WordPress Flaw

One of the nice features of Worpress (used for this blog) is that people can register as a user which lets themreceive notifications whenever I add new content.  Whenever this happens, I receive an email notification that they’ve registered – and as you can imagine, I like receiving emails like this.

Today though, this all changed! 

One of the things that I’d never checked is exactly HOW the process works.  There’s a setting that allows me to select the role that a new subscriber will take:

Imagine my shock then, when I found a new subscriber this morning, with a role of ‘Administrator’!  Of course, I deleted the user (it was clearly a random email address!) and any content that may have been associated with them, and looked at the settings in order to restrict the roles that a new user could take.

There is NO SUCH SETTING! I can find nothing allowing me to restrict the role through the administration interface!  This is not to say that I couldn’t do it through code, but it seems like a major flaw in the design of WordPress!  My only option given the time that I have available today was to remove the option for users to register.

For the time being, if you want to subscribe to my site, please use my RSS feed.  I’ll also be adding a proper RSS feed link on one of the sidebars to make this easier (which I seem to have overlooked…!!!!)

Also, watch out for my newsletter which should be launching soon.  This will be the best way to keep up to date with the news and reviews as it will contain more in-depth articles than I typically include on the blog!  If you’d be potentially interested in reading a newsletter from me, why not leave a comment below and let me know?

In the meantime, protect your WordPress blog!