Maltfield Log/2018 Q4

My work log from the year 2018 Quarter 4. I intentionally made this verbose to make future admin's work easier when troubleshooting. The more keywords, error messages, etc that are listed in this log, the more helpful it will be for the future OSE Sysadmin.

See Also

1. Maltfield_Log
2. User:Maltfield
3. Special:Contributions/Maltfield

Sat Oct 20, 2018

1. I did a search for wordpress plugins using the keyword "phplist". Here's some noteable results
   1. Sign Me Up https://wordpress.org/plugins/sign-me-up/
      1. - last updated 3 years ago
      2. + explicitly lists that it connects with phplist using AJAX
      3. - says that it doesn't support additional attributes (email address only). This will probably not work as we need to at least have a checkbox for the user to accept our gdpr-ready Privacy Policy
      4. there's a lot of info about this plugin here https://www.jaromy.net/wordpress-plugins/sign-me-up[[1]]
   2. WP PHPList https://wordpress.org/plugins/phplist-form-integration/
      1. - last updated 9 years ago
   3. yPHPlista https://wordpress.org/plugins/yphplista/
      1. - last updated 8 years ago https://wordpress.org/plugins/yphplista/

1. I tried searching the phplist forums for "wordpress" to dig through recent discussions about integrating phplist with wordpress
   1. I found this interesting discussion hinting to having a phplist plugin automatically send email campaigns after a new wordpress post is in. I really like this idea (ie: RSS scraping -> email campaign). Prior to sending the email campaign, we could post a link to it on facebook, twitter, etc. Then we could add a link to "like" or "retweet" the post (on social media) to the original post (on wordpress) within the email template. https://discuss.phplist.org/t/how-is-content-generated-in-wordpress/1656/6
   2. so 6 months ago someone asked my question: is there an official wp plugin for phplist? Sam Tuke (CEO of phplist) responded stating that there isn't but it's needed. And expounded on how the AJAX solution is the old way and that the future phplist wp plugin would work via the REST API (I like this much better too) https://discuss.phplist.org/t/any-plans-for-an-official-wordpress-plugin/3894
   3. this may work with the AJAX way https://discuss.phplist.org/t/wordpress-integration-newsletter-sign-up-plugin/1723/15
   4. And there was this old post for 2016 about the 9-year-old "WP PHPList" (phplist-form-integration) wordpress plugin https://discuss.phplist.org/t/phplist-wordpress-integration-solved/2279/2

1. I lost my password for phplist's discourse site due to my ssd crash, so I generated a new one
2. Interestingly, it looks like phplist's discourse site is SSO using wordpress as the account backend
3. I replied to this post, asking Sam if there's an option for sending our new subscriber's attributes to the stable version phplist via either AJAX or REST https://discuss.phplist.org/t/any-plans-for-an-official-wordpress-plugin/3894/3

Fri Oct 19, 2018

1. I'm back in NYC after restoring my laptop following my ssd crash
2. sent Sara information about wp-cli and managing wordpress
   1. I also sent an email to Marcin asking if he authorizes them having ssh and/or shraed ose keepass access
   2. specifically, the plugin that Sara wanted to install was this https://wordpress.org/plugins/custom-css-js
   3. the above plugin is freemium. the reviews suggested this free alterantive for more features, but it's a less popular plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/scripts-n-styles/
3. Marcin sent me a confusing email about utilization of google analytics. One of our first conversations with Marcin back in 2017 was about how OSE was working to migrate _away_ from Google services. We've since stripped analytics from all our sites. We looked at Piwik, but--due to security issues--we decided to go with awstats.
   1. I restated that we use awstats, and asked what are the benefits of using google analytics
   2. I added the microfactory site to our awstast generation cron job, and confirmed that I could view all the stats so far this month https://awstats.opensourceecology.org:4443/awstats.microfactory.opensourceecology.org.html
   3. In general, I'm very confused about where the line is drawn between giving up on FLOSS and moving to some closed-source SaaS solution here at OSE.
      1. I've been hacking the hell out of phplist so that we can use an ugly FLOSS solution, but Mailchimp would be much better, and very cheap for our needs.
      2. We still don't have a decent issue tracker. Mantis is a long-standing TODO, but we could use Jira for free because we're a nonprofit.
      3. Google Analytics is surely more powerful thatn awstats, but does that really justify the use of closed-source tools that exploit our visitor's data? Why draw the line here between awstats & GA but not use Jira or Mailchimp like most other nonprofits?
4. Marcin sent me an error when trying to post our email thread about installing a wordpress plugin to the wiki
   1. fixed by modsec whitelist
      1. 950019, generic attack = email injection
5. I updated the documentation on the wiki for the quick-start guide to configuring 2FA for our wordpress sites using the Google Authenticator plugin https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/2FA#Quick_Start_Guide
   1. I added a step to enable relaxed mode, so the user's phone only has to be correct within 4 minutes, rather than 30 seconds.
   2. I recommended use of the oandbackup app, which is the FLOSS replacement for Titanium Backup https://f-droid.org/en/packages/dk.jens.backup/

1. ...

1. began to revisit my install of the "Newsletter Sign-Up" wordpress plugin on the fef site
2. I logged into the fef wordpress ite
3. I navigated to the Plugins -> "Newsletter Sign-Up" -> "Settings" link (note that this redirects to the main panel nav bar's "Newsl. Sign-Up" link.
   1. I changed "Select your mailinglist provider" to "PHPList"
   2. our subscriber link is this, so I left the "PHPList list ID" at "1" https://phplist.opensourceecology.org/lists/?p=subscribe&id=1
   3. I set the "Newsletter form action" to "https://phplist.opensourceecology.org/lists/?p=subscribe&id=1"
4. this plugin appears to be mostly built around the trick of having someone signup when leaving a comment. That's a feature that we may want to disable. Mostly we want a widget and a form embedded into a post/page.
   1. I picked a bad site, fef, for testing widgets. it doesn't use them!
   2. I tested adding a form for signing up to the phplist newsletter to the lola page by adding "[nsu_form]" to the content of the post https://fef.opensourceecology.org/2015/09/03/lola/
      1. when I submitted on this form, it just fucking redirected me to the phplist site. it didn't even auto-fill the form! what rubbish! what we want here is for a seamless submittion to the phplist site without the user having to leave the site that they are on.
5. ugh, I just realized that the "Newsletter Sign-Up" form's main plugin page on the wp site shows a message indicating that the plugin is no longer maintained (it was last updated 11 months ago) https://wordpress.org/plugins/newsletter-sign-up/
6. I deactivated the "Newsletter Sign-Up" plugin and deleted the related content & widgets from the fef site.
7. looks like I lost my logs from when I discovered the "Newsletter Sign-Up" and similar wordpress plugins
8. I dug up some options
   1. https://wordpress.org/plugins/sign-me-up/
      1. - last updated 3 years ago
   2. https://wordpress.org/plugins/yphplista/
      1. - last updated 8 years ago
9. it looks like phplist.com (not .org) offers a solution to this issue, the so-called "AJAX" solution so subscribres can signup "...and stay on your website" https://www.phplist.com/ajaxdemo
   1. found some info on enabling this the '.org' way. note that there may be issues with the ACCESS_CONTROL_ALLOW_ORIGIN https://discuss.phplist.org/t/ajax-subscribe-api/974/7

define('ACCESS_CONTROL_ALLOW_ORIGIN', 'www.mydomain.de');
define('PUBLIC_PROTOCOL','https');

1. I found a few resources about ajax on phplist.com's wiki https://resources.phplist.com/start?do=search&id=ajax
   1. ugh, this just references the 2x no-longer-maintained plugins I found above https://resources.phplist.com/develop/wordpress?s[]=ajax
2. there's only 1x reference to "ajax" in the phplist.org manual it referes to the Ethical Pet case study. Yeah, the one that migrated off from phplist..
3. important, but a fucking stub. can we get an example listing 3x domains? https://resources.phplist.com/system/config/access_control_allow_origin?s[]=ajax
4. the discuss thread above includes this example file from subscription_form_example.html (in subscription_form_example.html.zip) https://discuss.phplist.org/uploads/default/original/1X/491a212528c7d5a4297d5449294fb5300778712c.zip
   1. ugh, the first line includes the jquery src @ googleapis.com. Let's not make our users require decentraleyes to prevent google from tracking them on our site..

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js"></script>

1. it's looking like the best option is to use the no longer maintained "Newsletter Sign-Up" wp plugin still :\ I re-enabled it and added the line "[nsu_form]" to the lola paga again. I'll try to debug that before reinventing the wheel https://fef.opensourceecology.org/2015/09/03/lola/
   1. I checked the code; there's not even any JS; it's just a fucking form with submit action to our distinct phplist site (I figured it was some ajax cross-site rejection failure causing fall-back to the redirect). Maybe this plugin isn't what we want still..I disabled it again.

Sun Oct 14, 2018

1. bought & installed my replacement ssd after my old one died unexpectedly
2. install os, restore backups, etc
3. catching up on old email

Mon Oct 01, 2018

1. Note that my logs for the first few weeks of this quarter were lost when my laptop's ssd crashed. Please mind the gap.