WordPress 1.5 notes

Filed under: — 9:33 am

Last week I upgraded this site to WordPress 1.5, upgraded some other sites to the latest security update, and worked on a new weblog. Here are a few random notes about things I ran into in this process:

  • Upgrading templates: The WordPress Wiki has a pretty good guide to upgrading a template from WP 1.2 to 1.5. This process has gone smoothly on all of my sites.
  • Spam Filtering: I use WP Hashcash by Elliot Back on all of my weblogs, and it effectively eliminates comment spam. Occasionally someone will manually enter a spam message, but the automated ones are stopped 100%. It uses JavaScript to verify that a real browser is involved. This shuts out a few potential commenters, but at least the new version displays a friendly message when JavaScript is disabled instead of responding to comments with a blank page.
  • Trackback Spam: Unfortunately, since trackbacks are supposed to be automated, there’s no easy way to stop them, and I’ve had hundreds of trackback spam comments this week. I’ll probably end up disabling trackbacks altogether. Let’s face it, Trackback is dead, and any system that lets anyone add a link to someone else’s site is inevitably going to be abused.

Here’s an interesting statistic: according to my WP Hashcash reports, there were 2472 spam comments blocked from July 3rd to today for this site alone. Now you know why I install spam filtering plugins on new weblogs before I even launch them…

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