Onwards and upwards
I can’t seem to stop working on the WPBlacklist plugin :p Now that it seems to work so well in combating the spam on my site, I wanted to add a few more features to make it even better. So, I added the option to allow the plugin to harvest spammer details from comments it automatically deletes. Then, I thought, "hey, wouldn’t it be good to allow the plugin to delete other messages which have already been held for moderation by the WP core?" So I added an option for that too – though I’ve actually turned that option off on my own site because I kinda like seeing what item on the blacklist triggered the deletion of the comment and I can’t get an exact item when the comment has been held by the core :p Anyway, it all seems to work fairly well.
I was about to release the plugin when I was notified by a user of another problem – the fact that if they added a URL manually to the blacklist, that it sometimes results in problems. This turned out to be due to another one of those regular expression related errors and so I fixed that as well and in the process, created another file to the growing list of WPBlacklist files – this time, to hold common functions. Since now I had a lot of files all over the place and the install instructions were getting complicated by different locations for the files to go to, I decided to make things simple by including the directory structure in the ZIP file so that all a user had to do was extract the ZIP file contents and then upload things just as they were 🙂 So that’s all there is to the new release – which I’ve called WPBlacklist 2.6. Enjoy 🙂