What differentiated these spam comments from all the others that do or don’t make it through the filters, is that these ones were actually relevant to the content of the article they were posted to.

Track of the Day: Architecture in Helsinki - Debbie
Spam Comment: “What a magnifcent world of clip-making”

Internet Censorship in Australia, AKA the “Clean Feed” - Do Not Want
Spam Comment: “And how can we avoid thi problem in any other way????”

Chilli Jam Recipe
Spam Comment: “It’s a little bit sharp but all in all it tastes delicious.”

Quicksilver Post to Wordpress with Title Script
Spam Comment: “Where can I downlod his qicksilver”

If any of these had come through individually I probably would have thought the poster was a standard internet stupid person and not bothered with it, however these came all at once, on a series of completely unrelated posts, which gave them away instantly.

Spammers really are their own worst enemies. I suppose if they were a bit smarter they’d do something productive with their lives.

Synthtopia has a little list of plugins, most interesting of which are Gigs Calendar, and Myspace Crossposter.

This isn’t a recommendation as such. We haven’t tried any of these plugins (yet). Calendar plugins seem to be hard to get right though, so it’s good to see another one in the mix.

I use BackupWordpress for various WP sites. It’s quick and clean, and can email backups to us as well! I can now also add “works with Wordpress MU” to that feature list.

Also on the WPMU plugin kick: MU’s “mu-plugins” folder is great for plugin functionality which should be available for all MU sites without any user interference, but certain plugins don’t work in there (I managed to completely break a WPMU install by dropping the PXS-Mail plugin in there today), and for some plugins we might want them to show up for new WPMU sites, but be enabled by default.

Enter Plugin Commander, an MU-plugin which lets you control which plugins appear by default, and also which plugins users can activate and deactivate. Very clever, and super useful.

Another caching solution for WP. This story also goes through some of the more generalized performance issues with WP and other solutions…
http://andy.wordpress.com/2008/06/22/batcache-for-wordpress/

This is the system they use for Wordpress.com:

Batcache implements a very simplistic caching model that shields your database and web servers from traffic spikes: after a document has been requested X times in Y seconds, the document is cached for Z seconds and all new users are served the cached copy.

New users are defined as anybody who hasn’t interacted with your domain—once they’ve left a comment or logged in, their cookies will ensure they get fresh pages. People arriving from Digg won’t notice that the comments are a minute or two behind but they’ll appreciate your site being up.

You don’t need PHP skills to install Batcache but you do have to get Memcached working first. That can be easy or hard. We use Memcached because it’s awesome. Once you know how to install it you can create the same kind of distributed, persistent cache that underpin web giants like WordPress.com and Facebook.

Interesting. Will probably be giving this a spin soon.

I’ve tried to troubleshoot this a few times - thinking it may be a mod_security problem, or perhaps just a weird 2.5.1 bug.

Another commenter had his comment eaten tonight, so I went through another round of searching, and eventually discovered this thread on the Wordpress forums.

The answer, he is right down the bottom there: “… a plugin designed to remove the rel=”nofollow” attribute”. A.K.A. Dofollow.

So it seems that Dofollow with WP2.5 breaks things, and causes comments to disappear. Very unfortunate.

So a way to get your images from Lightroom to Flickr as quickly as possible is a Good Thing, right? Right! Jeffrey Freidl’s “Lightroom Export Plugin for Flickr” works cross-platform, has all of the right settings available (including adding photos to Sets, or making a new Set), and integrates cleanly so all of your titles, tags and descriptions make it through intact.

And it’s super quick, so there’s one less barrier between the act of creation and the act of sharing it with the world.

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href=”" title=”"> <abbr title=”"> <acronym title=”"> <b> <blockquote cite=”"> <cite> <code> <del datetime=”"> <em> <i> <q cite=”"> <strike> <strong>

We quite often receive comments to out sites in which people - probably those unfamiliar with HTML - have taken these instructions to heart and created comments which look a little like this:

You can check it out <a href=”http://example.com” title=”here”>, more updates should be coming soon.

This can cause issues for the site as a whole: Wordpress doesn’t detect this error and close that anchor tag, so the rest of the comment becomes a link, which encompasses everything down the page until the next link in the code is closed. The same kind of thing happens when people put unclosed <strong> tags in their comments. We don’t have any closing </strong> tags in the page source after the comments, so when someone does this the rest of the site becomes emboldened until an administrator corrects the comment.

These kind of errors notwithstanding, WYSIWYG is perfect for comments. I don’t like WYSIWYG editors making decisions for me in my day-to-day coding life, as they rarely output exactly what I want them to, but writing comments is such a constrained activity; with a small number of tags available, the editor can’t really stuff things up too badly.

I’ve previously hacked a cut-down version of TinyMCE into our test bbPress installation. This was relatively simple, so I’d expected that it wouldn’t be hard to get it happening on the Wordpress comments form as well. I did a quick search first, though, to make sure I wouldn’t be duplicating someone else’s efforts. It turns out I would be, as there’s a Wordpress plugin called TinyMCEComments.

This plugin is great, but I think the default settings leave out an important functionality: blockquote. Commenting is about discussion and communication, and discussion often requires quoting to help clarity. TinyMCEComments does allow you to add additional buttons through an admin screen, but they show up at the right hand side of the toolbar. This might be ok - most commenters don’t really bother with blockquoting - but by default carriage returns in the WYSIWYG are converted into <br /> tags, and hitting blockquote then encompasses the entire comment.

So to get everything working happily, we also need to change the default from forcing line breaks to paragraphs. Here’s the changes we ended up making:
Line 218 - add “blockquote,” after “underline,”.

theme_advanced_buttons1 : "bold,italic,underline,blockquote,separator,strikethrough,undo,redo,link,unlink“,

Lines 219-220 - reverse the force newlines options, so it’s forcing p, not br.

force_p_newlines : true,
force_br_newlines : false,

And now it’s working beautifully, as you can see below.

Edit: For some reason this post is attracting a ridiculous number of comment spams. So I’ve disabled comments on this post. If you’d like to test the WYSIWYG, go say something insightful on another post.

This will probably become less useful over time as the plugin load expands, but right now it’s an excellent way to test things out and get some more functionality to our forum quickly.

So we’re now seriously on the path to a bbPress migration, there are some scripts around which will convert a phpBB database to bbPress, but our phpBB currently has 7486 registered users, and I’d say about 300 of those are real people. So before the migration, it’s time to remove the spam profiles.

Here’s a great start, it deletes all “members” who signed up over 48 hours ago and are inactive (haven’t clicked the confirmation link in their signup email).

The SQL looks like this:

[code lang="sql"]DELETE FROM phpbb_users WHERE user_active=0 AND user_id>0 AND FROM_UNIXTIME(user_regdate)… and running it on our database removed 3299 rows, which I would equate to 3299 spam users. That’s a great start, but I’m sure there are plenty more who have actually clicked that confirmation link, so my next move is to remove any users who have 0 posts. This could remove some lurkers who are actually interested in the site. Apologies to those people, but this is a war, and I’m a bastard.
I’m confident enough in my SQL that I don’t need to search around for something to do this, just modify that last SQL command. “user_posts” is where the post count is contained, so here’s what should remove users which are activated but haven’t made any posts: [code lang="sql"]DELETE FROM phpbb_users WHERE user_posts=0 AND user_id>0 AND FROM_UNIXTIME(user_regdate)And lo, it worked. 3316 rows removed. That’s 6615 spam users removed, and our phpBB installation is now showing 828 registered users, which feels about right. I’m sure there’s still some cruft in there, but this is definitely a manageable level, and some manual pruning of 820 users could be feasible, whereas manually going through 7000+ “users” would be utterly painful.Next step: Try the migration from phpBB to bbPress, and research whether we can redirect old orphaned phpBB URLs to the new bbPress hotness.

An aside: The lovely code highlighting in this post was provided with the Code Snippet Wordpress plugin, which I installed because WP was misinterpreting my html <code> blocks.

The only reason we haven’t run away from phpBB sooner is that the Moderators (and myself) are spam destroying ninjas. Most forum spammers thinly veiled attempts to insinuate their commercial pandering in our very serious artistic conversations are very obvious.

However, we’ve recently had a spammer who spent a little time, adding a couple of almost-relevant posts before revealing their flackishness. They started in the "Introduce yourself" thread:

hey party people

wanted to intro myself.

i live in washington dc, i work for a marketing firm and i have been a music groupie my whole life. my mother lived next to mick jagger once — it runs in my blood stream.

see you all on the forums.

Should have noticed the "i work for a marketing firm" bit and just banned them. Oh well. They added two more, slightly confused sounding posts before dropping this bomb in a thread entitled "the strengths and unique qualities of digital sound":

hey all - one of my clients is Energizer and they just released these new beta boards at www.pandoradiscussionarea.com that are a great place for discussions like this and a place to get more advice on gear, sound and the hottest steez. they are also promoting this new iPod battery — SO if you do go Digital with your iPod — you can plug the battery into it for a much longer set….let me know what you think.

Wow. That’s is a particularly pathetic attempt. Especially when you take a look at the site! I’ve had it open in a tab since this morning, marvelling at how terrible it is.

"Exclusive discussion area brought to you by Energizer(R) Energi to go(TM)"
"Portable Power: Mobile DJ’s & electronic artists, discuss your techniques, BPM and strategies here"

If that’s not bad enough, it looks to me like many of the posts within the "discussion area" itself are PR flacks as well:

Lee Fams, on November 12th, 2007 at 1:07 pm Said:

um. can Energizer make a battery for cell phones? My phone/PDA runs out of charge after 5 hours ?!
Energizer should work on cell phone batteries. kthx.

Julian, on November 14th, 2007 at 6:05 am Said:

@Lee Fams, they do.
http://energitogo.com

Depressing stuff. Better forgotten really, except this is a great lesson for us on how not to do branded or partnered content. Peter and I have had plenty of discussions this year about having companies sponsor or otherwise give us money for the content we’re creating.

Keep this in mind as a failed attempt at "Sponsored Content".