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Hi
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The latest version of kiwitrees (3.3.7) is available.
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For kiwitrees.net hosted clients, your sites will be upgraded within the next day or two.
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This is an easy but very important upgrade. No special actions are required (see the upgrade page for instructions). It is important because this is a security upgrade.
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A number of users have been reporting considerably greater numbers of spam attacks on their sites recently. These are happening in two major groups:
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- "SEO spam". It is designed with purely commercial interests in mind - gathering millions of links, then selling them to paying advertisers. So, it doesn't harm, or even risk harming your data, but it can cause your site to crash through the volume of traffic they generate. They are similar to "web crawlers", or "search engine robots", but do not follow the accepted rules for robots, such as "no follow" and "robots.txt". As an example, one of our hosted sites recently recorded over 750,000 visits in a 10 hour period or on average 21 per second. Kiwitrees has some tools built-in to combat these, but the best protection is at the server level before they reach the software. Get in touch on the help forum if this is causing you problems
- "Registration and email spam". A number of users, including me, have noticed high levels of fake registration and contact emails on their sites recently. As all registrations in kiwitrees require administrator approval, like SEO spam they are not going to damage or reach your data (unless you do approve them!). But they still require management and clean up. In this release, there is a new page (Administration>Site administration>Site configuration>Anti-spam tab) with some options you can use to reduce and help manage these. It also has a link to this FAQ page explaining how they work. There is also improved logging of spam entries in the logs. They are now listed under the type "spam", separate from normal "errors".
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Other changes
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Of course, no update is without a few bug fixes and general smaller improvements. You can read about the full list on this releases' change list.
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Kiwitrees-nova
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Still progressing steadily. Time was taken off recently to combat the spam issues mentioned above though.
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The focus lately has been on the administration pages. They have their own colour scheme, different from the standard display themes, as shown in these images. They show both the desktop view and the view for those who need (or want) to manage their site on their phone or tablet.
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The desktop view should, I hope, look familiar, but refreshed.
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