On February 14th, I upgraded MtDewVirus to WordPress 1.5 and on February 27th, I deactivated all spam prevention plugins. I was kind of curious how many comments, trackbacks, and pingbacks have been flagged as spam by my WP install, so I just took a look. It’s April 1st, but this is no joke…I have 10,000 spam comments sitting in my database. Ten thousand pieces of spam in a month and a half! Thanks to WordPress, not a single one was ever viewable by those of you reading MDV.
Tag: WordPress
Tag, You're It!
Since I started using Flickr earlier this month, I’ve falling in love with tags. Using categories in WordPress has always been a burden, so made the move to rid the site of them. Using tags is much better way to classify things in my opinion. You can view a heat map or full list of the tags used here at MDV.
While looking for a plugin to do the job I found quite a few, but they were all done wrong. Just bout every tagging plugin out there for WP used the meta data to store tags. I just didn’t get it. All of the functionality is already built into WP with categories, so why not just use what is already there?
After much searching I finally found a solution. All it takes is a simple edit to post.php and one plugin file.
CardiacKid
Another happy switch to WordPress.
Lack of Personal Updates
You may have noticed a lack of personal updates here at the MDV. Seriously, there really hasn’t been much exciting going on, but here’s what I’ve been up to the last couple of days.
Archive Inspiration
The archives at the WP development blog look a lot like MDV Archive, or more specifically, the old MtDewVirus Archives system, which allowed linking to the year archive. I wonder if my archives were inspiration or if they actually use my code.
WordPress Fights Spam
As I mentioned on Friday, I had deactivated my spam prevention plugins. It’s been about 60 hours, but all of spam fighting techniques that are built into WordPress are working extremely well.
One thing I noticed however was pingbacks automatically being approved. I had trackbacks moderated by a plugin I wrote, but otherwise they would have been approved also. Since they weren’t from sites in my link list, they should have been going to moderation. Well, this morning I took a browse through the code for 1.5.1 (I’m using the latest and greatest) and I found a bug with pingback and trackback white listing. WP was marking every PB and TB as white listed. It wasn’t ever possible for them to not be white listed, so I fixed the code and submitted a patch. Now I’ve even deactivated my Moderate Trackback plugin since I don’t need it either.
MtDewVirus and 2 Hole Cards are now completely free of all spam prevention plugins. I keep a few there for emergencies, but they aren’t activated at the moment.
If you’re curious about my settings in WP, here they are:
- Anyone can register = OFF
- Users must be registered and logged in to comment = OFF
- An administrator must approve the comment (regardless of any matches below) = OFF
- Comment author must fill out name and e-mail = ON
- Comment author must have a previously approved comment = ON
- Hold a comment in the queue if it contains more than 5 links.
- Blacklist comments from open and insecure proxies = ON
- Comment Moderation words = NONE
- Comment Blacklist words – I do have 7 words listed here. Contact me if you want them.
That’s all there is to it.
Fight the Spam
Last night I deactivated the WP Hashcash plugin here and at 2 Hole Cards to see how it goes. As of right now, the only spam plugin I have activated is my moderate trackback plugin. We’ll see how the spam prevention measures that are built into WordPress do.
WP 1.5 Times 2
Just upgraded 2 Hole Cards to the latest and greatest blogging software the web has to offer. I’m diggin’ WP 1.5 more and more each time I play around with. And finding out more about how it works too!
Trackback and Pingback Moderation Updates
I’ve updated the plugins for moderating pingbacks and trackbacks. They now work like I should have first created them. The PB or TB is set to moderate before being committed to the database. This eliminates my query to the database and it also allows WordPress to send you the correct email message. The latest version […]
Updated WordPress Plugins
I’ve updated all of my WordPress plugins for WP 1.5 compatibility. Most of them would have functioned without a problem, so I didn’t make many changes. Enjoy!
Nick Momrik 