Author page auto-created for any level – why?

Hi gang.

I have 4 levels set up for registration: 1 – 4.

The subscriber level (0) is not used (disabled in the s2member Settings area), and conventional subscribers via WP are not allowed (disabled in the WP dashboard area).

Some of my levels 1 – 4 can create posts (e.g., have the publish_posts capability). Others cannot.

Yet, for any registered user signing up through a PPro form, an author page is being created. This includes levels where the only capability assigned is “read”.

Request: for anyone with an install that takes registrations (free or otherwise) on PPro s2member levels 1 through 4 – would you mind checking if this happens on your install? Do you have an automatically created author page for that user?

Thank you.

Bran

s2Member doesn’t give the publish_posts capability capability to any role. Did you customize this with a role editor?

It’s possible that your customization is causing that author page to be created? s2Member doesn’t create pages for users.

Cristian,

This was a test of a level1 user whose capabilities are:

* access_s2member_level0
* access_s2member_level1
* read

This is a person who signed up for a free account via a PPro form.

I was not logged in when I tried this.

All I did was go to an author page on the front end and change the URI to end in this level1 user’s display name.

And that brought up an author page for this person (e.g., attempted to list all posts by this user, despite that they don’t have the capability to post).

Normally this wouldn’t bug me but I fear that search engines might somehow find and index this user’s page. I also don’t want any of these users to try it out for themselves just for kicks – they should be returned with a 404 on such an attempt.

I will say that if I run regular WP DB queries to get posts or list authors then these users don’t show up (as expected).

Bran

Hi Bran,

The WordPress Author Page is something that is part of the WordPress theme framework. When you request the URL for the author page, WordPress dynamically generates the page for you.

If you don’t want that page to be available or accessible at all, you’ll need to find a way to disable it. You could also add some code that redirects away from the author page when the requested author has zero posts (see here for an example).

Raam,

1000 stars for this snippet – it works a charm!

THANK YOU!

Bran

Glad to help, Bran! :)