bbPress.org

Hey all you plugin developers – and aspiring ones – I have a bit of an FYI for you when it comes to the naming of your files.

A bit of backstory to this – recently when I installed a set of bbPress powered forums on a new site I would suddenly find myself unable to connect to the site – both the blog and the forums. I was lucky that the many times this happened my host provider (and a good friend) was able to find out what happened to lock me out. It turned out that for some reason my IP was triggering the data center (where the hosting service is located) firewall and locking me out.

The question was – what was causing the trigger to be hit?

Well after some investigation by the engineers at the data center they found it one was one specific javascript file that was being called by two different plugins being used that were the cause of the firewall being triggered.

What both of these files had in common was a javascript file called jquery.cookie.js

The two plugins in question are bbPress WP Tweaks and bbPress Like Button. They both apparently make use of this javascript file.

Now of course this might just be a one off problem that will never actually happen to other users of these plugins (after all the engineers at the data center might be overly anal when it comes to their firewall rules 🙂 ) but if you use them and you suddenly get emails saying that your members can’t access the blog or forums this might just be the cause. Better to be forewarned than to be pulling your hair out trying to figure out what the problem is.

To the two plugin authors of the plugins mentioned – I like using your plugins and for now the engineers have put a global rule in place so that the calling of that javascript file won’t trigger the firewall, but you might want to think about alternatives to it.

As I said this is just an FYI but I thought it would be better to post about the problem just in case it happens to someone else as well as letting developers know that there could be a problem using this javascript file.