Normal view

Does Wordpress still let you use animated gifs on .org listings?

16 August 2026 at 20:32

I’ve been trying to upload an animated GIF for one of my WordPress.org plugin listings, but it keeps reverting back to the static logo.
Is this a new restriction by design, or am I doing something wrong? I’ve noticed other plugins, such as Elementor and SureForms, using animated GIFs, so I’m just curious if I’m missing something.
Any insight would be appreciated!

submitted by /u/neon4816
[link] [comments]

Bipartisan 'Uprising' Against Flock Cameras: a Larger Fight Against Big Tech and Surveillance?

16 August 2026 at 22:04
Politico notes that over 20 local jurisdictions in America "either stopped using Flock cameras or began the process of doing so in July, according to a tracker maintained by DeFlock, an activist group that has been mapping the company. It's the highest amount in a single month since they began tracking in 2021." Some local officials said the public safety promises weren't worth the cost. The cameras "didn't help us with anything. From a utility aspect, they were just kind of not useful," said Eric Couture, a Democratic first selectman in Killingworth, Connecticut, another city that recently canceled its contract with Flock. "I'd say it was a net negative." And their article adds that it's a bipartisan pushback that "runs parallel to sprawling fights over the future of technology in American life, including the rise of increasingly advanced artificial intelligence tools and the construction of massive data centers needed to power them." Salon even argues Flock's cameras "have become a symbol of growing anger over the efforts by technology oligarchs to impose their dystopian fantasies on the country, replacing liberal democracy with a surveillance state... People are sick of tech billionaires trying to control our lives"" By targeting Flock cameras, activists are building momentum for a larger rebellion against the tech industry — and against political leaders who are complicit in their assault on our freedoms. Flock Safety embodies the dishonesty that has been the prevailing theme of tech corporate communications and marketing for at least the past decade. While the cameras are sold to the public as a banal traffic safety measure, they have prompted an outpouring of stories about how they're being used to violate civil liberties and undermine democracy... According to an exhaustive 10-month analysis by Electronic Foundation Frontier, a nonprofit dedicated to defending civil liberties in our digital age, local police were using the cameras to track protesters, such as those at No Kings rallies, who were then put in a national database to be used across all jurisdictions. Despite claims that the cameras only record license plates, the technology-focused outlet 404 Media found that the database is also being used to collect information on individual people whom cops can then search for using descriptions of clothing, race, gender and body type. The Flock uprising, though, is the stirrings of public understanding that none of this inevitable — and we have the right to fight back... Along with protests against data centers, it's a sign that the public is desperate for a way to fight back against not just AI, but also the anti-democratic forces fueling this latest tech wave. Salon's writer also adds that "what stands out about the burgeoning public rebellion against Flock security cameras is just how fun it all is," citing "a national cat-and-mouse game between vandals and cops that is being merrily followed on social media, mostly by people rooting for the vandals." City council meetings in which citizens swarm to protest paying for the cameras are the new must-see TV. In Huntington, West Virginia, a small city in the heart of Appalachia, one man became an internet folk hero when he stood up at a city council meeting and said, "I'm not gonna waste your time; I'm kinda hungry. But one last thing: Every single Flock camera has about 2-3 pounds of copper and about 1-2 grams of gold. Do with that information what you will." He then walked off in triumph.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anthropic Criticized For Adding Watermarks to Text that Claude Generates - or Processes

16 August 2026 at 21:04
This week Anthropic announced its Claude chatbot will watermark the text it generates, reports the blog Futurism. "It works by making subtle changes in the AI's word choices across the text it generates, which are supposed to be imperceptible to a human but, in aggregate, form a pattern that is detectable with the tool." Anthropic said it was implementing the watermark system in response to the European Union's landmark AI Act passed in 2024, which requires that AI companies mark content that's been generated or edited by their systems. TechCrunch notes that other companies including Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Synthesia have committed to adhering to the EU's code. But "The news about Claude watermarking kicked off a firestorm on X," reports Forbes, "with users panicking that AI-assisted writing will now bear a kind of permanent 'scarlet letter.'" (Forbes wonders if media companies are normalizing AI "while at the same time stigmatizing the output.") But there's another issue. Anthropic said the watermark indicates Claude processed text, Business Insider points out, "not that it was necessarily the original author. The company said marks can remain after Claude proofreads, translates, summarizes, or otherwise edits content... a watermark shows that Claude processed text, not necessarily that it wrote it." In the days since, "Dozens of people have posted on X since Monday that they had canceled their Claude subscriptions, citing the watermark." Vladislav Rajtmajer, a freelance developer in the Czech Republic, told Business Insider he canceled his Claude Max subscription on Tuesday, citing the watermark as the main reason. He said he uses AI for code reviews and translations, and worried an AI label on code shipped to clients could raise questions about authorship or trigger contract penalties... Richard Echols, an AI consultant in Georgia, also said he canceled his Claude Max subscription on Wednesday and that the watermark was a major factor in his decision. He said he uses Claude to create documentation for businesses and worried the mark could appear when he had written the underlying material himself and used the chatbot only for edits. "Even if you edit your own work that you wrote, they add the watermark anyway," Echols said... Anthropic isn't the only AI lab to use watermarks: Google uses its SynthID technology to watermark AI-generated content, and OpenAI uses SynthID for supported images and audio. Elon Musk's social media platform X also adds a "Made with AI" tag on content it determines to be AI-generated or manipulated. Long-time Slashdot reader kmleon (also a tech consultant and RPG researcher) experienced another issue. He'd built some software using their own custom-built AI tool, only asking Claude to do some testing. "Little did I know that Claude would sometimes decide, since it was involved on the edges... to take credit for all of my work, claiming some parts were either '100%' or 'Co-Authored/Created' by Claude.Ai / Claude Code!" I'm sure the good folks at Anthropic will eventually tweak Claude enough to, hopefully, not make these mistakes in the future.... I only became aware of it today, because I recently setup scanners to catch Claude incorrectly watermarking any content it touches for various projects I'm working on. I found that it has (apparently as far back as Sonnet 4.6, but as recently as today, August 14th, 2026) sometimes been mistakenly over-zealous in taking credit for 100% creating or co-authoring docs, code, images, videos, etc. I've only, so far, found about a dozen instances spanning the past year, and most of them appear to have been injected in the last few weeks, so it is not a common issue (yet). On the bright side? Maybe watermarks can help AI stop training on AI-generated text. Although Forbes also reports that Google "announced on Friday that it will now let users remove the visible watermark from AI-generated images, videos and music created with several of its models."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Linux Kernel 7.2 Has Been Officially Released with Many New Features

16 August 2026 at 19:03
Linux Kernel 7.2 has just been officially released with a slew of new features, reports the blog 9to5Linux. Highlights of Linux 7.2 "include cache-aware load-balancing support, initial HDMI 2.1 FRL support to the AMDGPU driver, support for devres-based management of ACPI notify handlers, initial CRI platform support for the Intel Xe driver, and Rust support for the IBM System/390 (S/390) architecture." Linux kernel 7.2 also introduces a "Fair(er)" GPU scheduler, support for the 'zerocopy' library to Rust support to make zero-cost memory manipulation effortless, new hwcaps for the 2025 dpISA extensions on the AArch64 (ARM64) architecture, and enables large folios by default for the Btrfs file system. It also brings Intel CPU model number support for Panther Lake R processor series, improvements to the kernel's swap subsystem, support for multi-size transparent huge pages (mTHPs) to the khugepaged kernel thread, and support for compressed files to the SMB filesystem. On top of that, Linux 7.2 improves the new NTFS filesystem introduced in Linux kernel 7.1, adds devicetree updates for 64-bit NXP/Freescale and Qualcomm platforms, introduces MPTCP signaling support for IPv6 addresses, adds GRO/GSO support for PPPoE, and brings more SMP load-balancing updates... [T]he TCP authentication option has been implemented, and there are also some Thunderbolt networking improvements. Also worth mentioning is that the KVM subsystem has received support for AMD's "guest-mode execution trap" and Intel's "mode-based execution control" (MBEC) features, the NFS file system's default block size was bumped to 4MB on systems with at least 16GB RAM, and support for the Intel Trusted Domain Extensions (TDX) feature has been added. Thanks to Slashdot reader prisoninmate for bring the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China's Moon-landing Plans And Why the US Is So Worried

16 August 2026 at 18:03
"We are in a 21st century space race," U.S. Senator Ted Cruz has said. And this week CNN noted a competition that for decades loomed in the background of geopolitics "is now roaring to the forefront," with China "demonstrating rapid advances in space technology" while the U.S. is "ratcheting up rhetoric about a looming battle for control of the cosmos." It's the fact that China plans to build a permanent settlement on the moon by 2040 that has prompted an urgent response from [U.S.] lawmakers... They've declared a new space race, and NASA is pledging to build a lunar outpost of America's own.... Both the United States and China plan to send robotic explorers to the south pole later this year, paving the way for human explorers to follow close behind. The US is relying on the private sector to develop and build low-cost, exploratory robotic landers... Meanwhile, China is aiming to launch its robotic Chang'e-7 mission as soon as this month. The complex endeavor will seek to use four different robotic vehicles — an orbiter, lander, rover and mobile "hopper" — working in tandem to attempt to gather unprecedented data. The effort will include tools to drill for and directly analyze water ice, a feat that the US will only attempt with robotic missions slated for next year at the earliest. "If lunar water ice is successfully located, it could significantly reduce the cost and time required to transport water from Earth, facilitating the establishment of a human base for long-term activities on the moon and enabling further exploration of Mars or deep space," Tang Yuhua, the deputy chief designer of the Chang'e-7 mission, said in a 2025 interview with state media. The oncoming flurry of south-pole-centric activity, with few established international laws to govern the outcomes, is heightening the drama of this rivalry... But with a much more ambitious goal — a future in which people attempt to flourish within permanent settlements rather than just visit the moon — the stakes of this new space race are even higher, according to Clayton Swope, the deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a bipartisan nonprofit. "The long-term vision will take generations to execute on," Swope said. "But in my mind, it's a scenario where there are people being born, people dying, their families, children growing up in a place that is not Earth — so that looks a lot like a city, more than it looks like an expedition to the south pole." If such a future comes to fruition, Swope added, his hope is that such extraterrestrial colonies would be governed by rules reminiscent of Western ideals and democratic principles. Whether China would be on the same page is an open question. China is already fine-tuning its plans for a lunar settlement, CNN writes: The country envisions the International Lunar Research Station, or ILRS, as a sprawling science-focused facility on the moon's surface that can be operated robotically, "with the prospect of subsequent human presence," according to a government's ILRS website. China could partner with Russia to build a massive nuclear reactor to power the base, though questions remain regarding how the war in Ukraine may impact Russia's ability to deliver... China and Russia were mapping these plans long before the US announced its own intention to build a nuclear reactor on the moon last year and detailed its plans for a lunar settlement spanning hundreds of square miles... Who will write the rules? And how, exactly, will the use of lunar resources be policed on the international stage? Meanwhile, NASA "still does not have a vehicle capable of getting astronauts down to the lunar surface," the article points out: Returning to the moon is not as simple as repeating Apollo. The space agency cannot — and does not wish to — replicate its 20th century lunar-landing success. The supply chains, skilled machinists and factories that built Apollo's rockets, landers and command modules no longer exist. And while the Apollo landings stuck close to the lunar equator, landing near the south pole is substantially more complex and requires more powerful vehicles.... China, meanwhile, has been laser focused on its lunar exploration program since 2004, using its top-down, central planning system to keep resources flowing toward specific goals.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

WordPress Twenty Twenty-Five: Individual pages keep showing my homepage/template instead of their own custom HTML

16 August 2026 at 17:46

Hi everyone! I’m hoping someone can help me understand what’s happening with my WordPress site.
I’m currently using the Twenty Twenty-Five theme and its Site Editor/template system. I’m building my pages with my own custom HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
I have a Main Page set as my static homepage under Settings → Reading, and that page has its own custom code.
The problem is when I create another page.
For example, I created an All Properties page and put completely different custom HTML/CSS/JavaScript into that page. When I go into Pages → All Pages → All Properties → Edit, I can see the correct code and the changes I make there.
However, when I actually visit the page, WordPress shows my Main Page/homepage design instead of the All Properties design.
I have a “See More” button on my homepage that links to:
mydomain.com/all-properties/
The strange thing is that the URL does change correctly. It becomes /all-properties/, so WordPress is definitely going to the correct URL.
But the actual content is still my homepage.
I’ve also checked Settings → Reading:
Homepage: Main Page

Posts page: None

So I’m wondering if this is related to how Twenty Twenty-Five templates work.
It seems like the individual page has its own custom code, but the Twenty Twenty-Five template is overriding it or not displaying the page content correctly.
What I want is simply:
Main Page → displays Main Page custom code
All Properties → displays All Properties custom code
Other pages → display their own custom code
I don't want to have to put the entire design for every page into the global/template itself.
What exactly do I need to change in the Twenty Twenty-Five Site Editor/templates to make each individual WordPress page display its own content?

I’m pretty new to the Site Editor, so a step-by-step explanation would be greatly appreciated!🥹

submitted by /u/Next_Requirement_888
[link] [comments]

HubSpot just raised prices again, seriously considering self-hosting a CRM, has anyone actually done this long-term?

Third price increase in two years. We're a 6-person team and just got notified our HubSpot plan is going up again. At this point I'm paying for a brand, not a product. Agree?

Started looking at self-hosted options last month. First It looks doable: spin up a VPS, export contacts from HubSpot, import, done. I even ended up putting together a comparison of self-hosted CRMs you can run on your own server.

Then I had testing a few on a cheap instance on Serverspace, $9/month for 2GB RAM, and it actually ran fine. Some of the UIs are pretty dated, but the core functionality is all there.

What's making me hesitate is the maintenance side. Updates, backups, potential downtime with HubSpot someone else deals with all of that. I set up a daily backup cron job during testing, but if anything goes wrong, I'm the one taking on all the risk. Do you guys think it’s worth it?

For those who've actually moved off HubSpot or Salesforce to something self-hosted CRM - was the maintenance overhead worth the savings? Did anything break badly at a critical moment? And did your non-technical teammates adapt to a different interface without too much friction? I’m trying to figure out if this is a smart move or if I'm about to trade a monthly bill for a different kind of headache…

submitted by /u/No-Top9040
[link] [comments]

Are automated CRMs not a thing?

Im an automation guy and recently got into GTM engineering so im interacting with the CRM alot.

Obviously my CRM is like 80% automated. Everything from tracking buying signals, filling in lead context, and even enrichment and messaging. Only real work is handling the replies when they come in (no AI of course)

I thought this was standard practice but this sub is telling me otherwise...

So question is, what CRMs are you guys using? Are you not taking advantage of the automation features in them?? If not, why not? For context Im using Twenty on a small VPS

Building CRM architecture has been the highlight of my days recently

submitted by /u/MuffinMan_Jr
[link] [comments]

Made a Notion CRM for small agencies & consultants

I built this mainly around keeping the sales side organized when you're managing multiple leads and deals.

It has:

→ Follow-ups, so you can quickly see what needs attention

→ Deal health to get a quick overview of how things are progressing

→ Weighted pipeline to estimate the value of your current opportunities

→ Connected companies, contacts and deals

→ Won/Lost views to keep the active pipeline clean

→ A “Why Lost” field to keep track of patterns over time

I’ve been refining the workflow for a while and thought I’d share it here in case it’s useful for anyone managing a similar pipeline.

I’m also doing a small discount for the first 5 people who pick it up

submitted by /u/eve9656
[link] [comments]

Ce vieux thème WordPress est il sans risque ?

16 August 2026 at 12:57

Dans quelle mesure pensez vous que ce thème WordPress est à risque ? Il a été créé par Automatic, et n'est plus mis à jour depuis 2013. Mon site est un tout petit blog amateur avec très peu de visites, 27 visiteurs uniques le mois dernier d'après Jetpack.

https://wordpress.org/themes/parament/

Pour l'instant j'utilise le thème Twenty 15, mais j'ai envie de revenir sur Parament qui était mon premier thème, à l'époque de mon inscription sur WordPress.

Le remettre à jour uniquement au niveau de la sécurité demande t'il beaucoup de travail ?

submitted by /u/Gemurama75
[link] [comments]

Is WordPress a good option for building a car dealership website product?*

16 August 2026 at 15:59

I'm considering building a car dealership website using WordPress and then reusing the same system for multiple dealerships, with each dealership having its own branding, inventory, admin area, and domain.

The website would include things like:

  • Vehicle inventory management
  • Add/edit/delete cars
  • Vehicle images, specifications, pricing and availability
  • Search, filtering and sorting
  • Individual vehicle pages
  • Customer inquiries
  • Test-drive requests/bookings
  • Services section
  • EMI calculator
  • Dealer admin dashboard

The idea is to build the core system once and then customize/reuse it for different dealerships rather than developing a completely new website each time.

For people experienced with WordPress development:

Is WordPress a good option for building something like this?

What would be the main downsides or limitations I should be aware of?

I'm particularly wondering about:

  • Scalability when managing multiple dealerships
  • WordPress Multisite vs separate installations
  • Database/inventory performance
  • Security and maintenance
  • Plugin conflicts/dependencies
  • Custom functionality and integrations
  • Whether WordPress would become difficult to manage as the number of dealerships grows

Would you recommend WordPress for this type of product, or would you build it as a custom application from the beginning?

I'd appreciate advice from anyone who has built a similar multi-client/product-based system.

submitted by /u/LiteratureTypical982
[link] [comments]

Flock's 'Creepy Cameras' Remain Major Threat to Privacy Despite Small Recent Changes, Warns ACLU

16 August 2026 at 15:38
While Flock announced changes for its AI-powered traffic cameras, "Several of the proposed changes Flock is touting are merely retreads of previous ," complains the American Civil Liberties Union. "Flock's latest announcement still appears more focused on addressing a perceived PR problem than the significant harms its products create... [T]his is hardly the step forward Flock wants us to think it is " The ACLU continues to urge that default retention periods be shortened to 48 hours — not one week. And they warn Flock allows longer retention to any police department that asks for it, or when police officers activate "Evidence Mode" (the scope of which is not yet clear): Even if "Evidence Mode's" data retention hold only applies to hits returned on a given search, it would still retain significant amounts of location data on persons and vehicles who law enforcement do not suspect have engaged in any wrongdoing... Flock claims that its changes will provide "more local control," meaning local police can decide what types of offenses other Flock customers can search their data for... This is not new. Flock has attempted this before, and the security measure failed because users were easily able to circumvent the system's requirement that police input the purpose of their search. For example, on June 12, 2025 Flock started claiming its new "Proactive Search Term Tool" would block any "impermissible" searches, such as abortion-related searches in states like Illinois that prohibit sharing reproductive healthcare data. But police officers quickly realized they could just input "investigation" or even "hehehe" as a search reason and it would be approved. Flock later switched from an open text box to a drop-down menu of reasons, but that just offered police a list of acceptable purposes they could choose from, whether it was accurate or not. Until Flock demonstrates they can develop a reliable, workable system to prevent improper searches, this promise of local control provides nothing more than a false sense of security... While providing "Audit Assistance" to all departments makes sense, there is no evidence that the tool works consistently to address what the Washington Post observed is a growing pattern of police officers turning Flock into a personal stalking tool. While dozens of officers have recently been arrested, fired, or otherwise disciplined for misusing Flock for personal reasons, Flock claims these arrests are proof its auditing tool works. However, unless we know the number of officers misusing the system, we cannot conclude if Flock and its auditing tools are catching 95 percent of violators or 5 percent. Flock needs to have its auditing tool analyzed by an independent evaluator to determine its actual effectiveness. Until then, we don't know if the tool is a real security measure or just window dressing. Perhaps the oddest part of Flock's announcement is its claims that "now every search will require" police to input a case code... While claiming that a "search without a reason is a search that shouldn't happen in the first place," Flock's announcement fails to note how easily users have circumvented "search reason" security measures in the past... This leaves the public wondering how making an ineffective voluntary security measure mandatory will improve its functionality. Flock's "nearly $1 billion in venture capitalist funding has locked it into an operational model that seeks to trade our privacy for massive profits," concludes the ACLU's statement, as they promise to continue "The ACLU is fighting alongside communities to cancel local ALPR contracts and push lawmakers to protect our rights from this surveillance nightmare..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[PROMO] I built a Spotlight/Raycast-style Command Palette for WordPress Admin — Ctrl/Cmd + K to find and run admin actions

16 August 2026 at 15:03

I’ve been working on a WordPress plugin called Dhruval Admin Command Palette.
The idea came from something that kept annoying me while working in WordPress: you often know what you want to do, but not necessarily the exact name or location of the WordPress setting/menu.
So I built a command palette inspired by Spotlight/Raycast, with NLP-powered search to make the experience more natural.
🔎 What makes it different?
Natural Language / NLP Matching
You don't necessarily have to search using the exact WordPress terminology.
Instead of remembering the exact admin page name, you can search using the way you'd naturally describe what you're trying to do.
For example:
“change site title”
“manage users”
“edit homepage”
“change permalink settings”
The command palette uses natural-language matching to find the most relevant WordPress admin actions.
Text Highlighting
Search results also highlight the matching text, making it immediately obvious why a particular result was returned.
This is especially useful when there are several similar admin pages or commands — you can quickly scan the results and see the relevant match instead of reading through the entire result.
Other features
Ctrl + K / Cmd + K to instantly open the command palette

Search WordPress Admin pages and actions from one place

NLP / natural-language matching

Highlighted matching text in search results

Dynamic parameter extraction where applicable

WordPress.org search integration

Lightweight and designed to stay out of the way

Dedicated dashboard search interface

The goal is simple: stop hunting through WordPress Admin menus and just describe what you want to do.
It's available on WordPress.org:
Link
I'd love to hear from other WordPress developers, site owners, and power users:
What WordPress Admin action do you find yourself repeatedly hunting through menus to find?
That’s the kind of use case I’d love to add to the command palette next.

submitted by /u/Maximum-Policy-8340
[link] [comments]

How to ditch WordPress?

16 August 2026 at 14:42

I've got a really basic website that's just a few pages of text and links. But in WordPress under the hood it's a hundred miles of spaghetti code and stuff I don't use.

I could just write a plain html site that would be sufficient, but I worry about ftp'ing into my server and deleting the whole WordPress install. I also don't know how to force it to load as https rather than http.

Does anyone with more knowledge or wisdom have any pointers?

EDIT: Thanks everyone for excellent advice!

submitted by /u/BenGleason
[link] [comments]

Could a Disc-Free PlayStation Actually Lower Game Prices?

16 August 2026 at 13:42
"As Sony soldiers ahead with their plans to end hard copies for new PlayStation games, players are fearing a future which will force them to pay more and own less," writes Kotaku. What will prices do in a world with no physical copies to share or sell? One former Square Enix executive speculates this could actually drive down the price of games: "Digital on the PS store will likely get cheaper," posted Jacob Navok, former Square Enix business strategist. "Current prices are tied to retail. Without physical discs holding digital hostage we'll see a larger spectrum of pricing similar to steam." Navok says that the digital-only landscape will pit major publishers in constant, dynamic competition with each other... "The more the Playstation store becomes digital only, the greater this trend will accelerate," Navok follows up. "You will see more sales and dynamic pricing similar to Steam because publishers will compete among themselves to a greater extent." [O]n the other end newer games are getting increasingly expensive, even on digital platforms. The fact that Grand Theft Auto VI will be a purely digital release has not caused its price point to budge.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

wp-flare malware plugin

16 August 2026 at 12:08

This is driving me nuts. After 10+ years of no malware on client sites, I'm getting hacked every couple of weeks on sites that are fully up to date and using 2fa logins. The common thread is that all infections install a malware plugin called wp-flare. Beyond that, I can't find any intrusion path. It does seem that once the infection gets cleaned up, it doesn't come back, but it's driving me crazy not knowing how it's getting in to multiple sites on different hosting. Anyone seen it?

submitted by /u/squ1bs
[link] [comments]

Bluesky's Active User Base Shrinks 52% Over 18 Months, But Its Protocol is Spreading

16 August 2026 at 11:34
An anonymous reader shared this report from TechCrunch: According to data from digital intelligence provider Similarweb, Bluesky's mobile app had 10.4 million monthly active users worldwide in June 2026, down 27.2% year-over-year. In addition, mobile daily active users continued to decline, falling 25.6% year-over-year in July to around 3 million... Bluesky's app has lost more than half its monthly active users from its late-2024 high... Its quarterly average was around 22.1 million monthly active users in the fourth quarter of 2024, Similarweb's data indicates, and it declined to 10.7 million in the second quarter of 2026. That's a decline of around 52%. While Bluesky's numbers are down, those who stuck around are committed. Its smaller community remains relatively active, with a stickiness rate (the ratio of daily to monthly active users) of roughly 29% in June, about the same as Threads. For Bluesky's new CEO, Toni Schneider, these numbers may not be as concerning. The company is not entirely focused on making Bluesky (the app) succeed, but on making it possible for the underlying protocol (AT Proto) to power a growing number of social apps, services, and communities. That's something that is now taking place, as projects like BlackSky and Eurosky are growing, while some AT Proto apps like the video-focused Skylight have found early traction, too. In addition, the company has launched new products, like the AI-powered research tool Attie, and is now working on adding support for private data to Bluesky. The latter could generate new interest in Bluesky from a different type of user — those less interested in the public square, and more interested in private networking and communities. But on Threads in July of 2026, daily active users were up 21.3% year-over-year to 147 million, the article points out, and website visits were up 112% year-over-year to 471.6 million. And Threads now appears to have roughly 66% more monthly active users than X.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Need help sorting out an issue with my WP blog

16 August 2026 at 10:27

I've been running a non-commercial WordPress blog since 2009. Yesterday, I tried to create a new blog post but there was an issue with the database and now the WP Dashboard tells me that there are no posts, no activity, no comments, etc. Jetpack Stats can't find anything to show. The public interface now shows a "Page not found" with the message "Sorry, no posts matched your criteria".

I contacted my ISP's tech support and after a long back-and-forth, they reported:

"Upon reviewing logs, It shows Could not insert post into the database while adding post in wordpress dashboard, which typically occurs due to unsupported character encoding (like emojis), corrupted database tables, an omitted AUTO_INCREMENT attribute, or insufficient server memory limits.

"I have successfully repaired and optimize database am afraid issue remains same"

They ran a malware scan which found four instances of:

SL-PHP-BACKDOOR-GENERIC-hnl.UNOFFICIAL 

As a user, how do I remove these four instances?

submitted by /u/Alu_Aardappel
[link] [comments]
❌