Hide usernames in Author Pages URLs to enhance Security
The Smart User Slug Hider Plugin hides usernames in Author Pages URLs to enhance Security
Development, maintenance and support of this plugin has been retired in october 2023. You can use this plugin as long as is works for you.
There will be no more updates and I won’t answer any support questions. Thanks for your understanding.
Feel free to fork this plugin.
The plugin automatically replaces user names with 16 digits coded strings. There are no settings. Just install and forget. Deactivating the Plugin restores the default WordPress behavior.
WordPress uses the pattern example.com/author/name
for author page URLs where name
represents the users login name.
This means that the login names from all your users are publicly visible which is a serious security flaw.
The Smart User Slug Hider Plugin changes all author page URLs from e.g. example.com/author/john
to something like example.com/author/e9e716def73f76ac
.
The codes are generated automatically and its impossible to make conclusions about the user names. The WordPress default URLs will cause a 404 (not found) error.
The plugin adds three shortcodes you can use in your posts:
[smart_user_slug]
– the user slug of the post author – e.g. e9e716def73f76ac[smart_user_url]
– the url of the post author’s profile page – e.g. example.com/author/e9e716def73f76ac[smart_user_link]
– adds a link to the post author’s profile pageThe plugin adds two functions that can be used in theme files:
get_smart_user_slug( $author_id )
to get the user slug for the author – the parameter $author_id is optional, if omitted the author`s ID of the current post is usedthe_smart_user_slug( $author_id )
to display the user slug for the author – the parameter $author_id is optional, if omitted the author`s ID of the current post is used