nope. we absolutely do not require those kind of permissions… but it the ownership (uid/gid) of the sp-resources directory is incorrect, it could cause that… compare those for the wp-content directory…

Great, but something changed and my directories were not writable on the back end for Simple:Press.

Anyway you could guide an idiot like me as to what may have changed and how to correct it?  I had to change permissions to 777 to get all my simple:press plugins/resourses to work and it concerns me with all the Malware that is being injected to forums now a days. I don’t know what to do.

Also, why aren’t the Avatars working anymore? Only the Gravatars seem to be working after I changed permissions to 777.

sounds like that scurri plugin changed something?

take a look at where an avatar is displayed… get the url to the avatar and see if you can display it in the browser… its probably forbidden…  ie still a permissions issue…

setting permissions to 0777 is probably more of a risk than not running that scurri plugin…

did you do what I asked?  check the uid/gid?  you can do that via ssh or ftp (usually)…  see which user and group owns the directory sp-resources…  compare that to the user/group that owns wp-content…  or ask your host…

 /www/wp-content/plugins/simple-press has 99 99 for the owner/group while some other plugins have 997 988

Could you tell me what they should be?

its going to be time to contact your host…  the numbers mean nothing but to your server…  they will be a ‘user’ of your server…  evidently, when the sp-resources directory was created, the process couldnt use the appropriate web user…  this can occur in certain flavors of php…

your web host should be able to set you up rather quickly…

if you have ssh access, you should be able to see the real info…

take a look at the directory with

ls -l

you should see permissions followed by the owners, something like name name

compare wp-content to sp-resources again…

when you know what to change it o, you can normally change those owners with

chown -R name:name sp-resources

where name would be the proper web user like on wp-content…