So Emma has a blog now. Her first post is on Rock Band, which we played the other night at Randy’s house.
I will probably have to be working on some parental comment moderation type plugins (or modifications to existing ones like SK2), since I’d rather not have her dealing with the subject matter of most blog comment spam.
The final post from Andrew Olmsted, to be published in the event of his death, which unfortunately occured recently in Iraq.
A very well written, thought and emotion provoking piece; I highly recommend it.
Thanks to a notice from Nate after he got blocked from commenting on Martha’s blog, I did a little digging and uncovered an update (just published today) to the WordPress Bad Behavior plugin that fixes an issue where it was blocking pretty much everyone from commenting.
From the Bad Behavior blog:
All users should update to Bad Behavior 2.0.11 immediately to prevent being blocked from your own site.
Within the past two days users have found themselves blocked from their own sites while using recent versions of Bad Behavior. A third party blacklist which Bad Behavior queries recently began sending false positives for any IP address queried, causing everyone using Bad Behavior to be blocked. This issue is fixed in Bad Behavior 2.0.11.
My apologies to anyone who was prevented from posting here or on Martha’s blogs; the issue should be resolved now.
For those of you who run WP blogs and use this plugin, be sure to update ASAP.
I’m not sure when this happened, but Blogger has RSS feeds for comments now. You can get to them using the following format:
http://BLOGNAME.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default
Thanks to Nathan for sending me that link; I guess I get to blog about it since he doesn’t blog anymore. 
Not to rain on Google’s parade, but I do wonder why the heck they put the comment content in as the title for the feed items instead of the post title that the comment is related to (like other sensible blogging software does), but it’s definitely better than nothing.
Sorry if any of your comments have been moderated lately either on here or on Martha’s blog(s)…
I’ve been waiting to get a chance to work on some of the spam prevention plugins now that I’m running the “bleeding edge” (SVN) version of WordPress MU, so I’ve got the “auto-moderate comments unless their e-mail address is recognized in an already approved comment” turned on, which means I have to periodically scan through those and approve them, which I haven’t had a lot of time to do lately.
If any of you read Martha’s blog, you may have recently noticed several spam comments getting in.
Well, I finally got around to taking a look at it and it turns out to validate all the crap I’ve given to akismet in the past here on this blog. Every one of those totally obvious spam messages was marked as “not spam” by that lovely system, bumping its karma up enough to overcome the negative points that other parts of spam karma had given it.
The good news is I should be able to just update the plugin there, just like I did on this blog (as described here), so that it never awards any positive points for an akismet “OK”, only negative points when akismet decides it’s spam, because (in my experience) they very rarely have false positives, but very often have false negatives.
Hey, I finally got around to testing and repackaging my latest theme for public consumption. I guess it’s not really as polished as it could be, but there’s always room for improvement, and I’ll probably never really be completely satisfied with it, so what the heck…
Go get Oasis 2 if you’re interested.
It’s been a while since I posted on comment spam, and since it used to be a regular topic, I figured it might deserve an update.
It seems like it’s been on the rise lately; I’m averaging about 300 spam comment attempts per day on here. Obviously most of them get caught, but due to the increased volume a couple have slipped through in the last month or so.
I’m currently using a combination of Bad Behavior and Spam Karma 2 to filter most of them out, and that seems to work pretty well. I disabled the Akismet plugin a long while ago because of false positives, and for a while after that I was using a Spam Karma 2 plugin that used Akismet as just one source for karma, but I eventually ended up disabling that as well. I may go back and use that again once I get a chance to modify it slightly. I want to make it still give negative karma points for comments it identifies as spam, but I don’t want it to give positive points for comments it says are not spam, because (in my experience) too many slip through the cracks that way.
After being behind on blog reading for several days (actually about a week), I finally caught up today.
As a result, I’ve also been seriously lagging on posting here, and in the meantime I’ve forgotten several ideas for posts I’ve had in the meantime. Maybe I need to start blogging from my PDA when I think of stuff, since otherwise I will lose it before I get around to finding time.
I’m reconsidering my position I’ve had up until now regarding my blog arrangements.
I think I’m probably going to move fully into MU (which Martha’s site already runs on but mine does not), and separate out my blog into two separate ones. I’ll use jared.freepressblog.org as my personal blog, for everything non-tech related, and then keep freepressblog.org as the home of all the plugin work and tech / software development related posts I do, as well as being a base for any other friends who want their own Wordpress blog at whatever.freepressblog.org.
One of the main reasons is that I’d like to dive back into posting a lot more, but most of the stuff I see myself posting about is more tech related than most of the people who read this blog would be interested in, so it may be easier to split it out to make it easier for people to deal with. Of course, I haven’t been posting much at all recently anyway, but I think that will be changing shortly.