Ryan Imel

I use the Recent Comments Dashboard widget every single day. It’s the first way I check up on recent activity on my sites. Now that I’ve started using bbPress to power a forum on my site I would like the same bird’s eye view of it too.
This plugin adds a widget to your WordPress Dashboard that pulls in recent activity from your bbPress-driven forum. It will pull in recent topics and replies. The bbPress plugin is required.
The widget displays all new topics and replies, with the ability to either open the post to edit it or to view it on the front end of the site. Currently only admins (or more specifically, those with the <code>manage_options</code> capability) will see the widget.
The plugin roadmap looks like this:
<ul>
<li>Add the basic hover over actions that the Recent Comments widget has (Edit, Spam, Trash).</li>
<li>Add ability to reply to topics and replies, same as the Recent Comments widget.</li>
</ul>

Dashboard Forum Activity

Quickly review your bbPress forum activity using a widget on your WordPress Dashboard.

edward_plainview

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):
<ul>
<li>Comments: approve, held, spam, delete</li>
<li>Custom Post Types: draft, publish, update, trash, delete</li>
<li>Logins: login, login failed, logout</li>
<li>Pageviews: admin, front-end</li>
<li>Passwords: reset, retrieve</li>
<li>Plugins: activate, deactivate</li>
<li>Pages: draft, publish, update, trash, delete</li>
<li>Posts: draft, publish, update, trash, delete, password</li>
<li>Taxonomies: create, edit, delete</li>
<li>Themes: switched</li>
<li>Updates: WordPress core, plugins, themes</li>
<li>Users: register, delete, profile changes</li>
<li>And more….</li>
</ul>
The logged information consists of:
<ul>
<li>A description of what was logged</li>
<li>Blog</li>
<li>Timestamp</li>
<li>Hook that was triggered</li>
<li>User ID</li>
</ul>
<h4>git</h4>
The <a href="https://bitbucket.org/edward_electric/activity-monitor" rel="nofollow ugc">Activity Monitor has a git repository</a>.
<h4>Security tips</h4>
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:
<ul>
<li>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.</li>
<li>If you have another DDOS service, write a script that can ban visitors by IP. Use this script with the Send To Exec plugin.</li>
<li>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.</li>
<li>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.</li>
<li>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.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Custom hooks</h4>
See the <a href="https://pvactivitymonitor.com/doc/dev/" rel="nofollow ugc">developer documentation</a> for relevant info on how to create custom hooks.

Plainview Activity Monitor

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

Dashboard Forum Activity vs Plainview Activity Monitor