8 Ways to Sunday

I got a big fat load of comment spam for New Years Eve — about 300 spams, to be specific. Kitten’s Spaminator doesn’t seem to be doing the trick anymore, so I’m moving to Dr. Dave’s Spam Karma. It appears to be more aggressive at keeping spam out; unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to like the 1.2 pre-release version of WordPress that I’m running. The “mass edit” mode for comment deletion also doesn’t do anything in 1.2 RC1, which makes disposing of the remaining 245 rape-and-incest porn spams a real headache. Looks like it’s time for a blogware upgrade as well.

If the move to WordPress 1.5 (yes, it’s 1.5 now) and the addition of a new spam blocker cause havoc, please be patient. I hope to have the remaining spams gone by midnight, and I’m crossing my fingers that I don’t break anything in the process. Meanwhile I’ve beefed up my WordPress block list, so hopefully any spam posted between now and then will at least be shunted into the moderation queue.

Updates:

• 1/1/2005 @ 3:00 AM — That wouldn’t have taken so long if it weren’t for the nap I took in between porting my few customizations to WP 1.5 and actually performing the upgrade. Once the upgrade was done, yanking the spam off the site was simple: go to Options ? Discussion, scroll to the moderation blacklist at the bottom of the page, click the “Check past comments against current word list” link, then click “Move suspect comments to moderation.” Voilà — no more spam. Spam Karma is now running, and I hope to have fewer of these outbreaks in the future.
• 1/1/2005 @ 6:25 PM — Some overly aggressive items in my comment-spam blacklist resulted in the deletion of several non-spammy comments (mostly from this post about Oklahoma lesbians, surprise surprise). One restored backup later, all good comments are once again available. In a related note, that post is now going strong as the number-two Google hit for “oklahoma lesbians“!
• 1/1/2005 @ 9:57 PM — As awesome as the new WordPress is, it’s also a little slow. This page used to be generated in about 0.6 seconds on average, and now it takes between 0.8 and 1.5 seconds — a noticeable difference. I’ve enabled the Staticize Reloaded plugin — which caches pages and serves them statically after they’ve been requested once — to alleviate the problem. Thus far, it seems to be doing a great job.