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Free Plugin by edward_plainview v20180826

Plainview Activity Monitor

Real-time monitoring of users, content, functionality, appearance, security, and updates.

Plainview Activity Monitor

The facts

Rating
3.6★ from 12
Active installs
100+
Price
Free
Last updated
26 Aug 2018
Added
May 2014
Requires WP
3.9
Tested up to
WP 4.9.31
Downloads
29,404

Our analysis

AI-assisted

Plainview Activity Monitor is a WordPress plugin designed to track user activity on your blog or network. It provides a global view of activities across the entire network or a local view for individual blogs, allowing for filtering by specific criteria such as blogs, hooks, IPs, or users.

The plugin logs various actions, including comments, logins, page views, and updates, along with details like timestamps and user IDs. It is suitable for users who want to monitor activities for security and management purposes.

Best for: This plugin suits WordPress site administrators looking to monitor user activity for security and management.

What it does well

  • Tracks a wide range of user activities
  • Offers both global and local activity views
  • Allows filtering by multiple criteria
  • Logs detailed information about actions

Where it falls short

  • Last updated in August 2018
  • Tested only up to WordPress 4.9.31
  • Directory score of 44/100 indicates potential issues

Verdict

Plainview Activity Monitor provides detailed tracking of user actions, but its age and low directory score may raise concerns for some users.

From the developer

edward_plainview's own description of Plainview Activity Monitor, lightly tidied.

Activity Monitor tracks all user activity on your blog or network. The activities can be viewed in global table showing activities on the whole network, or locally for just the blog you are currently viewing. The activites can be filtered so that only specific blogs / hooks / IPs / users are displayed.

Monitored actions include (not exhaustive):

  • Comments: approve, held, spam, delete
  • Custom Post Types: draft, publish, update, trash, delete
  • Logins: login, login failed, logout
  • Pageviews: admin, front-end
  • Passwords: reset, retrieve
  • Plugins: activate, deactivate
  • Pages: draft, publish, update, trash, delete
  • Posts: draft, publish, update, trash, delete, password
  • Taxonomies: create, edit, delete
  • Themes: switched
  • Updates: WordPress core, plugins, themes
  • Users: register, delete, profile changes
  • And more….

The logged information consists of:

  • A description of what was logged
  • Blog
  • Timestamp
  • Hook that was triggered
  • User ID

git

The Activity Monitor has a git repository.

Security tips

There are several ways for people to break in to your WordPress installation, or cause trouble by DDOS. Here are some tips on how to use the Activity Monitor and its plugins to help detect problems:

  • Get a DDOS protection service with an API. There is a plugin to ban IPs via CloudFlare (Send To CloudFlare). Other APIs could be supported as the need arises.
  • If you have another DDOS service, write a script that can ban visitors by IP. Use this script with the Send To Exec plugin.
  • If you can’t ban users using a script, at least set up the Send To E-mail plugin to inform you of suspicious activity.
  • Use the Bruteforce Detect plugin to detect when an IP or IPs are trying to guess the admin’s password. Ban the IPs automatically using Send To Exec.
  • Do not use admin as the username for your administrator account. Instead, use some else and add the admin username to the list of banned usernames in the Login Failed Username plugin. Ban the IPs that cause the plugin to react.

Custom hooks

See the developer documentation for relevant info on how to create custom hooks.

Read the full description on the official page →

Tagged as

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