Is your User setting correct in WordPress?

Though I am an experienced content marketer and have used WordPress for a long time for my blogs, every once in awhile a setting gets changed and it can cause some unusual results. I found a new twist the other day and thought I would save you some potential grief.

Under Settings: General, you will find an area that looks like the selection here.

If you accidentally check the “anyone can register box”, it allows anyone to register as users on your site. Somehow this was checked on both this site and DesignResumes.com.

When I discovered this, I found that multiple people with spammy looking names registered. Fortunately because the setting was set to a default role of Subscriber, it didn’t give this people any rights other than setting up a profile.

Is anyone registered as a user on your WordPress site besides you?

You can check who is registered as a user on your site by opening the User tab like the one on the left. You can then delete the users you don’t want.

It did feel a little like someone had entered my home without permission and maybe they might just drank a glass of water but the feeling of an uninvited guest is unnerving.

I unchecked the box and still don’t know why I would have checked it in the first place unless I thought it had something to do with comments. (It doesn’t!).

I did find that the WordPress documentation is much more detailed that I thought and a search of Google gave me many answers quickly right from the WordPress Codex site.