New Release: PeepSo 2.6.0 and Gecko 2.6.0.0

If you are using User Limits to control Groups access, please read this post in detail. PeepSo 2.6.0 does come with some big changes. That’s one of a few reasons to bump the version. Gecko Theme brings stable version of Sticky Sidebars. Yay!

What’s new in PeepSo

Important change: User Limits & Groups

Based on popular demand, we have separated the permissions governing group creation and group joining. The old setting was renamed to “disable group join” and follows the old “disable groups” setting.

The new setting is called “disable group creation”. Unfortunately, we are unable to provide the new option with a default setting following the original one. If you are using User Limits to control access to Groups, please make sure to configure the new setting according to your needs.

Auto-unpublish reported posts

A new option in General Configuration allows you to define a number of reports needed for a post to be automatically unpublished without any action from the administrator. It will be especially effective against trolls and spammers active when the site administrators are away or asleep. In case of a false positive or report abuse, the unpublished content can be manually restored.

Licensing & versioning performance improvements

As our business is growing, the amount of licensing, versioning and update calls grows with it. In order to ensure smooth operation of the client sites and our own server, we introduced some improvements in the engine.

If PeepSo.com is detected to be down by any of the PeepSo subsystems running on your website, it will automatically stop all other calls from going out for an hour. This is to ensure our site being down or otherwise unreachable doesn’t affect the client site performance. Before 2.6.0 each subsystem needed to encounter a time-out on its own, which lead to some consecutive slow-downs especially for the administrator (wp-admin is where the licensing calls are sent).

We are also experiencing a lot of licensing traffic coming from certain domains. Some websites hit us as many as 50.000 times a day. Most likely their transients are not working, preventing the licensing calls from creating a working cache. Websites like that create a substantial load on out server, hammering it with never-ending requests.

Since we are using a very powerful dedicated machine, the problem is a minor one, but as we expect to grow at a rate of 500 new active licenses per quarter, we needed to take some proactive action to avoid issues in the future.

PeepSo 2.6.0 ships an API rate limiting feature, which limits the site to maximum of 250 calls per hour (or 6000 a day). If the limit is hit, a warning is displayed with a recommendation to contact support. Please see the full changelog here.

WordPress 5.3 and PHP 7.4

WordPress 5.3 was released this week, with PHP 7.4 following closely in a few weeks. PeepSo 2.6.0 is fully compatible with both, although we are still unable to properly test some integrations because the third party plugins break or misbehave under PHP 7.4.

What’s New in Gecko Theme

Gecko Theme brings stability to Sticky Sidebars. Thanks to all of your reports we were able to nail it in just one sprint. If you do happen to find anything else. By all means, please do not hesitate to contact us.

This release also brings you improved embedding of shared FB links. We also added improved the default styling of Easy Digital Downloads’ Update Payment Method form so that it actually does look great.

Apart from the above we also added a bunch of fixes. Please see the full changelog here.

Brought to you by Matt Jaworski

I am a professional nerd with **over fifteen years of experience** in the field of Open Source web development. Before [PeepSo](https://PeepSo.com) I was a contractor and have helped build successful businesses around the world, including USA, UK, Germany, Indonesia, and Malaysia. A couple of years leading up to founding PeepSo, I was involved with JomSocial – a social networking extension for Joomla. Stepping up from the role of a contractor to a business owner, I became [PeepSo](https://PeepSo.com) founder and Chief Technology Officer. I strive to build beautiful, fast, and functional software that **empowers users to build their own digital tribes with full autonomy and freedom** often not available on mainstream social networking media. In 2023 we spun off a new company to launch [Awedesk](https://awedesk.com) – a complete ticket-based client support solution for WordPress. I also created [ListoWP](https://LIstoWP.com), a modern to-do plugin for WordPress which is now evolving into a project management tool.