Can Permalink be disabled or winked out?

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Can Permalink be disabled or winked out?

sopl
While Nabble is able to live within Weebly, there is no way to prevent someone from using the permalink to work around the Weebly LOG IN request to access the Nabble forum. This prevents me from controlling who has access to the forum registration. So is there any way to prevent this by disabling or winking out the permalink?  TIA.
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Re: Can Permalink be disabled or winked out?

GregChapman
sopl wrote
While Nabble is able to live within Weebly, there is no way to prevent someone from using the permalink to work around the Weebly LOG IN request to access the Nabble forum. This prevents me from controlling who has access to the forum registration. So is there any way to prevent this by disabling or winking out the permalink?  TIA.
I'm not a Weebly user so do not understand the problem. Can you explain more...

I assume you have embedded a Nabble forum in a site hosted by Weebly. Do you have the Nabble "Redirect to" facility turned on?

What is the "Weebly log in request" and how does this relate to pasting a Nabble URL into a browser address bar? (if that is what you mean by "using the permalink")
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Re: Can Permalink be disabled or winked out?

sopl
Thank you for your time.  Weebly is a website builder and Yes Nabble is embedded and Weebly has its own Log-In to access selected pages where permissions are given. It was my intention to prevent a user from being able to access the Nabble registration and log-in without having to pass-thru the Weebly log-in.  It behaves like this when using Chrome, but all other browsers allow someone to use the permalink option shown to be cut and pasted and bypass Weebly log-in permissions. I use subscription based access with automated expiration to my pages and this permalink creates a back door of sorts so I was hoping to eliminate it or prevent users from find it. My goal is using Nabble as it "lives" within Weebly and its rules.

I'm not familiar with the Nabble "Redirect to" facility? Please advise. TIA.
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Re: Can Permalink be disabled or winked out?

GregChapman
From what you say I wonder if you have just posted a link to your forum. Your forum can only be embedded in another site if you use the embedding code found at:
Options > Embedding options

On the page you are sent you will find not only the appropriate code to paste, but a "Redirect to" option that ensures that you users cannot break out of the embedding. With a redirect set using a Nabble permalink will always force the forum to appear within the page on your main site where I would expect your Weebly subscription setting to prevent access.

The only point I can't advise on is the different behaviour with Chrome. I cannot say whether this is related to unexpected behaviour by Weekly or Nabble. There have been some reports of Blogger sites not handling Nabble forums properly, I remain uncertain whether this was user error on the Blogger site or a real issue with Nabble.
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Re: Can Permalink be disabled or winked out?

harkawy
This post was updated on .
Greg.....

HELP.
We were able to wink out the permalink by modifying some code.
I used the following...
A Nabble Forum Admin will see the 'Edit this page' at the bottom of the Forum on the SOPL site.
Click on it.
The new page will show the settings button above the "Override this macro"
Click on the button.
At the bottom is "Go to Advanced Editor"
Click on it.
I added a "< ! - -" at the beginning of line 52.
At the end of line 56 I added a "-->".
Please note: the additions are without the quotes or spaces
At the bottom left of the window is the 'Save Changes'

That worked fine but...
I think I screwed up the forum by attempting to redirect from the nabble site to our site.
Now as the admin, the only thing that I see within the Options button is "Subscribe via email" and the Edit this page is gone.  What do I do?
I
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Re: Can Permalink be disabled or winked out?

GregChapman
harkawy wrote
I think I screwed up the forum by attempting to redirect from the nabble site to our site.
Now as the admin, the only thing that I see within the Options button is "Subscribe via email" and the Edit this page is gone.  What do I do?
I
What you describes is the appropriate action to comment out some of the HTML code that Nabble's NAML will generate. Unfortunately, I am not clear which macro you are editing so can't confirm whether it would have the effect you want.

I didn't suggest commenting out code as a solution for you at this stage as I am still not clear what it is you are trying to stop happening. That's because a correctly embedded Nabble forum with a redirect set to the page in which it is embedded can never be displayed except within the page to which it is redirected. If access to that page is then controlled by the security settings of the main site, unauthorised visitors can never reach a page that displays the forum so the URL of any Nabble permalink will always be hidden from unauthorised visitors.

It seems that either I misunderstand something or you are not correctly embedding the forum. So I can understand the issue, you need to provide me with a step-by-step of how to reproduce the problem where unauthorised visitors can break through the security built into your main site. (Click on my username to reach a screen where you can email me the details should you not want to post them here.)

I don't have any ideas why you should now not have access to the administrator options on your menu, except for the following...

I have seen your other post where you report being locked out after editing out the Nabble branding in the footer. I won't reply to that post as I sometimes believe that Nabble staff think I can crack any problem in which I engage and leave me to it. If I do not respond then they are more likely to. Unfortunately, these days they can be very slow to respond.

Removing the branding breaks Nabble's Terms and Conditions. I am not clear what measures they have in place to control/monitor those who do that, but it is possible that it is that alone that has caused the problem rather than any other edits. If so it will require someone at Nabble to fix that. Paying for Premium Support is one solution. Some do that specifically to be able to remove the branding, but most, these days, feel it is not worth it.
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Re: Can Permalink be disabled or winked out?

GregChapman
I have now read the other post and see there is the URL of your forum there, so I have investigated further.

I find that it appears unembedded. That suggests the code found at:
Options > Embedding options
has not been successfully inserted in the page on your main site. From the posts here I know a number of Weebly and Wix site owners have difficulties in finding the correct options within those site builders to get the code inserted in the right way. You might require help from Weebly to sort that out.

I also see that the removal of the branding has failed as that still appears.

However, far more critical to the maintenance and customisation of the forum is that not just the the Permalink link is missing but the entire set of links "Refresh  Permalink  Login  Register". So it's possible you have done more than removing the links and disabled the actual login macros in some way. The links are not just missing from the Login screen, but also the registration screen as well, the only two pages I can reach.

Unfortunately, I can't investigate further as, for some reason, the captcha required is not displaying on your site in any browser I use, so I am unable to register.

Because Nabble can take a long time to respond and if you are still only at the stage of developing your Nabble forum, it might be easier to abandon your current forum, create a new one and start again - though it would need to use a slightly different name to your current one.

You might want to take a look at http://www.aivuk.org.uk/members.html to see an example of a site that uses only Nabble's own security to control access. While anyone can register at any Nabble forum, on the AIVuk site you will find that registration gains you nothing as access is only granted to those who have been assigned manually to the forum's "Members" group. You can find more about different user groups from my post at:
http://support.nabble.com/Moderating-free-forum-tp6873076p6873871.html

However, in your case you will need to continue to use Weeby's access system as Nabble has no automated way of linking access to a subscription. Nevertheless, I still say that with correct embedding you should not need to delete the "Permalink" feature as the Nabble forum should never appear unless the visitor has access to the page in which the forum is embedded and you will control that through Weebly's facilities.
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Re: Can Permalink be disabled or winked out?

sopl
Greg you are awesome! I am sure harkawy will reply, he is the techie not me. We did not wish to deny Nabble of its branding,  what we were trying to avoid was having users learn of a direct way to access the forum outside of it being embedded on our website. Once a user sees, or has the ability to redirect to the permalink url, they can bookmark that and not pass through our site which has a subscription rule for the page the forum lives on.  Harkawy was successful in winking out the permalink however if we were to right click on the forum name and open in a new window, we would be directed to Nabble and the url exposed. Also if we hovered our mouse over the name the permalink addy was visible in the lower left of the screen should anyone be wise enough write it down. I understand some of these things are all part of how things work but we were just hoping to reduce the discovery of the ability to "go direct". Does this make sense?

We really like Nabble, we just want it to live within our space so we can control access "to" the forum even though the forum has its own security.  Thanks again Greg, we value your support and dedication to help others. It is refreshing.
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Re: Can Permalink be disabled or winked out?

sopl
In reply to this post by GregChapman
Greg! Yes! This is exactly what we want - http://www.aivuk.org.uk/members.html to happen. Do you know how it is done?

The permalink and right clicking on the forum name always redirects back to their website page even though the url is different and includes reference to Nabble, it is not the actual Nabble page. I would be happy with this.
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Re: Can Permalink be disabled or winked out?

harkawy
In reply to this post by GregChapman
Greg,

I recreated the site and using the coding provided in the Nabble Support by Pedro (Nabble) at
http://support.nabble.com/Hide-quot-Edit-Page-quot-td7589661.html#a7589794
His code is...

Let's try another approach.
1- Delete your js_page override.
2 - Delete the hidding_powered_and_naml macro.
3 - Add this two overrides to your code:
<override_macro name="macro_viewer_page_link">
    <a style="display:none;" href="[n.macro_viewer_page_path/]" rel="nofollow">Edit this page
    <n.visible_for_admins selector="td.footer-right a" />
</override_macro>
<override_macro name="nabble_homepage_link" dot_parameter="text" parameters="class">
    <a href="[n.nabble_homepage/]" class="[n.class/]" target="_top"><n.default. to="Nabble"><n.text/></n.default.>
    <script> $(document).ready(function() { $("td.footer-left").css("display","none"); }); </script></override_macro>

The above override removes the Nabble wording on the lower left side and permits only admins to see the 'Edit this page'.

I saved the code and opened a different tab so that I still had access to the code page.
I then opened my website which had the embedded code to the forum to see if everything looked right.
It did.

I again clicked on the Edit this page button.
I clicked on the tool button and chose "Search macros"
In the search field I entered "Header" and the "Macro source contains" and
clicked on the Search button.
When the listing came up, I chose the js_header_functions.
When the window opened I clicked on the "Edit this override"
I scrolled down to line 58 and at the beginning of the code "Nabble.siteHeader = function()",  I added a "<" "!" "--"  (
no spaces or quotes)
I then scrolled down to line 75 and added a --> behind the " };"
I then saved the code and once again went to my site to display the forum.

The "Refresh Permalink Login Register" links are gone.
But.... We would really like to see the Login & Register links.  We don't need the Refresh or the Permalink links.

So, how can we do this..... safely....
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Re: Can Permalink be disabled or winked out?

GregChapman
In reply to this post by sopl
sopl wrote
Greg! Yes! This is exactly what we want - http://www.aivuk.org.uk/members.html to happen. Do you know how it is done?
As I explained earlier you login as administrator and go to:
Options > Embedding options.

This shows a screen similar to this.
Embedding options
It is the "Redirect Users" part that does the business, but only after you have correctly inserted the JavaScript code in the HTML of a page on your main site.

Initially the screen will not show the Redirect options seen above because, as you will realise, you have to have successfully embedded your forum first for it to know the URL of page in which to display the forum.
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Re: Can Permalink be disabled or winked out?

GregChapman
In reply to this post by harkawy
Hi,
harkawy wrote
I recreated the site and using the coding provided in the Nabble Support by Pedro (Nabble) at
http://support.nabble.com/Hide-quot-Edit-Page-quot-td7589661.html#a7589794
His code is...
I am aware of this tweak but I have never used it myself as I regard is merely cosmetic and not worth playing with. If you use the link on this site you can see code but you can't edit it. If you are a malicious hacker you will always be able to work out the code behind a Nabble site by looking at any other Nabble site. I take the view that it simply isn't worth hiding as the ordinary user will never be curious enough even to click the link.
The "Refresh Permalink Login Register" links are gone.
But.... We would really like to see the Login & Register links.  We don't need the Refresh or the Permalink links.

So, how can we do this..... safely....
If you've checked out my answer to sopl you'll see that hiding the "Permalink" link is not the issue that you might first think, if your forum is properly embedded with the "Redirect to" set. Only authorised users will be able to reach screens that display it.

In fact, I think both you and your users will find that both the Refresh and Permalink links useful.

Refresh
allows anyone to re-load the forum page without reloading the page in which it is embedded. That makes refreshing a page so much faster. If you keep a tab in your browser open on a long term basis and need to see the latest posts, using this link means you do not have to reload your main page at Weebly before Weebly then seeks out Nabble's servers and fetches the latest version of the page. It speeds it all up by 100%

Permalink
allows anyone to link to another post anywhere on the forum. On my forums I use it constantly for linking to FAQs and for managing topics that need to be merged with others or moved to other sub-forums. Similarly, your users will find it useful if referring other people's or their own posts that may be related to their current message.

I realise you've got good coding skills and are keen to use them, but I would strongly advise that you concentrate on getting your form embedded correctly first. The issues you see as urgent currently will largely disappear.

Note: I am about to leave the UK for a couple of weeks and it is highly likely I'll be off-line for that period, so don't be surprised if I go quiet suddenly after tomorrow.
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Re: Can Permalink be disabled or winked out?

harkawy
Thank you, Greg.
We have taken your comments to heart and have restored the "Refresh Permalink Name" to the site as
there will be times when someone needs to log out as well as adjust their profile.

Thank you for everything!!!!
Have a safe trip and a Happy New Year!
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Re: Can Permalink be disabled or winked out?

sopl
In reply to this post by GregChapman
This has been an AMAZING experience. Greg, you have been very kind. You have helped my being a dumbass with all this stuff a learning experience with positive results that will not be forgotten. We owe you. Loving Nabble!