PJCNET

Apologies For The Rogue Email (Sent to registered users):

Firstly, sorry to my registered users for the unexpected email you probably received from “Wordpress”, this wasn’t intentional and was caused by a software bug. There won’t be a message to read as stated in the email message received as I’ve been forced to disable the software urgently, sorry for the confusion and any inconvenience.

As part of trying to continuously improve this website, I was testing some new software to allow me to send out public messages to a new Inbox feature inside everyone’s profile pages within this website only. I most definitely set the software NOT to send out email notifications for public messages, unfortunately it totally ignored the settings and sent the public notification to everyone’s email anyway against my intention. The rogue software has now been deactivated permanently.

Technical Details of Problem:

This website is powered by powerful open source blogging software called, Wordpress. There’s literally thousands of optional plugins (software addons) that can be also installed along with Wordpress to customise the system for your personal needs. The offending plugin in question is called:

User Messages V1.2.0

Please be careful if you intend to install it with your Wordpress installation, although I suspect it works for the majority of people as it’s been rated highly at the time of writing!

The first impressions of the plugin were really good as it added a really neat full instant message and mail facility for registered users with the ability for Admin to send out public messages to all. There’s an option to decide whether to inform users by email on receipt of a public message and I was very careful to ensure the setting was disabled as this would otherwise send out a mass email to everyone for each public message. I saved the settings and I doubled checked that the email notifications was certainly disabled. It’s a pity it all went completely wrong when the system decided to send out mass emails to everyone against the saved settings and the consequences of this nasty bug could have been much worse.

I am using the latest stable version of Wordpress at the time of writing which is V2.8.4, but I’ve got numerous other plugins enabled (also all updated to the latest versions). It’s possible another plugin could be clashing with the “User Messages” plugin, causing the problem. It’s certainly a very serious bug, but what made it much worse was the fact that the system was about to resend the messages yet again to all registered users without any interaction, if I or my website host hadn’t picked up on the problem, who knows how many mass emails it could have sent on autopilot?

The Consequences of this Nasty Software Bug:

Well firstly, if the system kept sending repeated mass email messages to all users, it could have caused serious legal problems and a lot more embarrassment to say the least, luckily I saw the problem immediately at the time and my website hosting company also cleverly stepped in to stop it.

Secondly and even worse is the fact that sending out mass emails is against the terms & conditions of my website hosting agreement and many other website hosting agreements. Hosting24 were very quick to react and their system banned my all my websites, bringing them down with immediate effect straight after the first email batch was sent. At least it stopped the system sending any more emails and luckily Hosting24 were very understanding. When I explained what had happened, they reinstated my account immediately and I was only down for a few minutes. I then quickly disabled the offending plugin in the nick of time as it had wrongfully and automatically relined up the message to mass email yet again which would have left me with even more explaining to do to Hosting24.

Some hosting companies, especially free ones may not be so understanding as Hosting24 and because of this bug, you could end up banned from your website Host permanently. I sincerely thank Hosting24 for being so good and I’m very impressed by their quick acting security system which would have prevented an endless supply of emails if I hadn’t had noticed the problem myself.

I apologise for this problem once more to my registered users and unfortunately I now won’t risk implementing an Instant message system on this website in the near future as I’ve therefore learned from this mistake. Thanks to everyone for reading and understanding, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

I am now writing to the producer of the “User Messages” plugin software and I will update with any responses I receive. In the mean time, I strongly recommend you don’t risk use this software with your Wordpress installation.

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