2013-04-30

Google Voice New Number Error... or Intended Blocking?

For all of us getting a There was an error with your request. Please try again  message when trying to obtain a new Google Voice number.

This is the best answer I've found so far in the Google Voice "Support" Group:


Transcription:

lucas carterLevel 1 

Apr 21


I'm trying to get google voice set up, but I keep hitting the same error. I added my mobile phone number as the forwarding number, but then when I got to picking a new number from the list provided (int "Choose your number"), I got:  "There was an error with your request. Please try again."
I did some searches and found similar problems. I'm in the 48 states, so that's not it. People suggested going to the "phones" tab in settings, but that doesn't exist. Others suggested clicking the upgrade button, but that doesn't exist either. I do see "Get a Voice number" but that just leads me back to the error. Other problems people mentioned are that my phone is already used for another GV account and I need to change it. I don't think that's the problem, but I'm happy to try changing it to my landline for now, but I can't find an option that lets me do it.

The first time I clicked "Get a Voice number" it let me setup a forwarding number, but now it skips right to "Choose your number" and the error.

If I go to 
https://www.google.com/dashboard/ it says this under voice:Forwarding phones 2 phones
That would seem to be my problem, but I can't seem to get to a settings page that lets me delete, reset, or change those - or even see what they are.

Any help would be appreciated.



HillsboroughTop Contributor 

Apr 21


I suspect this is the problem:

"If I go to https://www.google.com/dashboard/ it says this under voice:
Forwarding phones 2 phones"

The missing phones tab can indicate that you transferred the GV account to another email, have a Gmail Phone account only, failed to complete the setup steps or ported the GV number out recently.   I don't know exactly what you did in the past with the account but are likely running into restrictions that Google Voice has in place to prevent abuse.  If your current Google account does not have the option to add a new phone number then you won't be able to use that account unless someone from Google Voice sees your post and provides assistance.

This message was posted by Google personnel yesterday:
If you're receiving an error message when trying to select a GV number, please note that you are most likely encountering an issue because you have used your mobile phone number as a forwarding phone on another Google Voice account in the last year.  If you have, you will not be able to sign up for a new Google Voice number with the mobile number you're trying to use.  Please use a different phone number. 




me
 (Jorge A Orpinel Pérez change

4:19 PM (17 minutes ago)


You're probably right. They are placing many accounts on security hold and not saying anything about it. Someone is also deleting many messages in other similar threads. I'm taking a screen capture of this one as soon as I post and will publish on my blog: http://rehalcon.blogspot.com/2013/04/google-voice-new-number-error-or.html

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If you go to this search: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!searchin/voice/There$20was$20an$20error$20with$20your$20request.$20Please$20try$20again./voice/v40PVH45G2M/46ARqzw5AUcJ you'll find all the other threads and no answers from Google. Yet many many deleted messages, including best answers.

2013-04-20

Best Role/Capability plugin for WordPress: 7 current plugins reviewed

WP 6 native roles come with a basic structure of user control. Not much of an access management scheme for more complex projects. You can add special roles via the wp codex API but this is sort of inefficient and difficult for non-developers.

The one thing many wish WordPress included natively however, would be content-based access. Meaning to restrict arbitrary users from accessing certain content (by category for example). This is not currently possible with the CMS default structure.

Plug-ins!

listed from most basic to better/most advanced/most useful

(so scroll all the way down for editor's choice)

URE

User Role Editor is a good plugin just to manage roles and capabilities. It doesn't feature any sort of content-based permissions but I'm linking here because a plugin like this one may be used in combination of another one to achieve our purpose of the day...

UAM

User Access Manager (not linked because it didn't work as advertised) claims to allow content-based access by category. Interestingly, instead of changing the WP roles it allows to create role groups. Then you can go into different places such as posts, pages, and even categories and restrict them one by one to certain groups. The problem is that I just tried it and it does not work recursively: I assigned a group to a parent category but the users in roles outside of the group can still access posts in child categories... Not sure if it just doesn't affect posts when selecting categories or if the restriction doesn't propagate to child categories, either way its no good it its present version :(

Members

Members allows you to add/edit roles without using code. It is basically a graphic interface to the roles and capabilities API functions, accessible from 2 new entries under the Users menu of wp-admin. Such basic functionality is available in other plugins, such as User Role Editor. Additionally, Members also provides shortcodes you can add posts-by-post to restrict access to them -- getting us closer to content-based access management. The author promisses to extend the latter for future releases (its version 0.22 at the moment). Members also lets us create new custom capabilities.
Note that any changes made to users and roles using this plugin will remain even after uninstalling it.

s2Member® Framework

s2Member FREE is a very functional system to control content-based user access according to its own concept of Levels or membership tiers. It's intended however to be used as a commercial tool to charge for membership (integrates with PayPal) and has many features that don't really matter to me at the moment but others may really love it. Especially because its extremely well documented, its easy to setup, and it has enterprise-level support. Unfortunately to use it for access control means that everyone needs to register with the site to even read a post... but I'm running a public website!
There's also a "PRO" (paid) version with more flexibility and features.
Note that any changes made to users and roles using this plugin will remain even after uninstalling it.

At least s2Member helped me realize there's various types of content-based access management. What I'm interested in and the reason for this blog post is to limit some of my existing roles (the  back-end users) in their capabilities depending on the content (again, for example by category)..

AAM BASIC

Advanced Access Manager BASIC has an interesting interface in a new "Access Manager" menu which lets us create/edit/delete roles (and assign them to capabilities). We can also establish special restrictions for any existing role such as menu item visibility and ...drumroll... content based! Yes, there's a "posts & taxonomies" tab in there where you can choose posts (by categories which display as folders), pages, and media (and even media folders, in case you too also using Media Library Assistant). Sadly, while restricting categories does make them and child inaccessible to the role (although the category count is wrong in the list), it doesn't apply to the actual posts in them! -- I'm not going through 2000+ posts one by one.

I'm not linking to this one because after further tests I decided it doesn't work. Assigning taxonomy based restrictions to a role yields unexpected restrictions in others... Another annoyance with it is that some quite useful features (such as restrictions for posts inside categores...) are locked unless you buy AAM Premium... It would also be nice that media attached to restricted posts was automatically restricted. On the other hand, AAM can create new capabilities, and it's the only plugin so far that can be setup (with ConfigPress) to delete capabilities (any, not only the custom ones -- which can be pretty dangerous for your WP). Fortunately, deactivating the plugin removes all special restrictions.

Restrict Categories

Restrict Categories adds itself as an item under the Settings menu. Under its Roles (1st) tab, it allows to select the categories one-by-one or all-at-once (unfortunately no recursive selection) that can be accessed by that role. It doesn't work if you are selecting more than 989 categories :( please fix this... I'm opening a support topic with them.

Role Scoper 

We're down to Role Scoper. This plugin is complicated, not recommended for beginners... As it name suggests, the plugin allows to restrict role capabilities to work only on certain content -- by-category included, and it works recursively (option must be chosen). Again, this one is confusing because it bring into play new abstract, fixed RS roles such as "Page Editor" or "Content Manager" that map to certain (undisclosed) wp capabilities and are described in the "WP Role Definitions" tab of RS Options. To complicate things further you can also activate RS user groups which in turn can be given RS roles for site-wide permissions... Anyway, this is what I did to restricted managing some categories to only some of the back-end users:
  • I first created a new role similar to Editor with another plugin (as of now URE being the best one just for that);
  • I assigned certain users to the new role;
  • (optional) Having a public website: Under the Roles menu, Options (1st) sub-menu, then Realm tab: in the Access Type section I un-selected the "Viewing content (front-end)" check-box;
  • (optional) Selected all the "sync WP [Role] to these selections" check-boxes in the "RS Role Definitions" tab of RS Options -- not sure what this does though;
  • Enabled groups in RS Options, Features (1st) tab;
  • In the Restriction menu, Categories (1st) item: under 1. I chose "Restrict selected roles" and "for categories and sub-categories", under 2. I went to the category of interest (a parent) and selected all the RS Roles except "Post Reader", and clicked the Update button on 3; (Probably because of my thousands of child categories, the page returned was completely blank but I went back to the same category restrictions page and confirmed the changes were applied.)
  • In the Roles menu, Categories item: under 1. I chose "Assign for selected and sub-categories", under 2. I checked the [role] in question (as a group), under 3. I went down to the same parent category as before and checked the same RS Roles.
Understanding exactly what the steps above do is not trivial, feel free to investigate. In the end this whole thing didn't work for me exactly as I wanted it to. The one problem I found is speed. It's very slow when filtering access to many categories and the posts in them, so the lists can take a looong time to load... Happily as with AAM, deactivating the plugin gets things back to normal.
As a funny note, Role Scoper was developed within a religious project you can learn more in its About page. It also has a larger/newer version (it costs) called Press Permit.

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So there it is. Nothing seems to work perfectly, or maybe I have to redesign my project (too many categories). Maybe restricting admin access based on content is not the best thing to do with WordPress, It was not designed that way (which is why we shouldn't call WP a CMS). Then again that's probably why they came up with the multi-site WP Network, so consider that option instead if you can still re-start your project or migrate your content.

2013-04-02

Man Boobs on Google Maps

Here's a guy with floppy jugs on Google Maps: http://goo.gl/maps/mbM35 and here's a screenshot:
That's all.

Simple server load test with cron and ab (Linux)

Load testing "refers to the practice of modeling the expected usage of a software program by simulating multiple users accessing the p...