike MS Explorer, which did have issues in compatibility with Web Standards, MS Edge seems to work fine.

Need a bespoke CRM system? – Call Graeme Neale

If you have either reached a point where you might benefit from a CRM System (Customer Relationship Management) or your old one has fallen into disrepair or has been withdrawn from the market then you might like to check out Graeme Neale, (Email address: gnh@pmvideos.com )

I have virtually met Graeme through the website redevelopment for Home-Start North West Kent where he has been building a new CRM system for them to replace MESH which is withdrawn later this year.

Graeme charges a flat fee for the development of the system, provides training and maintenance for a year, after the initial period; ongoing maintenance and support is negotiable.

If you are looking around, or considering just using spreadsheets, it might be worthwhile sending Graeme a message to see if he can help.

← Evening Tutorials Virtual Private Server →

Evening Tutorials

Would you benefit from more training on your website?
Would you like to get some more of the cool features to work on your site?
Do you need a refresher on common problems?
Would you like to participate in a forum?

Just thinking outside the box here. I know from working with some of you, you have picked up the concepts behind editing your websites and have done really well. If you would like to become advanced users and learn how to do more,. why not consider signing up for a once a month (free) or ad hoc online Zoom Tutorial? I could run this as a forum and have multiple attendees.

Let me know if you are interested in going that extra mile. Use the contact us page to send me a message.

← From website referral form to CRM Need a bespoke CRM system? - Call Graeme Neale →