For those that haven’t noticed, I released a new version of Clean Archives Reloaded yesterday. It’s a major reworking of the plugin and it now requires WordPress 2.5 (due to functions it uses).

It’s now faster than before (I saw page generation times drop by about 10% on my test blog), an options page to configure the plugin, and much, much more.

So, upgrade today! :)

So I woke up today to find this e-mail in my inbox:

Dear Defensio user,

We have reasons to believe that a few of our api keys might have been compromised and our research indicates that your key(s) might be among them.

Don’t worry, YOUR ACCOUNT WAS NOT HACKED AND YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION IS SAFE. However, in order to protect your privacy, we thought the best thing to do was to regenerate new api key(s) for you.

As of now, DEFENSIO IS NO LONGER FILTERING SPAM on your website or blog. To re-enable it, please login to your account at http://defensio.com and then go to “My API Keys” where you’ll find newly generated keys. You should then update your website or blog settings with the new key(s).

When an API key is invalid, apparently it’s supposed to go to the moderation queue, but it didn’t for me which meant I got 400-500 spams overnight on my blog. Lovely.

So, I just spent the last few minutes deleting page after page of spams from my blog. I thought I skimmed through each page looking for legit comments, but I know I missed at least one (of mine specifically). If you found one of your comments from the last 24 hours has gone missing, please post it again. I probably accidentally deleted it. Sorry.

As for Defensio, I’m still happy with their spam accuracy, but I really wish they’d fix that bug in their plugin. It was hugely annoying to wake up to so much spam on my blog. That’s the whole reason I use Defensio — to avoid that. *sigh*

Seems Quoter doesn’t play 100% nice with WordPress 2.5 (breaks page validation). It’s a simple fix though.

Open the plugin and find this text on line 568:

$text = wpautop($text, 0);

Before it, add this dirty little fix:

$text = str_replace( array('<p><p>', '</p></p>'), array('<p>', '</p>'), $text);

It only works around the problem rather than fixing it, but it seems to do the job as most pages now validate. :)

EDIT: Seems WordPress originally mucked up the code that I had posted. It’s now been fixed.

Someone came on to #wordpress yesterday looking for a plugin to only allow registered users to view their blog. Many plugins to do this exist, but after glancing over their code, I realized none of the ones I looked at were perfect. None of them allowed the blog owner to allow guest to view their feeds and people could easily get around the plugin by adding wp-login.php somewhere in the URL.

So, I wrote my own version. It has an options page and should be 100% accurate.

For many, many years, I had been using Spam Karma 2 for comment, pingback, and trackback spam protection here on my blog and it seemed to do a decent job. The idea behind SK2 is to check for things like Javascript (few bots have JS enabled), the number of links in the post (spam obviously has lots usually), how long it took them to post the comment (bots post it nearly instantly), and so forth. Each property would add or subtract karma points from the comment until a final score was given. The comment would then be marked as ham (good) or spam (bad) based on that score.

It of course wasn’t perfect. Spam bots are getting smarter and a plugin such as SK2 alone just couldn’t be accurate enough. So, a year or so ago, I added an Akismet plugin for SK2. The idea is the plugin talks to Akismet and gets a ham or spam rating for the comment. This result is then given to SK2 to use in it’s overall score. It worked great, at least for a while.

However, even with the help of Akismet, SK2 just wasn’t cutting it lately. Akismet was too often saying it was ham when it really was spam or on occasion, the other way around (that ham was spam).

So, two weeks ago today, I decided to give Defensio a try.

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This is probably the most funny April Fools day jokes I’ve ever seen.

Go visit YouTube and click on any of the “Featured Videos”. It’ll take to to a video of Rick Astley’s music video for Never Gonna Give You Up, a hilarious practice called Rickrolling.

Oh, and by the way, check out this sweet video.

UPDATE #2: Try v5.4.3. I’ve heard multiple reports it’s working fine for those who tried it. Let me know.

UPDATE: I just committed version 5.4.2. Try this and see if it fixes any problems. I couldn’t reproduce any errors on demand, but I made some code improvements to hopefully fix the problem.

I updated Viper’s Video Quicktags before WordPress 2.5 came out and it was 100% compatible then. Infact, it still is fully compatible with WordPress as far as I can tell.

However! It doesn’t seem to be compatible with many other plugins out there, namely ones that use the “ButtonSnap” PHP class that allows for easy adding of buttons to the classic style editor and old versions of TinyMCE. I’m working on fixing it, but it’s hard to debug it.

Meanwhile, the following work around worked for me: click the “Deactivate All Plugins” button, activate my plugin FIRST, then activate all the other plugins.

Thanks for being patient while I sort this out.

I’m currently trying to debug a problem I’m having with my blog, so all plugins are disabled for the moment. So, if you were expecting to see all my posts on my archive, my weather, videos in posts, etc., you’ll have to wait.

Just thought I’d let you know what was up.

EDIT: Okay, everything is back to normal. Discovered the problem wasn’t plugin related.

I’ve used the WP-Dash plugin on my blog for over 2 and a half years. One of the very first plugins I wrote was a “latest spam” widget for it.

Well, with WordPress finally introducing a built-in widgitized dashboard, I’ve decided it’s finally time to ditch WP-Dash. However, the new dashboard doesn’t show you recent spam, a thing I like to keep an eye on to make sure no legitimate comments get marked as spam. So, I wrote a plugin to add one.

Dashboard: Latest Spam is now available for download from WordPress.org.

I’ve released a non-beta version of my previously mentioned plugin. It addresses a couple bugs found and has some minor feature improvements.

It’s now available for download at WordPress.org.