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November 12th, 2008
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WordPress Live Writer header tags trigger anti-virus software

Posted by plattapuss on November 12th, 2008

Yesterday, someone emailed me saying that their anti-virus software would not let them properly view this website. I keep my site fairly well up-to-date and check it regularly for strange behaviour, so this seemed like a strange complaint. However, I am not one to ignore someone saying they can't see my website. Doing my due diligence I asked for any errors that the anti-virus software might have come up with. The fellow said there were no useful errors. Next step, look at the source code a little more carefully. I figured I would be looking for a script or link to a script that Windows might be trying to access. Very quickly I noticed the following two links:

PLAIN TEXT
CODE:
  1. <link rel="EditURI" type="application/rsd+xml" title="RSD" href="http://www.esslingerfoods.com/xmlrpc.php?rsd" />
  2. <link rel="wlwmanifest" type="application/wlwmanifest+xml" href="http://www.esslingerfoods.com/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml" />

A quick search on WordPress.org showed that others question whether or not these two files should be on the their wordpress site, or not. As it turns out, these lines are part of a "feature" of the most recent WordPress upgrades. They give you the ability to use Windows Live Writer with your WordPress blog. Oh, and WordPress decided this is a must have for everyone, so there is no preference setting to turn it off.

Fortunately a few people gave a suggestion on how to disable this feature quickly and easily. Simply add the following two lines of code to the top of your current theme's functions.php file:

PLAIN TEXT
CODE:
  1. remove_action('wp_head', 'wlwmanifest_link');
  2. remove_action('wp_head', 'rsd_link');

After these two lines were added to my current WordPress theme's functions.php file, I emailed my visitor back and asked him to check my site again. Low and behold, his issue with my website was gone. His anti-virus software was now happy and he could once again, view my site.

If the developers at WordPress are listening, which I am sure they will be once I post a comment on their forum about this "Please don't force special features like this on people, it is just plain wrong."

I don't have tons of traffic but I get more than 100 unique visitors a day, which is kind of nice to know. Out of those visitors, I am pretty sure that more than one a month has had this same problem. As we all know, most people that find issues with small sites like mine, usually don't take the time to inform the webmaster. So, thanks to WordPress, I have probably ticked off a few visitors for no good reason, to which I apologize. This is another good reason why I am switching to ExpressionEngine as soon as my little fingers have the time to do the move.

A special thanks to Steve at DomainePlus.com who alerted me to this issue.



Reader Comments

Comment:
1
Written by:
Roscoe
Posted on:
November 20th, 2008 at 11:30 pm

Platt,
Would you comment on using

Header set Cache-Control “max-age=300″

in WordPress. Many experienced programmers won’t use it out of fear it will cause problems with xmlrpc.php and xmlrpc.php?rsd.

Thanks,

Roscoe

Comment:
2
Written by:
Roscoe
Posted on:
November 20th, 2008 at 11:32 pm

Platt,
Would you comment on using
[code]

Header set Cache-Control "max-age=300"
[/code]

in WordPress. Many experienced programmers won’t use it out of fear it will cause problems with xmlrpc.php and xmlrpc.php?rsd.

Thanks,

Roscoe

Comment:
3
Written by:
Roscoe
Posted on:
November 20th, 2008 at 11:36 pm

//Header set Cache-Control “max-age=300″//

Cache control for .php files is what Im trying to show you.

Comment:
4
Written by:
threats
Posted on:
December 31st, 2008 at 12:26 am

Thanks for this info, i’m a newbies of wordpress and looking for any info related like this.

Comment:
5
Written by:
Matt Clark
Posted on:
January 14th, 2009 at 6:17 pm

I had a hard time finding information on wlwmanifest.xml, your post has really helped me understand it.

I doubt many of my visitors are using windows live writer, so I’m going to use the code provided.

Thanks.

Comment:
6
Written by:
MSN Virus removal
Posted on:
March 14th, 2009 at 5:22 pm

This is news. Do you think the live writer is dangerous?
PS: just noticed the date of this post, is it fixed now?

Comment:
7
Written by:
Remonster
Posted on:
May 28th, 2009 at 1:28 pm

wp-includes/default-filters.php

line 167 & 168

//add_action(‘wp_head’, ‘rsd_link’);
//add_action(‘wp_head’, ‘wlwmanifest_link’);

Comment:
8
Written by:
jriordon
Posted on:
May 29th, 2009 at 7:35 pm

Thanks Remonster. A simply way to do this is nice to know.