I use the plugin Bad Behavior on top of Aksimet to stop spam on my blog and something went strange with the old version I have; a blacklist started coming back with false positives but it has been fixed. So if you couldn’t post a comment try again.
Check your WordPress blog time
Just posted a comment and realized everything has been off an hour since the switch to daylight savings. Yeah for WordPress not handling it but like for all WP annoyances there is a plugin, Time Zone. Activate and set timezone to “America/Los_Angeles” and all is good.
New WordPress Version is out
A new version of WordPress (2.1 to be exact) is out and has a fair number of upgrades but if you have a lot of plugins then be careful that some of them might not be updated yet. Since I develop 3 plugins I have had 2.1 on a beta install and updated my plugins but I’m taking the plung right now. I’ll be posting new versions of my plugins right now too.
Test
Stopping WordPress Comment Spam Before It Starts
My blog isn’t terribly popular but I do have a good number of links to my plugins which has made me a more visible target for comment spammers. The built-in WordPress spam filter does a pretty good job but it does nothing to stop bots from hammering my blog and eating up bandwith. One of my friends in my extended blog network had a post that tipped me off to a more active method of spam prevention, Bad Behavior.
Bad Behavior works by analyzing the HTTP requests made by clients and running them through a set of tests like checking the user agent description. Before installing the script I was receiving about 200 spam comments per day and maybe 1 or 2 would slip through per week. Now I’ll get maybe 1 a day in my spam queue. Not sure how much this affects the bandwith the spammers are using but it will definetely save a little on database.
Blog facelift
Things were getting a little old around the blog so I spruced things up a bit. Ditched the nav bar across the top, it was a bit of a pain to work with. Put login stuff in the sidebar like Nathan has on the Blarg, RSS buttons down at the bottom (which you should use, if you don’t know how or why please ask) and a thing for my flickr account. There should be more changes and more posts coming.