Annoying Corel Pop Up and How to Fix It

This will only be of interest if you have the problem!

What is the problem?

I use several Corel products on my system. They are associated with graphics and video production and manipulation. I have used them for years, but much less so now. However they are still on my system, which is part of the problem.

Corel have decided to tell me exciting news about Particle Shop, Paint Shop Pro, Video Studio et al with a pop up which appears in the bottom right of my screen. Nothing particularly wrong with that except that despite many hours of research and trying; you cannot get rid of it. It pops up randomly. That can be very annoying if you are recording your screen for someone and are 30 minutes into the recording!

I am not alone

Search around forums and you will find lots of people are annoyed with this problem and the lack of guidance on how to get rid of it. The general solution is to go into each application and search for messaging and turn it off. Which I have done, and they still pop up.

I don’t mind an app telling me that there is an update, or a special offer when I choose to run it. However Corel in their infinite wisdom it turns out has set up a scheduled task which runs every day. Even if I do not run the application. That is too intrusive for my liking. If removes my ability to control my computer. I guess that is why lots of other people are complaining.

The Solution

If you have been around the various forums and worked your way through the solutions and are still scratching your head, please review the text below which is recorded from an online chat with Shamili of Corel Support. It would appear that in some cases you can end up with a command in the scheduler, and that is the reason why the adverts pop up independent of the settings in the applications.

I do not think this practice is a very smart one, it has put me off acquiring any more Corel Products.

Nov 16, 2020, 4:57 EST

Chat started: 2020-11-16 09:40 AM UTC

(09:40:31 AM) Mark Wingrove: I have an annoying pop up originating from Corel which I want to get rid of. It is popping up on my screen almost daily now. I have been through all of the corel apps on my system and cannot find the culprit. I have read about the problem and the Corel response. I have tried those, but I am still getting them.
(09:40:33 AM) Corel Customer Support: This chat will be recorded for quality purposes. Terms of Use http://www.corel.com/en/terms-of-use/ | Privacy Policy http://www.corel.com/en/corel-privacy-policy/
(09:41:26 AM) *** Shamili joined the chat ***
(09:41:29 AM) Shamili: Welcome to Corel, My name is Shamili.
(09:41:31 AM) Shamili: Hi Mark
(09:41:38 AM) Shamili: How May I help you?
(09:41:38 AM) Mark WIngrove: Hello
(09:42:02 AM) Mark WIngrove: I want to get rid of the source of a pop up which keeps occurring on my system.
(09:42:20 AM) Mark WIngrove: Currently it says Black Friday Savings.
(09:42:32 AM) Mark WIngrove: I am seeing them daily.
(09:43:24 AM) Shamili: May I know what specific product are you referring to?
(09:43:49 AM) Mark WIngrove: I wish I knew. I cannot tell which product is generating them. I have several corel products
(09:44:34 AM) Mark WIngrove: I have the following, any of them could be the source. However I have checked them all.
(09:45:28 AM) Shamili: May I know for which product You have got the pop up message
(09:46:00 AM) Mark WIngrove: Aftershot, video studio 2019, video studio 2020, painter essentials and corel photoshop pro 2020
(09:46:26 AM) Mark WIngrove: Currently it is promoting Paint Shop Pro 2021. I also keep seeing ads about special brushes as well.
(09:47:17 AM) Shamili: Please hold while I check on that for you.
(09:47:21 AM) Mark WIngrove: I have two version of PSP 32 bit and 64 bit
(09:48:57 AM) Mark WIngrove: PSP Ultimate 2020 has options under Help | Message preferences. Nothing is checked, and it also says do not show me tray messages for this application.
(09:49:39 AM) Shamili: Please try the following steps, to attempt to prevent the messaging pop ups from appearing:

1. Open up a run prompt by holding down the windows key on your keyboard + the letter “r”
2. Type Taskschd.msc and press ok.
3. Once the Task Scheduler app appears highlight the Task Scheduler Library Folder towards the top left.
4. The box on the right will show you what programs have scheduled tasks.
5. Locate the Corel tasks, there should be two of them and right click on it.
6. Choose delete
7. Close the window.
8. Restart the computer

(09:49:57 AM) Shamili: Kindly follow the above steps to get rid of popup
(09:52:01 AM) Mark WIngrove: Ok, I have the scheduler open and can see at least one task in there. How do they get there if I have turned them all off in the apps?
(09:52:16 AM) Shamili: Okay
(09:52:38 AM) Shamili: Here after You will not get any offers from the corel
(09:53:24 AM) Mark WIngrove: Yes but you have not answered the question? These pop ups are very intrusive and annoying. They are not doing Corel any favours here.
(09:55:18 AM) Shamili: Sorry for the inconvenince, I apologize for that If You use any software from the corel If there any offers going on You will get the offers messages If You disable it You won’t get it
(09:56:34 AM) Mark WIngrove: You still have not answered the question Shamili. I should be able to do this within the apps. If Corel is nagging me all of the time I am less likely to use it. Even take it off of my system completely.
(09:57:13 AM) *** Shamili left the chat ***

← Watch out for Boris & his friends Home-Start and John Lewis Partnership Christmas Appeal →

Watch out for Boris & his friends

This Boris comes from the USSR and other states that have no interest in your website other than abusing it. This is a short case study on why it is wise to remain alert.

Invitation to make some changes

On a few sites where I know there is very little annual activity on the behalf of the website owners, I help out from time to time adding a message here and there. Typically this year it has related to coronavirus shut down/ reopening messages. I received a message from one of my clients and proceeded to make the changes yesterday.

On entering the website there was an exclamation mark next to a plugin warning me there was a problem. I investigated, it related to an SMTP plugin which is used to handle sending messages on behalf of the website. This is usually more reliable than sending via PHP the native method in WordPress. By using an SMTP plugin the website connects to an SMTP (outgoing mailserver) and sends the message out through an email account.

In this case it warned me that error messages had been returned from the mail server. It invited me to send a test message to check it. Which I did. The first attempt returned an error, the second attempt a few seconds later was successful, the third attempt returned an error.

What was happening?

I have been down this path a few times, and suspected that the hosting company was limiting messages coming through the mail box, probably because of spam like activity. I raised a ticket with the hosting company and asked them to check and verify.

They never answered the question but requested access to the website to see the fault for themselves. They missed key points in the questions I had raised to them, so I tried again.

Second time around they blamed the plugin for the problem claiming there were no error messages in the hosting relating to failed email attempts. (But still did not answer the question whether they were blocking it or not). So I tried again.

On the third request they did find error messages in the email log which also mentioned suspected spamming activity through the contact form on this website.

Website Log

At this point I checked the log of website accesses to see if I could spot anything there. Sure enough something was probing the website 4 times a minute over less than a 2 second period. Humans do not work that fast, so it had to be a bot (computer program running on a compromised server somewhere).

All accesses were from this IP address: 5.188.210.4. Checking that IP address it turns out to a server in Russia. Probably a legitimate server that has been compromised by someone.

Why should you be concerned about this?

From the first time around 7 years ago now, when I started to turn on security monitoring and you could actually see beyond normal website usage, I was surprised to see the volume of illegitimate attempts to access websites.

One of the most common is sledgehammer approach password guessing routines which try to get into your website.

In this case, something was probing the contact us page and attempting to use it to send spam. It later turned out that the website owner had received 257 spam messages, but they had all been trapped in the email program they were using.

Whatever it was trying to do, it was triggering a safety function in the hosting which was stopping or rate limiting messages from this website. So while it may have tried to send thousands of messages, only a few got out. BUT…. it also means that this Russian computer was hitting the website so hard, that it would have affected any legitimate messages coming in through the contact us page.

When I did my test, it failed, then passed, and then failed for another 10 attempts.

So, if your junk mail rises for any reason beyond a few messages a day, be suspicious. Someone may be targeting your website, and they may be impacting your website’s ability to send messages. Or said another way, your clients to reach you through your website. The main problem here is there is no warning given, no messages of failed delivery.

How to fix it

In all of my cases, I work locally in the UK, the audience with a few exceptions are all UK based, and in most cases probably within 50 miles of the location of the entity or charity. Therefore your website would not be of any interest to someone in India, China or Russia.

The hosting control panel has some country blocking options. You can block by country. In this case I blocked several countries including Russia from this site. It is not a bombproof solution, there are ways around it from the attackers point of view, they could return through a VPN or some other path from the dark web. But in most cases it will work.

In this case some 12 hours later, the server in Russia is still probing the website every minute, which just goes to prove it is a hackers program that is doing this running on a remote server, and probably probing hundreds of sites. However in our case it is blocked at the server before it reaches the website.

IP address is now blocked from accessing the hosting

If you are affected…

If you suddenly see an uptick in spam messages, and they all seem to be related (Russian or Chinese for example) send me a message and I will check. They are a nuisance, but there are ways of stopping them, both at the hosting, preventing access to the site, and adding spam filtering if there are some common themes if you are affected by direct email.

However do not ignore it. If the spam is originating via your website contact form, this may impact your other users. Send me a message through the contact us page if you want me to check.

← Looking for Donations? Annoying Corel Pop Up and How to Fix It →

Looking for Donations?

I have received some requests over the past year to add “Donate” buttons in prominent places on websites. I am also asked for advice on ways of raising funds. Which are the best partners to work with.

I will try to capture here some of my own thoughts on the subject and hopefully you will understand why I look at things in this way, and alter your approach accordingly.

I need a donation

This is your need, and of course we all understand why in the current climate. The problem is so does everyone else. They all need donations as desperately as you do.

First Response: Put Donate buttons everywhere

I have been asked to do this, I can only assume that I am asked to this because someone else has done it. Home-Start UK does it, so everyone else wants one. However if we think for a moment, if you were walking down a street and saw someone on the side of the street holding a cup up for a donation, most of us would walk by. Why? Because the reason why that person needs a donation has not been established. You have not received or been able to process any “sales pitch”. It is just “I need money”.

Now consider this analogy to viewing websites online to walking down a street and everywhere you are looking people are thrusting donation boxes at you asking for donations. You can now perhaps understand why this may not be successful.

Sell your need

If you watch some of the 2nd tier TV channels like ITV3 and the other commercial channels you will see lots of adverts asking for donations. However they all spend most of their time explaining why they need your donations. If you need donations this is how you need to tackle it. Build your case with some solid examples, place them in a post or dedicated page on your website, add links to the donations portal/ partner. When you have done that, copy the web address of your page or post and paste that around a few social media sites that might be interested to learn what you do. Finally check on the number of hits you got as a result of this activity and whether you acheived any donations or not. Then refine further.

What sort of donations?

Are you seeking a one off amount, or a regular donation? A regular donation of £5/ month is worth a lot more than a single donation of £30. Build a story that you are going to reveal over time about your “need” and how people are helping to make a difference. In this case you could have a “Friends of” page where people sign up and make a regular donation and become an elite group of supporters. If you follow this path, think about how you can reward them for their generosity, make them feel special?

Make it very easy

Someone contacted me asking if I could add a standing order form to a website to help to generate donations. I was curious why this would help generate more donations? As a potential donor, I would have to a) believe in the cause sufficiently to b) download and print out the Standing order form. c) Fill it all in. d) Find an envelope, fill that in, e) find a stamp, f) post it.

Compare that to clicking on a Virgin Money Giving link which allows me to donate online either as a one off payment or a regular payment. I can do all of this online in a few seconds without leaving my chair.

While I do not pretend to know all of the answers here, why would someone fill in a standing order form compared to the online security and ease of use in going via Virgin Money Giving, or some other established fundraising portal a charity is providing in under a minute?

I think the only advantage of having an online Standing Order form which can be downloaded and printed might work with older donors, but for younger people, more used to working with computers and doing things online, I think the online portals offer a very easy path to raising funds.

Other methods

Easyfundraising.org.uk is a great way to raise money. Just think of how much ecommerce is active at the moment with everyone shopping on line? Most of you have EasyFundraising.org.uk accounts but some are more successful than others, why is that?

Keeping promoting

It takes a little more effort to place your orders via EasyFundraising.org.uk. I generally go to Amazon. John Lewis, et al, set up my basket in my account. Shut down the browser, open a new one, go to my account at EasyFundraising.org.uk and then look for a link to Amazon, John Lewis et al. That takes me back to where my basket is waiting. I pay and exit the site. Because I have come from EasyFundraising before I made my purchase a referral fee is paid back to EasyFundraising. That is how the donation is made. The major benefit here is it did not cost me a penny, but I did need to remember to finalise the transaction from EasyFundraising.

At your end, if you have an EasyFundraising account, you need to keep pushing your membership/ supporters / interested parties. You need to keep reminding them to a) signup, and associate their account with your charity, and b) make online purchases via their account. It would also be very useful for you to feedback to your supporters what difference they are making.

You could consider this a campaign; identify and collect subscribers/ supporters, and keep contacting them. Treat it like an exclusive club. There are some small charities that have a dedicated following which will generate several thousand pounds this way.

Fundraising page

Another advantage of Easyfundraising.org.uk is you can point or have a link which points to your account on your website. So there is little risk of losing someone interested in supporting you.

Amazon Smile

Amazon Smile works in much the same way, but only applies to qualifying products at Amazon. You access it by going to https://smile.amazon.co.uk

Unlike Easyfundraising.org.uk Amazon Smile does not allow you to point directly to your account. All you can point to is the smile.amazon address. So your supporters have to locate you before making an association between your account and theirs.

Comparing them both?

As far as I can tell, Easyfundraising.org.uk works with lots of online retail outlets including Amazon. However Amazon Smile only works for Amazon purchases. I have not seen any disadvantages of making Amazon purchases via an EasyFundraising account for example. So I don’t think you really need both.

Final words

Whatever you choose to do, think of it as a value proposition to sell (receive a donation) and hold that mindset. If you are failing to meet expectations on raising funds, it possibly means that other charities are being more successful than you, so you need to up your game to compete.

You do need to keep reminding people though, whether it is easyfundraising, Amazon Smile, or Virgin Moneygiving (or whatever your chosen partner is called). You do need to keep selling the dream.

← Phishing Woes Watch out for Boris & his friends →

Phishing Woes

I would like to raise everyone’s attention to a series of official looking Phishing attempts on one of my clients. Having alerted the relevant people, one more came forward to say that they had received a message as well.

This is how it works

You receive a short email to say that your email account has been suspended due to security issues that have been detected. Of course you would wish to rectify this so would read it.

The email is personalised and appears to be addressed to you, because the first part of your email address contains your name. They harvest this part and place it as a field in the email. So you might see something like Dear mark.wingrove, ….

Note the lack of capitalisation, and the “.” in the name. That is a giveaway.

Within the message body is a statement which claims the IT/ Support department for your organisation has detected a problem with the security of your email address and you need to act within the next 48hrs otherwise your email address will be permanently disabled.

There is a link you need to click on to resolve the problem.

What is Phishing

Phishing is a method used by hackers and other bored people to present a form to you and invite you to enter your email address and password into the form. I wrote about this a few years back with an example and how it all worked. You can find it here.

You assume the website/page you are taken to is legitimate and enter the information into the form anticipating you will resolve the problem mentioned in the email.

What actually happens is the form data is forwarded to an anonymous (meaning difficult to trace) email account which the hacker is using. They will then use your email address and password to access your account and take it over.

Take care of your security

Once the hacker has got into your email account, now consider how you use your email account and how it is connected to everything else, and you will get an idea why they do it.

I have had examples from a a few years ago where a gmail account was compromised in this way, and the hacker got into a website because the gmail account was associated with a website.

About this particular case

In this instance, it looks like there was a small number of personalised email account addresses on the website. These are under links encouraging people to contact an individual directly. So someone or something had harvested these from the site.

Normally a generic email account is used and mail goes to this mailbox for sorting later.

What to watch out for

If you receive any email, expected or not asking you to follow a link to set up your account, unfreeze your account, or anything to do with entering your account details somewhere do not click on it.

If you were expecting an email like this (for a legitimate reason) then independently go to your account and check it. Do not trust any links sent to your email account in emails especially if they are not solicited. They are likely to be fraudulent.

About your IT department

I am not your IT department, but if I was aware of a problem with your account I would contact you directly. Even if you have a third party looking after your email accounts, they will probably contact you directly, or through their contact in your organisation, it would be very unusual to receive an automated message.

Free Account users

For those of you using Gmail (Googlemail), Yahoo or Hotmail, you are particularly vulnerable. If you loose control of your account, then you will probably lose it for a month or more. Because you are not paying for your email account, it not so surprising that there is not a human you can call to resolve it. You enter an automated process which takes some time to resolve. If that was your only account, or main account, you are now in trouble because you can no longer send or receive mail once the account is suspended. I recommend that if you fall in this category you look at adding 2 factor authentication on your account which will help prevent any third party from taking it over.

If you are using an email account associated with your hosting or domain name, then if it is taken over, it is easy to grab back again. If it happens to you, tell me or your email partner immediately you are aware of the event.

← Apple Woes Looking for Donations? →

Apple Woes

Family Sharing and Subscriptions

I thought I would share this with you because I have recently been caught out. For those people that regularly read my articles on scams and things to be aware of, this one is particularly embarrassing. I have been trying to figure out how it happened.

I am fairly meticulous with anything to do with credit cards, banks and subscriptions. Like many of you I have an iTunes account and have purchased music, video and apps in the past. In my case I have one account which is shared with the family. That means we can share most things, even across platforms onto Macs as well as Apple mobile devices.

I have never had any cause for complaint with Apple. Their service has always been exceptional compared to many other service providers until the following happened.

Set up notifications

When I set up my Apple ID associated with iTunes, I used to get email messages if anyone downloaded anything. That worked brilliantly, I always knew what was going on. The problem here though is for some reason, which I have still not fathomed out yet, they stopped.

So point one is make sure any purchase, even if it is £0, you get an email, so you know it has happened.

The Perfect Storm

I cannot remember why I checked, but I looked at a credit card statement to see two monthly payments coming from Apple which were for subscriptions. I knew I had only one subscription with Apple, and that was an annual one. So I started digging. One was for Amazon Music, the other was for Dropbox. These are both Apps on an iPhone.

I already pay Amazon for an Amazon Music Family Account. I pay that directly. I already pay DropBox for a DropBox Professional Account. When I downloaded these apps, that was how I used them, so I did not anticipate any additional charges.

I went to Amazon and asked why am I paying twice for this? They did not know why, they could not find another account, only the one I had. Then told me that they don’t have any visibility of what Apple does as Amazon Music is provided via iTunes. I would need to contact Apple.

I got the same story from Dropbox. Whatever the mechanism is, it is controlled by Apple. Dropbox has no visibility of what Apple provides to clients. Contact Apple. I don’t believe either of these, but you can only complain so far. So I contacted Apple.

Apple started out as their usual polite selves. I guess it is fair to say that I was less polite, having found out that £21 per month had been going to iTunes for probably 2 years. The interesting thing was I was immediately refunded 2 months worth of subscriptions with little debate. However Apple could not go any further back than that. I escalated it and got the same response from the supervisor, who said it could not be taken up any higher. But I should contact Dropbox and Amazon Music.

And there I was left spinning. Amazon Music points to Apple, Dropbox points to Apple, Apple points back at Amazon Music and Dropbox. As for the guy in the middle, nobody can help you other than directing you to someone else that cannot help you.

So what happened?

The missing connection, which I am still to resolve, is the messages about purchases stopped coming through. I never changed anything, but when I realised it, I had not seen anything about purchases or subscriptions for some time. Years in fact. When you make a purchase a confirmation email is sent out to the account holder even if you are using Family Sharing.

Check your subscriptions

I am guessing that this is unique to me, I have not seen lots of other people complaining. However I recommend that you check on your smart phone and your iTunes account to make sure that a) there are no subscriptions you do not know about, and b) you have a recognised email address where purchases are being forwarded.

Further checks show that my son had used Dropbox and Amazon Music accounts, and this is the point where these charges started to occur. The safety net of sending an email to me to advise of the charge was no longer in place, so I was oblivious to it. Ho Hum!

And then there was this…….

While on the credit card trail, my wife commented on a different card and asked why it was so high. I had no idea so took a look. Guess what? Over 14 days £401 worth of debits by Apple. In one day £250. So on the phone to Apple again!

This turns out to be totally unrelated. Looking back at various transactions, it looks like someone somewhere had intercepted my card details from another transaction.

To cut this story short, someone had my credit card details, took out an iTunes account and an Apple ID and started spending. Checks were made by Apple to verify that the payments were not made against any of the Apple IDs used by the family. They were not. Apple could see they were fraudulent actions and said they would recommend a refund and it would be sent for review over 48hrs and to check back later.

48hrs passes ……..

Yes we have reviewed these payments on your credit card and will refund you £4.97. The rest of the payments were made against consumables apparently. Here Apple becomes extremely unhelpful. I point out that there must be another ID associated with my credit card, who is it? “Can’t tell you that”. “Can you tell me what the transactions were for at £48.99 each?” “nope, can’t tell you that”. “But you can see that they are fraudulent?” We went around and around on this one, they could not tell me anything else due to privacy issues. Apparently you have to keep fraudulent activities secret.

I eventually went back to my credit card provider who has refunded the balance. However some learning points here too.

Always use a credit card, if I had used a debit card with Apple, I would have not been able to recover anything. Secondly, periodically check your accounts for unauthorised activity.

I was left somewhat dismayed with Apple in this second unrelated case, as it was clear they had all of the clues as to how it was done, and who was behind it. They were not very helpful either when I asked for the reason why only £4.97 would be refunded against a total debit of £401. While the claim had gone to some group sitting in an ivory tower somewhere, and they determined they were not responsible; it would have been useful to see exactly what they determined and why.

← Head above the parapet? Phishing Woes →

Head above the parapet?

We have all become uncomfortably aware of Covid-19 and it’s impact on society in general. In the classic change curve view of things that are thrust upon our daily lives, we are still adapting. There are some schools of thought that say things will never be the same again.

If I look at all of the people that contact me each month, things have become very quiet. For the first time since I started I am now down to two websites in the pipeline, and then nothing beyond that. I am not bothered about this, I have other things to be getting on with.

Looking across many of the websites I look after, numbers are down (site visits) due to everyone temporarily closing down. However over the past two months things have been picking up again.

You may also have noticed that there are some large charities advertising on TV seeking funds. Eventually everyone is going to wake up and start seeking donations. Without doubt it has been a tough year, and those typical annual sources of incoming have not been there. So what can you do?

Learn from the big boys

Now is a good time to give this some thought and start to put a plan together for your campaign no matter how small you are. If the large national charities are starting their campaigns as things start to ease off others will eventually follow, because there is only so much disposable income out there.

The following is simply a one man brainstorm, but hopefully there are some ideas in here to get you started.

1). Are you on Easyfundraising?

Easyfundraising is an attractive method of raising funds because it costs your donors nothing. But you need to put some effort in. Just think about how much is being purchased online these days. Some charities, even small ones can receive £1000’s this way, but you need to engage your supporters. Find out more at https://easyfundraising.org.uk

2). Are you on Amazon Smile?

I have an Amazon Prime account, and while it is not always the cheapest option, I make a lot of purchases via Amazon. An Amazon Smile Account provides a 1% donation based on purchases. I think EasyFundraising is a better option because it is broader than Amazon, but if you have a lot of people purchasing things at Amazon you could request that they sign up to Amazon Smile so you can benefit. It means you need to take out an Amazon Smile account.

3). Have you told the world what you have been doing?

For the first 5 months of the lockdown, I was incredibly busy. I expect that while you adapted, had more things on your plate than normal, you had to adapt as well. If you continued to provide services to your clients even though those were no longer face to face, why not put together an article and publish it on your site.

Make it a case study on adaptability, make it the cornerstone of a fundraising drive.

Many sites have gone quiet, not published very much at all. But most of you have carried on, albeit with reduced services. How has it been? What challenges did you face, and how did you overcome them?

4). Do you have a particular goal?

You may be struggling internally with achieving the support levels you would like to provide within the funding envelope available. Tell people what your goal is, list it on your site with some supporting narrative. Celebrate any movement towards that goal.

People will be more likely to help if they can see what the problem is, and what you are trying to do about it.

5). News News and More News….

One thing which you may not realise is that Google and Bing search engines visit your site whenever you publish something. If you don’t publish something, they have no reason to visit, and your listing in the respective search engines will become stale. Any more active organisation in your area providing the same or similar services will become a competitor if you do not take any action.

6). Newsletter

Think about a site visitor. They have not been to your site before, but they like what they have seen on your site. They spend 15 minutes on the site and then leave.

A week later you have an important announcement which might have solicited a donation from this visitor. However you are unlikely to see them again any time soon.

It is much better to capture those people that are interested in your website by inviting them to sign up to a newsletter. The newsletter runs in your website and allows you to repackage content you have already written. (So you don’t have to write it again). Very easy to use, all fully GDPR compliant.

So, let’s run through that again. Think about a site visitor. They have not been to your site before, they like what they see. They spend 15 minutes on your site. While viewing the news page they can see they can sign up to the website newsletter. They go ahead and do that. Takes less than a minute.

A week later you have an important announcement which you hope may solicit some donations. You publish a post on the opportunity, and you send out the post as a newsletter to your subscribers. Easy. In this case the “fan” receives your website in their inbox. So you have maintained the engagement with the visitor.

7). Do you put your news on Facebook?

STOP!

Put your news on your website so more people can see it. Facebook is mainly for those people who have already made a relationship with you, so it is sort of like inhaling your own exhaust!

Try it this way: You have some announcements, you put them on your website as discrete posts. When you publish your posts you display them (during testing). Now copy the URL (web address), go to Facebook, and create a post on Facebook, by inviting people to read the article on your website by pasting the URL into Facebook.

If you do it that way, you have only written it once, but it is visible in two places. The fact that it is on your website as well means it will help with SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and allow your item to be found through searches on Google and Bing et al.

8). Do you put text in images in your website, like posters?

STOP!

While they can be read and understood by humans, they cannot be read and understood or indexed by computers. That means the text in your important poster will never come up in a Google Search. Always put the details of an event as discrete text into a post. Supplement it with an image, that is fine. However do not always rely on just an image. This equally applies to PDFs which may or may not contain text. Always have anything that is important in text. When you publish it can be indexed by search engines.

Whatever happens next, do start to think about how you can re-energise your website with new fresh content and start to drive more traffic to your site.

Need help? Drop me a line.

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WordPress Site Health Check

Some of you may have noticed while logging in a small panel in the dashboard called Site Health Status. It first appeared around six months ago and is part of the core WordPress installation, which has gone through several major changes over the past six months.

What is it?

It performs some tests when you visit your website and gives you a summary on the home page. You can also locate the detail by going to Tools, and then Site Health.

Over the past 2 months I have been working my way around all websites and have noticed some trends with this health check. It often shows critical errors and needs improvement. I asked the hosting provider for optimised settings for a WordPress website to get the best performance. You may find that question a little odd, but sometimes there can be wide variances in performance, and whenever I see this I go back to the hosting provider and start asking questions. Which is why I have opened around 380 support tickets over the past 3 years. I asked for a set of changes to apply to every account to get them all to the same level of performance.

There are often things that need to be done in addition to the parameters configured by default. Anyway I will not bore you with the details, but I have found a set of parameters to be added in the hosting which achieves a generally faster website, and that is what I have been doing in the background. I am about 3/4 of the way through and anticipate I will have been through all sites by the end of September.

Below is the dashboard panel summary for the Site Health Status.

The image below is an example from a live site, viewing the detailed Site Health Page.

Is my site sick?

Well, I have been asking that question, because the health check provides some unexpected results. There is also a wide variance in the results on successive tests. So I raised the question with the hosting provider to ask……

Then I entered the longest support thread I have ever had with them. Well over 1 month going back and forth. We are not done yet, and when I finally get this resolved I will let you know. But this is what I have found out. Some of it I knew already. However the bottom line for me is a health check provided by WordPress in the core functionality should simply pass every time. If it does not work predictably, or throws an error then it should be investigated.

Initial observations

While working around sites and optimising them (more memory, more PHP variables, buffering turned on, site optimisation turned on, CDN turned on….) I noticed that the health check often showed up as “requires attention”.

However there were no indications from the outside of the site (the users view) that anything is wrong. The site functions normally, and is quite quick. However the health check reports there is something wrong.

Most likely a false positive

It looks like the results WordPress is reporting are “False Positives” this means an error is being incorrectly reported. They are often inconsistent on subsequent tests, and clearly the site is not broken. So why are they occurring?

WP-Cron

WP-Cron is a house keeping function built into the website. It is triggered whenever someone visits a page. What should happen is any tasks that are due to run, start when WP-Cron is spawned. However this presents a problem to hosting companies. (Not just the one you are with, but most of them). WP-Cron can be processor intensive if there are lots of page views. If it is processor intensive, it will limit how many websites can be placed on any given server. One way to reduce that load is to disable it, which is what I have been doing, and replace it with a call from the control panel which is executed every minute to check to see if there are any housekeeping functions required. This is not a standard WordPress installation, this is extra, and leads to a more efficient site. Especially as it turns out that if you leave the installation as a standard WordPress installation, then the naturally occurring WP-Cron events are throttled back by the hosting anyway. Something I had to find out and was not published.

WP-Cron is restricted to executing once per minute by the hosting company. If you try to execute it more than once a minute it will not work. If there are several tasks, maybe only one of them is completed. When you visit the health check screen or trigger it you are doing this asynchronously, it is quite possible that the request has already been triggered for that period. This is reason why there are occasional failures.

My opinion

I am not happy that these are failing. The position I have put to the hosting company is that these tests have been applied by the WordPress developers and are indicative of the performance of the hosting platform that WordPress is running on. While I can accept from an engineering point of view that the native WP-Cron in all WordPress websites may not be efficient, or take up too much processing power, it is how it was designed. If the hosting company claims that their hosting is WordPress optimised then it would not be unreasonable to expect that a health check passes consistently. That is a very difficult argument to defend from a hosting company point of view.

What they have said

They understand the position I have represented, and are currently looking into applying methods in handling WP-Cron requests to get around the problem, such that all sites indicate a pass. That work is ongoing.

Reality Check

Based on the feedback I have had and various tortuous explanations and going back and forth, I am reasonably content that the failures are not real. I also want to stress here that, you would not be aware of any problems from the outside users view of the site, and therefore would be unlikely to be looking for any problems. This whole area is pretty deep in the bowels of how WordPress works. But I am not letting the hosting company off of the hook, because it is their hosting implementation is showing the problem.

Looking around the internet, lots of people are raising the same thing. This may lead to pressure being applied to the WordPress development team by Hosting Companies to reconsider how these tests run to ensure they run in all environments. Even those that rate limit WP-Cron.

So inconclusive right now, so we watch and wait.

But, if you see anything else wrong with your website, or the perfomance is very sluggish, always raise it to my attention and I will check to see if there is some other problem present. As always please contact me through the usual channels.

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Website Health

WordPress has recently introduced a health widget in the dashboard. It indicates the health of your website. I have been getting questions on it. It looks like this.

I have not done anything yet on this site (my site) so let’s take a look. First thing is not to wholly believe what it says. But we should check it out. I have clicked on the Site Health Screen link. It takes me to here.

The first thing to note is at the top. It is now running some tests. Which infers it did not really know what the state of the website is.

We have 0 critical problems, if you ever find you have one or more in this space alert me immediately. A critical problem could bring your website down.

The two recommended improvements show that I have one or more themes that are not in use, I should remove them.

It also says I have one or more plugins loaded which I am not using, I should remove them. Both of these are security precautions. In our case, not that important.

The last one relates to a function in the hosting which I have never seen anywhere, and is not supported by this hosting. It too is non critical. However it is worth checking by opening the box.

In the meantime while we have been thinking about this page the Site Health has changed to:

… GOOD. Well I did not do anything to the site. Unfortunately the way this has been implemented is a little alarmist. I don’t mind WordPress mandarins building a stronger and more robust platform, but this feature is not a great implementation as it turns out.

Check for yourselves

When you next login, give it a try and see what the page says. If you see something there after you have loaded it and are concerned, let me know and I will check it out for you.

← Website unavailable and other messages WordPress Site Health Check →

Website unavailable and other messages

Over the past six months there have been around 4 or 5 cases where websites have stopped working. This can invoke panic if you have never seen it before. There will be a white screen and some short message on it which will not mean a lot to you.

Firstly do not panic

Your website is still there, but cannot run. WordPress introduced some measures around six months ago which ran some diagnostic and other tests and reported on the health of the website. It is since this change some sites have failed, probably because one of the trapping mechanisms trying to identify problems has kicked in.

Generally what has happened is the website may have been upgrading itself, the upgrade has caused a temporary conflict, and this or some related event has caused it to crash. What you see is the white screen. It can sometimes be falsely triggered by security plugins.

How bad is it?

The first thing to check is whether you can still log in to the site. Try to login as an administrator. If you can get into the site, there may be a warning message there. If the problem is down to a plugin (it normally is) try turning some of them off and see if the website returns. If the site does return, delete the broken plugin, and try reinstalling it.

If you cannot login and have access to the hosting

Normally the way I have to handle these problems is to log into the control panel, use a file manager to locate the plugin directory for the website. I then work my way down the list renaming the directories by adding some text at the end of the directory name. For example if the directory was called wordfence, I will rename it wordfence-off. When I do this, the plugin can no longer load. If it was the one causing the problem, then the site will return.

I would then delete the plugin and reinstall the latest version, that normally fixes it.

Can’t fix it?

If you cannot resolve the problem, send me a message, better still call me on the phone, and I will take a look as a priority. But you may find you can resolve this yourself.

Why?

I use a very limited set of proven plugins across the websites I build. They are all well maintained, and if a problem exists, and I can identify it (usually takes around 30 mins), so far removing and reinstalling them has resolved the problem. You may however have added in your own selection of plugins. Not all plugins are equal. Yours may be causing the problem.

If you are stuck, and have refreshed your browser, or tried a different browser and get the same result alert me immediately and I will try to get it resolved for you quickly provided I am near a computer.

If the worst happens

We always have a weekly backup we can rely on for website recovery if we run into a problem that cannot be resolved.

← Speeding up websites Website Health →

Speeding up websites

Over the course of the past three years I have raised over 300 tickets with the hosting company to raise technical questions and try to resolve problems. That does not mean they are not very good, far from it, they offer an excellent service, and are based in the UK in Nottingham.

One of my eternal questions is why is this one website running slowly and the others are ok. That can be for all sorts of reasons, including my local area network as it turns out. I inevitably am told “well it all looks ok from here” but they are sitting on the end of a VPN and not accessing the site in the same way I am doing it.

Anyway to cut a long story short, I am working my way around all of the website accounts and making some optimisations in the hosting account. I have to do this on a per account basis, and it will likely take the next two weeks as a background activity. It includes increasing the number of variables a website can use, this is important for Divi based sites, increasing the memory the site has available to 512MB. Turning off the standard WordPress Cron job manager and running one CRON job every minute from the hosting. Standard WordPress needs to carry out housekeeping functions, and these are triggered by visitors. If you do not have many visitors the jobs may accumulate, and also the hosting limits the number of jobs to be run to one per visitor. The fix in the hosting and getting the housekeeping function triggered from the hosting will keep these jobs to a minimum.

While doing this I am also checking the sites, adding back in the Google Analytics plugin you used to use, it was sold to a third party by the author, and from then on the new owner was asking for money for what should be a free service. It will show a graph on the dashboard after it is installed again.

Increasing backups to 8 consecutive weeks, and setting up an encryption password to protect the backups.

If you lost it, I will reinstall the old WordPress editor, some of you have mastered the Guttenburg WordPress editor, but it is a stretch, if you only go into the site now and again. The original editor was much easier to use.

Checking everything is running on the site.

Finally turning on a website optimisation function in the hosting and a CDN (Content Delivery Network) function in the hosting.

Having worked through that lot, your site and page changes should work in a couple of seconds. That seems to be the case with the first 20 sites.

I am trying to get all of the accounts to reflect the same standard settings. They have not over the years for a number of reasons.

Any problems drop me a line.

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