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Is there any plugin or method to know outgoing data? Nowadays every 5th plugin use to fetch data from sites. And I noticed that plugin authors are very enjoying this function. But as plugin users I'm liking it sometimes.

So far I've been digging into plugin files to remove their codes. But its not possible to do after every plugin update.

I think this features is facilitated by wordpress own functions. Is there any method to turn it off?

Edit:

For example Yoast seo plugin uses this file to fetch information about users. He even gets contents from database queries. Isn't it too much? The same way any plugin can get passwords too.

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  • It's highly not clear what functionality are you talking about. Please elaborate.
    – Rarst
    Commented May 12, 2014 at 10:54
  • The functionality through which plugin authors, for example Yoast SEO, collect data from sites where plugins are installed.
    – wp student
    Commented May 12, 2014 at 14:25

1 Answer 1

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The functionality of making network requests for getting and sending data is abstracted into HTTP API in WordPress. As long as plugins do use related functions (and not make requests directly via raw PHP) you have degree of control over the behavior.

The easiest way is probably to only whitelist hosts you need/trust and leave rest blocked. 

define( 'WP_HTTP_BLOCK_EXTERNAL', true );
define( 'WP_ACCESSIBLE_HOSTS', 'api.wordpress.org,*.github.com' );

See Block External URL Requests in Codex.

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  • Its the solution. But I think It still requires the user to know the data requesting URLs. For which users will have to dig into plugin code. What if we disable wp_remote_post instead of above solution. Will it affect wordpress' other functions in anyway?
    – wp student
    Commented May 13, 2014 at 9:09
  • @Waqas that's the point of whitelisting, you only need to know domains to allow, rest is blocked by default. Disabling POST requests is also a possibility of course, but it will naturally kill anything that needs to make such requests.
    – Rarst
    Commented May 13, 2014 at 9:29
  • Thanks for clearing. I just realized that in both cases we will need to whitelist domains. eg; for social login requests or automatic remote backup transfers etc etc.
    – wp student
    Commented May 13, 2014 at 9:57

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