When I originally set up my blog, I installed Farook’s WPBlacklist plugin to help combat blog spam. Then, a few days ago I installed Spam Karma 2 in order to take care of issues that were possibly being caused/exacerbated by WP-Gatekeeper. Today while perusing the management interface for SK2, I discovered that it handles blacklisting as well. I chose to let SK2 handle blacklisting and disabled WPBlacklist because:
- I want to use SK2 as my primary spam filter, and
- SK2 doesn’t require manual BL updating, as WPBlacklist does.
SK2 can even update the RBL when spammed.
This is turning out to be a pretty spiffy plugin! I get grim satisfaction from looking over the “recent spam harvest” and seeing the blocked attempts.
In this post, I mentioned having problems with live updating of the blacklist. (The “URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration” error.) In this comment, Matt Read shows how to use curl to fetch the file contents via http. I have posted the curl info on Fahim’s site already.
Well, I finally got on the blog bandwagon. I was interested in blog software which supported pingback and trackback, and which I could install on Pair’s systems without root access. After checking out a few packages, I settled on WordPress.
Anti-spam plugins that I’ve bolted on include Farook’s WPBlacklist and Meyer’s WP-Gatekeeper. I wasn’t able to get the blacklist to use URI updating, due to “URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration” error, so I just browsed the blacklist and saved the contents locally. This will need to be manually updated from time to time :(, but it’s a reasonable start.
After browsing Joseph Scott’s blog, I decided to supplement the category system by adding Felix Wong’s WP-Tags plugin.
I decided to leave the blog timezone set to UTC, since I live in the Pacific timezone while my server’s timezone is 2 or 3 hours ahead of me.
