Solipsistic Meanderings » Those persnickety bugs …

October 5, 2004

Those persnickety bugs …

I’ve been using WPBlacklist 2.0 for a few days now and today all of a sudden, I discover not one but two bugs in it! The first one was something that has bothered me a lot with the original WPBlacklist 1.2 – the fact that you can use regular expressions in the blacklist but not all URLs that you add to the blacklist are regular expression safe :p So I’d added a bit of code to make the URLs regular expression safe but forgot to use that same code in some parts of WPBlacklist 2.0 🙁 I corrected that mistake but at that point realized that the MT blacklist import code wasn’t working properly since it wasn’t taking in new entries even though there were new entries in Jay Allen’s centralized blacklist. I investigated the problem and discovered that a new bug had crept into the code due to some variable name changes. Fixed that too and then I had WPBlacklist 2.01 :p

In the meantime, I’ve been hit by comment spam again. It looks as if this particular spammer has a robot which is smarter than the usual ones – it goes through the index.php file, finds the comment script, parses the comments script and finds the particular variables that are used in the comment script and then submits spam using the information it just discovered. Of course, all this spam is being held for moderation by either the WP moderation system or WPBlacklist but I am getting tired of having to delete all that stuff off the queue later. So, I’m thinking of adding a configurable option to WPBlacklist where the user can specify whether to hold comments identified via IP, e-mail, URL etc. or to delete them immediately. I’d like to make the option individually configurable so that you can specify a different action based on the identification type but am not sure exactly how I’ll end up setting the whole thing up. This probably will be WPBlacklist 2.1 – no idea on an ETA yet though.