How to remove Plesk News

[trauma]

I don't have the checkbox either... 8.2.0 (centos 4). But the CSS trick works for now.

I'm getting very discouraged by the amount of "hacking" that I have to do with each release to get rid of this Sw-Soft spam. I know it's been discussed at great length elsewhere, but it's very confusing for my users. They shouldn't be bombarded with this information. IMHO Sw-Soft shouldn't really have any communication with my users. It would make a lot more sense if I could use that "news" area to post information relevant to my business/users.

Grrrrrrr!

 

[galaxy]

I too use the CSS ways to remove news.
I too must hack things up for every new release. In fact I have to keep a script and repository of files to replace to rebuild the environment.

But I thought about trying to hack into the RSS feed they setup on the "default page" and several others throughout the apps. That would be useful for our own communication to our customers. I agree they (SWSoft) should not be communicating to our customers.

It looks like their javascript makes a connection back to the same server on port 8880 for the feed. I just don't know whats being served up from there.

 

[trauma]

I just started looking around and the "news" text is stored here ->

psa/admin/plib/locales/en-US/messages_en-US.php

and the binary php files that calls the text is here ->

psa/admin/plib/news/

But I'm not sure whether this information is even useful.

 

[galaxy]

controlling newsfeeds

Actually the newsfeeds go back to the plesk server on port 8880 (which is the httpsd that also listens on 8443). Its pulling the data from the same control panel server.

I found that in /usr/local/psa/admin/htdocs/javascript

there's 2 files:

newsfeeds.js.php
newsfeeds-data.js.php

that deliver the content.
The only problem is that these files are encrypted.

 

[trauma]

Interesting. Is there more than one set of "news" elements that appears in the control panel?

Because the files that I mentioned in my previous post contain all of the content that I'm seeing on my Plesk Desktop. Or perhaps the content is cached in those files?

As far as the stuff that I'm seeing, it appears to work as such...

A table in the psa database called NewsArticles contains three fields: id, class, data. The data fields are all empty/null (probably for future use). Each class that's listed in the table can be found in psa/admin/plib/news/. For example, 'WhatsNew8_2' has a corresponding php file, WhatsNew8_2.php.

The problem is that they're all encrypted; so it would be pretty difficult to create your own without understanding the structure of the class files.

 

[galaxy]

agreed.

I've seen the news in 3 places.

- plesk control panel
- webmail on plesk server
- plesk default page (go to an IP address in plesk that has no hosting or disabled)

On webmail, I do see news that "changes", so it appears that the server is going out and getting a feed from somewhere. I'm thinking thats whats in those encrypted javascript files, where to redirect to and what protocol.

 

[trauma]

Ahhhh... okay that makes sense. I'm not seeing the changing feeds because I'm not using the built-in webmail (Horde).

I believe there *is* a setting in the preferences to turn of news feeds in webmail.

 

[CruzMark]

It seems like there is a general confusion in this thread about the difference between newsfeeds and the Desktop news appears on new Client, Domain, and Mail accounts and re-appears during some upgrades.

My experience is that using the "Do not show newsfeeds in Webmail and default domain pages" does just that, but you still get the Desktop News as described above.

My solution was to create 3 event manager entries, one each for Client, Domain and mailbox creation. These call a set of perl scripts that access the database directly and then "dismiss the news" by setting the value of "news_dismissed" to "3" in the appropriate table.

Here are the steps after getting into the psa table:

Client:
Get id from clients table for the client name.
change news_dismissed in cl_param table to 3.

Domain
Get id from domains table for domain name.
change new_dismissed in dom_param table to 3.

Mailbox
use domain to get id from 'domains' table
use mail_name and dom_id (from domains table) to get id from 'mail' table
use id from mail table to change param news_dismissed to '3' in 'mn_param' table


Hope that helps.

 

[trauma]

I love it! A very elegant solution that uses Plesk's built-in tools.

Now I just need to write a script that automates the CSS updates to hides the Virtuozzo spam.

 

[ACID25]

Hi

to disable news for admin these values should be put into psa.misc table:

INSERT INTO misc VALUES ('admin_news_dismissed',3);

For each client should be ran this INSERT statement:

INSERT INTO cl_param VALUES (cl_id,'news_dismissed',3);

where cl_id is an ID of Plesk client (from psa.clients table)

To hide Virtuozzo promotion from top frame, insert into psa.misc table parameter 'hide_top_advertisement' with value 'true':

INSERT INTO misc VALUES ('hide_top_advertisement', 'true');

This should work and hide Virtuozzo promotion logo from the top frame.

Kind regards
ACID25

 

[remsys]

I`ve created a script to disable this automatically .

http://gr.remsys.net/scripts/remove_swnews.pl.txt

Save it as /usr/local/psa/bin/remove_swnews.pl, make executable and create a new server event

Server > Event manager > Add new event >
- Event - Client account created
- priority medium
- user root
- command /usr/local/psa/bin/remove_swnews.pl

It will run the script on new users creation , and disable news/advertising for each user, even if someone enabled news for him.

 

[Lea Robson]

#dBox-news_articles
{ display: none !important; }


Thank you, an excellent tip! Although even if the drop down box says WinXP blue it appears the Interface is default Win XP Reloaded Compact - took me a while to realise why modifying WinXP Blue wasn't removing the news!!!

Thanks
Lea