Dixon's Forum

Another busy week here at Dixon’s Forum, with dixonsforum.com under relentless attack from the hackerbots, roaming the webwide world seeking doors they can enter to commit acts of vandalism or espionage.   “Bad Actors”, the Security People call them.   They come from all directions, and the vast majority are named “admin”.

Fortunately, the AIOSWP site security plugin’s Login Lockout feature has kept them all at bay; I’ve seen no evidence of their presences inside the site.   Sadly, the attempts showed that the hackerbots were aware of my login page URL, so the recommended step was to change it, which I did, with much greater difficulty than would have had an ordinary human.

First, I got scared by the bright orange caution bar on the login-page-renaming feature, stating it could break the site or lock me out of my own admin if it wasn’t done right.   It said if my host “performs server caching” to ask them to NOT cache my renamed login page.

My host’s chat support didn’t say exactly whether they perform server caching, whatever that is, just that the CDN cache, whatever that is, is currently disabled, for my site, so I was like, if I do this and it’s ever undisabled, oh no!   My ask for clarification only led to more confusion, including links to developer’s forums and instructions how to change login passwords, very different things than login pages.

Next, it was revealed that they actually rely on the LiteSpeed Cache plugin to perform this feature, and linked me to its documentation, so riddled with techtalk and code snippets I couldn’t make out what to do, and got told I should disable the Security Plugin, if that’s what the chat agent meant, but it can’t be.

So I created a testing subdomain to try it out, and that’s where more trouble began:   For some reason, the convention changed from using the subdomain name as administrator Username to using the administrator email address instead.   This bothered me a great deal, and I could not move forward unless all my subdomains were named by the same convention.

The host chat insisted it had been this way all along, and instructed me how to go into the .php files and change the username, but I am so easily confused and cautious, when the AdminPanel calls it “Username” and the .php file calls it “user_login”, I just freak and freeze, and cry out for assurance they’re the same.   I still don’t know if AdminPanel “Nickname” and .php file”nicename” are the same thing or different, and remain afraid to touch it.

So I never changed the Username/user_login, just basically played Poke and Hope among the LiteSpeed Cache plugin’s settings until I got it right and changed the login page urls on the main domain and subdomains, and deleted the testing subdomain, resting assured if my CDN cache gets undisabled the LiteSpeed Cach will not cache my login, and my site will remain unmolested.

The fact that the hackerbots know about me means also that the Googlebots do too, even though I have not began their pinging yet, so dixonsforum.com could soon show up in the search results, yipee.

Click here to see the third installment of my rememberly story entitled, “Unentitled” .

Click here     for the home page of the second installment, and here    for the second installment itself. 

Next Week:   the third section of the script for my oral story, “That’s my Way”.