If you travel frequently and use your Windows 7 OSed PC in Coffee Clubs and various locations including Airports or public places, you might want to also obfuscate Windows's login screen to prevent it to be easily recognizable you're on a Windows by its default Blue and all known Login and Lockout screns for security or just for personal fun show off your l337 Skills to your colleagues at work and in this article I'll shortly explain how this is possible on Windows 7 the same is easily possible to do also on Windows 8 and Win 10 and I'll explain this as well in a separate article some time I have time in future.
In Windows 7 by default the Login Screen background is identical to its Lock Screen, one that appears on Windows (button) + L combination and through which if the computer is once locked you can login by pressing CTRL + ALT + DEL key combination, after which standardly you're either prompted for your password or if its a Domain connected corporate PC you're asked for your PIN or picture password.
Windows 7 Users: Set a Custom Login Background
To use a custom login background in Windows 7, you need to
1. Do Windows Registry edit – in order to enabled custom backgrounds
2. And then store the image you want in a special Windows folder.
Step One: Enable Custom Backgrounds in Windows 7
For Windows 7, the ability to set a custom logon background is intended for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to customize their systems, but there’s nothing stopping you from using this feature yourself.
As I said prior Windows 7 background change feature is disabled by default, so you’ll have to enable it from the Registry Editor. You can also use the Group Policy Editor if you have a Professional version of Windows (or you're configuring the background for a a whole bunch of Domain run Windows PCs).
Launch Registry Editor by hitting Start, typing “regedit,” and then pressing Enter.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Authentication\LogonUI\Background
In the right pane, you’ll see a value named OEMBackground. Note that, If you don’t see that value, you’ll need to create it by right-clicking the Background key, choosing
New -> DWORD (32-bit) Value
and then naming the new value “OEMBackground.”
Double-click the OEMBackground value to open its properties window, set its value to 1 in the “Value data” box, and then click “OK.”
!! Be Aware that !!:
If at any point you decide to select a new theme in the Appearance and Personalization window, this will reset above already made registry value.
Selecting a theme will change the value of the key to the value stored in the theme’s .ini file—which is most likely 0.
Thus in case you do change theme, to have the background be the custom set make sure you don't forget to perform the Registry tweak again.
If you're running a Windows Professional or Windows Enterprise alternative way to set custom background is to directly change using the Local Group Policy Editor instead. The advantage of using Local Group Policy Editor to set a custom Login or Lockout screen background is it will be kept persistent even if you change your themes.
To do it via LGPE,
Launch Local Group Policy Editor by pressing Start, typing “gpedit.msc,” and then hitting Enter.
drill down to the following location:
Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\System\Logon
On the right, you’ll find a setting named “Always use custom login background.” Double-click that setting and, in the setting’s properties window, select “Enabled” and then click “OK.”
Next step is to actually set the image you want to use.
Finally Set the Custom Background Image of choice
You can use any image you like, but there are two things you’ll need to keep in mind:
!! Your image must be less than 256 KB in size. !!
You may need to convert your image to something like JPG format to make that happen.
Try find image that matches the resolution of your monitor so it doesn’t look stretched.
Windows looks by default for the custom logon screen background image in the following directory:
C:\Windows\System32\oobe\info\backgrounds
Also defaultly, “info” and “backgrounds” folders donesn't exist, so you’ll need to navigate to C:\Windows\System32\oobe folder and create the subfolders on your own.
After creating the folders
C:\Windows\System32\oobe\info\backgrounds
Copy whatever background image_whatever.jpg you want to the backgrounds folder and rename the image file to “backgroundDefault.jpg.”
Remove URL from comments in WordPress Blogs and Websites to mitigate comment spam URLs in pages
Friday, February 20th, 2015If you're running a WordPress blog or Website where you have enabled comments for a page and your article or page is well indexing in Google (receives a lot of visit / reads ) daily, your site posts (comments) section is surely to quickly fill in with a lot of "Thank you" and non-sense Spam comments containing an ugly link to an external SPAM or Phishing website.
Such URL links with non-sense message is a favourite way for SPAMmers to raise their website incoming (other website) "InLinks" and through that increase current Search Engine position.
We all know a lot of comments SPAM is generally handled well by Akismet but unfortunately still many of such spam comments fail to be identified as Spam because spam Bots (text-generator algorithms) becomes more and more sophisticated with time, also you can never stop paid a real-persons Marketers to spam you with a smart crafted messages to increase their site's SEO ).
In all those cases Akismet WP (Anti-Spam) plugin – which btw is among the first "must have" WP extensions to install on a new blog / website will be not enough ..
To fight with worsening SEO because of spam URLs and to keep your site's SEO better (having a lot of links pointing to reported spam sites will reduce your overall SEO Index Rate) many WordPress based bloggers, choose to not use default WordPress Comments capabilities – e.g. use exnternal commenting systems such as Disqus – (Web Community of Communities), IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, Vicomi …
However as Disqus and other 3rd party commenting systems are proprietary software (you don't have access to comments data as comments are kept on proprietary platform and shown from there), I don't personally recommend (or use) those ones, yes Disqus, Google+, Facebook and other comment external sources can have a positive impact on your SEO but that's temporary event and on the long run I think it is more advantageous to have comments with yourself.
A small note for people using Disqos and Facebook as comment platforms – (just imagine if Disqos or Facebook bankrupts in future, where your comments will be? 🙂 )
So assuming that you're a novice blogger and I succeeded convincing you to stick to standard (embedded) WordPress Comment System once your site becomes famous you will start getting severe amount of comment spam. There is plenty of articles already written on how to remove URL comment form spam in WordPress but many of the guides online are old or obsolete so in this article I will do a short evaluation on few things I tried to remove comment spam and how I finally managed to disable URL link spam to appear on site.
1. Hide Comment Author Link (Hide-wp-comment-author-link)
This plugin is the best one I found and I started using it since yesterday, I warmly recommend this plugin because its very easy, Download, Unzip, Activate and there you're anything typed in URL field will no longer appear in Posts (note that the URL field will stay so if you want to keep track on person's input URL you can get still see it in Wp-Admin). I'm using default WordPress WRC (Kubrick), but I guess in most newer wordpress plugins is supposed to work. If you test it on another theme please drop a comment to inform whether works for you. Hide Comment Author Link works on current latest Wordpress 4.1 websites.
A similar plugin to hide-wp-author-link that works and you can use is Hide-n-Disable-comment-url-field, I tested this one but for some reason I couldn't make it work.
Whatever I type in Website field in above form, this is wiped out of comment once submitted 🙂
2. Disable hide Comment URL (disable-hide-comment-url)
I've seen reports disable-hide-comment-url works on WordPress 3.9.1, but it didn't worked for me, also the plugin is old and seems no longer maintaned (its last update was 3.5 years ago), if it works for you please please drop in comment your WP version, on WP 4.1 it is not working.
3. WordPress Anti-Spam plugin
WordPress Anti-Spam plugin is a very useful addition plugin to install next to Akismet. The plugin is great if you don't want to remove commenter URL to show in the post but want to cut a lot of the annoying Spam Robots crawling ur site.
Anti-spam plugin blocks spam in comments automatically, invisibly for users and for admins.
Plugin is easy to use: just install it and it just works.
Anti bot works fine on WP 4.1
4. Stop Spam Comments
Stop Spam Comments is:
Stop Spam Comments works fine on WP 4.1.
I've mentioned few of the plugins which can help you solve the problem, but as there are a lot of anti-spam URL plugins available for WP its up to you to test and see what fits you best. If you know or use some other method to protect yourself from Comment Url Spam to share it please.
Import thing to note is it usually a bad idea to mix up different anti-spam plugins so don't enable both Stop Spam Comments and WordPress Anti Spam plugin.
5. Comment Form Remove Url field Manually
This (Liberian) South) African blog describes a way how to remove URL field URL manually
In short to Remove Url Comment Field manually either edit function.php (if you have Shell SSH access) or if not do it via Wp-Admin web interface:
Paste at the end of file following PHP code:
Now to make changes effect, Restart Apache / Nginx Webserver and clean any cache if you're using a plugin like W3 Total Cache plugin etc.
Other good posts describing some manual and embedded WordPress ways to reduce / stop comment spam is here and here, however as it comes to my blog, none of the described manual (code hack) ways I found worked on WordPress v. 4.1.
Thus I personally stuck to using Hide and Disable Comment URL plugin to get rid of comment website URL.
Tags: article, bloggers, btw, data, interface, lot, page, php, platform, problem, running, Search Engine, SEO, spam, Spam Robots, Stop Spam Comments, theme, URLs, use, website, Wordpress Comments, wordpress plugins, wp
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