Entries, Comments and Connections
It’s weird how these things go … Well, not really weird if you stop to think about it for a second but I just like to be amazed … or was that amused? :p I hadn’t received any comments or spam on this site for the longest time and I was beginning to think that my anti-spam measures were finally paying off. Then I made an entry a couple of days ago and then I heard from my friend Edward today – he said that he couldn’t post comments since they don’t appear and that he can’t leave a tag since the tag board tagged anything he posted as spam :p I checked on it and found that there had been a reason for the absence of comments …
Both the comments system and the tagboard have a spam blacklisting feature. Basically, I adapted the WPBlacklist plugin code to work for the tagboard as well. So, they both run off fairly similar blacklists and for some inexplicable reason, the letter "b" had gotten in to the blacklist :p And that meant that you couldn’t post anything with the letter "b" in it without it getting tagged as spam. I fix the problem and what do you know? Barely an hour later, I get my first tagboard spam in ages and I get two comments posted on various entries over the course of the day! I am not even certain if one of the comments is spam or not but the other is not spam. However, it is intriguing that all this happened on the same day because there really were no comments till now for a while – even if the comments had been deleted because they were mis-identified as spam, I would have received a notification, so I know that there were no spam comments 🙂 Anyway, that’s my little bit of wonderment and mystery for the day … Now I’m going back to doing other stuff – like watching the really gory and fairly pointless "Resident Evil: Apocalypse" :p