I’ve just installed the Spam Karma plugin in an attempt to deal with comment spam which has suddenly kicked into high gear. Hopefully people will still be able to comment legitimately, I’m using an alpha of Spam Karma with a nightly of Wordpress so it may not be the most stable or reliable of systems.
I should probably update the Wordpress install actually.
I think this might actually be dangerous. Sat at my computer contentedly playing SimCity 4 and I am abruptly and inexplicably seized by the urge to turn my chair, wiggle the mouse attached to my Powerbook and fire up a web browser in order to write a blog entry. I’m not entirely sure what the reasons for doing that are, but I suspect they have something to do with having not written an entry for a while, and people might perhaps be wondering what I’ve been doing, since I’ve also not been all that active on IRC.
Well dear friends, the reason is simple: I’ve been ill. I took a nasty cold and it’s been delighting me with endless variations of the classic cold symptoms. At the moment I think I’ll be okay to go to work tomorrow, but it’s not really that certain as I’m currently on my second ‘oh I’m better now’ phase. Hopefully this is it, I’m sick of being sick and I’m sure that my colleagues would appreciate me coming in and doing some work.
In other news, I’ve ordered an import Nintendo DS, because it seems that it won’t cost me more than ten pounds or so more than the normal retail price of the DS when it launches in the UK on the eleventh of March, but I get it within a fortnight. Games are region-free so there shouldn’t be any trouble, and the people who’re supplying it have thoughtfully provided a suitable mains adaptor so I can charge it. That should keep me occupied and out of trouble, as I’ve ordered Super Mario 64 DS to play on it, and of course my sister has a few games for her Game Boy Advance SP which will play on it. Plenty of good games coming out over the next few months as well - Warioware Touched, Yoshi’s Touch and Go, and a new Kirby game are three I have my eye on. Also looks like DS games will be reasonably priced for a change. Console games are often hideously expensive, so it’s nice to see the expected price point for DS games being below the normal price points for PC games.
But enough of that, I’ll be rhapsodising about it a lot when I get it I’m sure, so if you’re interested you’ll get to hear more about it then. I shall probably make a new topic for it.
What else? Been trying to finish off Unfinished History, but it carries on getting longer. This seems to happen to all of my stories for the h2g2 Post, so I shall have to get to a point where I can stop and perhaps put the rest into a sequel some time. I’ve got another story idea floating around which I’m very keen on doing, and I also need to talk to Richard about our collaborative project some time.
And to Ross about perhaps doing another one with him, although a short one this time. I do like to write 
I just shifted to using a recent nightly of Wordpress 1.5, so the templates are completely hosed for the time being. I’ll tidy it up later; this is an incentive to myself to do some redesign work anyway.
I just upgraded to the latest WPBlacklist for comment spam filtering. I’ve set fairly aggressive deletion options because I’m sick of having to do the deletions manually. It’s possible that you may end up having comments deleted if your IP appears on a real-time blacklist server for whatever reason. If that happens, sorry, but I really don’t get enough comments to make the spam worth the effort of deleting.
If this doesn’t work as well as I’m hoping it will, comments will be switched off until Wordpress 1.3 with its better plugin hooks comes along and spam filtering plugins can get fancier.
WordPress doesn’t seem to have the same kind of hooks for plugins to stop comment spam that Movable Type has. It seems that the Blacklist plugin only holds spam for moderation instead of rejecting it outright, and also that it’s impossible to have email when someone posts a comment but not email when someone posts a comment which is held for moderation. Maybe this will be added soon… anyway, it’s been fairly time-consuming to deal with, although easier than MT without MT-Blacklist.
Thus I’ve added a fairly rudimentary little plugin that should deny comments on all entries over 21 days old. So you won’t be able to comment on the old stuff anymore, but since nobody legitimate ever did that anyway, I’m sure nobody will mind, and it might just reduce the volume of comment spam I’m getting.
One thing that is good though is that WordPress does come with the ability to filter comments based on spam words and how many links they’ve got, so even though I’ve had a huge moderation queue every morning for the last week or so, none of the spam has ever appeared on the site itself. Go away spammers, your spam will gain you nothing here. In order to get a spam up here you have to:
And then I’ll notice it and delete it. Goodbye!
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