Stop SOPA Blackout WordPress Plugin
On the Tuesday 24th January 2012, the US Senate will vote on the internet censorship bill.
Whilst it is an American law, it has far reaching repurcusions for the web as a whole.
There are many companies against SOPA, such as Google, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, and today I am lending my weight to the argument by making this WP plugin.
If you think SOPA doesn’t affect you, please think again. Watch the video below, download the plugin for your WP site, or use the form below to force politicians to take notice.
Thank you
Download the SOPA Blackout WP Plugin Directly
Filed under: Plugins,SOPA,Wordpress - @ January 12, 2012 6:28 pm
Does this plugin replace all pages with this, or just the main page? Also, the link about the Censorship Bill goes to Wikipedia will be down for the blackout. May want to encourage people to link to this page: http://fightforthefuture.org/pipa/ for details.
Beth – yes it replaces all pages.
I’ve seen a JS snippet that you can stick on individual pages that will put a layer above your site. However, thought this was less ‘blackout’ and more ‘venetian blinds’.
If there’s call for this today, I can add the option of just affecting the homepage.
I’ve activated your ‘SOPA Blackout’ WordPress plugin and checked the ‘test’ box, to see what the blackout looks like…nothing happened on any of my three websites (tried a mulit-site network activate install and also per site activation)…any thoughts?
@ChaisMeyer – the plugin relies on the
get_header()hook. If you don’t have this in your template, there will be a problem. If this is the case, get in touch (I’ve sent you an email), let me know what WP functions you are using in your template(s) and I will rustle up a bespoke bit of code for you.Just installed this, but as i live in Europe i cant select the right timezone. :/
@maxH – you only have to change the timezone if you want to co-ordinate with the US sites. Leaving timezones option blank will simply go with your default setting.
I have updated the FAQs for the plugin
Thanks for the plugin, amazing way to show our support for SOPA from here at DownloadCrunch. Keep up the good work
I also activated your ‘SOPA Blackout’ WordPress plugin and checked the ‘test’ box, to see what the blackout looks like…nothing happened
@GR8FL – does your template use the
get_header()tag? Which theme are you using? I’ll take a look…Thanks Toby for writing this plugin. Do you know if this works for mobile users as well? I use the WPtouch plugin for mobile visitors. Thanks.
Hi,
A client of mine found a problem trying to activate the plugin.
You have three occurrences of short PHP tags.
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-sopa-blackout-parse-error?replies=2#post-2566137
Mike
@Mike – thanks for that. You know, I felt sure I had left one in, but went through it twice and didn’t spot it. Thanks for the heads up. Changes going up now in version 1.4
The SOBA Blackout plugins works for mobile users as well, even if your blog uses the WPtouch plugin. The page isn’t particularly mobile friendly, but it shows.
@Jim – sorry I didn’t get back in time. I was having dinner. Hopefully I will have time to make some adjustments to the mobile view tomorrow, even if it’s just
viewport,initial-scaleand a few other bits and bobs.Tested this plugin on my local server & it worked fine. Thank you once again and keep up the Good Work. Say NO to SOPA & PIPA.
Thanks for the plugin. I’ll be using it on my website.
plugin works great on our site http://www.okayplayer.com and http://www.okayafrica.com but we are getting blanks when using the url without the www.
okayplayer.com
okayafrica.com
way to fix?
@dantana
Can you show me what the .htaccess file looks like, please?
Can’t think of anything obvious.
Actually, just looked up your with www and without on a DNS lookup service and I’m getting very strange results:
Sometimes I get a full record with your MX records in gmail and an A name resolving to 207.150.193.189 and other times I get no A name record or MX records at all.
Does it normally work? What happens if you disable the plugin?
I have get_() in my theme functions, but I still can’t get the plug-in to work.
@Anita
The only way version 1.4 of the plugin wouldn’t work is if the hook (the function that calls the plugin to load and fire) is being overridden by another theme/plugin/process somehow.
I had issues with WP Super Cache plugin which was bypassing the PHP altogether and serving cached pages, however this is now fixed.
What theme are you using?
Any caching plugins?
What URL are you testing?
If you would like to try and remedy it yourself, you could try finding line 314 of sopablackout.php and change the ‘template_rediect’ bit of the line as seen below:
add_action(‘template_redirect’, ‘sopablackout_content’);
… to one of the following:
muplugins_loaded
plugins_loaded
sanitize_comment_cookies
setup_theme
load_textdomain
after_setup_theme
auth_cookie_malformed
set_current_user
init
widgets_init
register_sidebar
wp_register_sidebar_widget
wp_loaded
parse_request*
send_headers*
parse_query*
pre_get_posts*
posts_selection
wp*
I would start at the bottom and work upwards (please ignore the asterixes when copying and pasting.)
Hey guys,
The plugin works when I’m logged in and have “show to logged in users” enabled, but no other time! I’ll disable my caching but the same lack of blackout occurs when I open a new incognito tab in chrome so I’m not sure what’s up. Any ideas?
Thanks so much, really want to get this up!
Sounds like a time issue
Can you tell me what settings you have for timezone, date, start time and end time, please?
UPDATE
I am setting my timezone to 8am East Coast Time (New York), so I can stay open for support requests for longer.