Hm.

title: Hm. date: 2004-12-26 21:32:50

I don't like the WPBlacklist plugin as much as I used to. Reasons why:

1. Stupid insistance on banning IPs. There are so many zombie PCs out there acting as open proxies that this is a waste of time. I've watched the traffic, and comments don't come from the same IP twice.
2. Stupid insistance on looking at email addresses. When it's so easy to make up an email address, why bother? Tracking 1600 variations on byob@[some number].com is just filling up the tables.
3. Problems tonight with Topo's blog.

Topo mentioned tonight that not only had it been a while since a new comment was posted on her blog, but a test comment posted tonight never showed up. Part of the problem turned out to be a stupid PHP syntax error I'd introduced; I'd been editing one of the files in an attempt to force WPBlacklist stop emailing re: deleted posts. (Yes, we'd turned off all possible email-me-please settings, and it still kept filling up her inbox.)

And then somehow, our IP address and my URL got put into the blacklist tables. There's no note of when an entry is added to the blacklist (FIXME!), so I can't tell when it was added -- but every test comment I made was getting caught by this. Finally, there were at least two blank entries in the tables, and I'm afraid they might have been destroying everything in sight, too.

After a little bit of browsing around, it turns out the let's-insert-a-blank-line problem has been addressed in the 2.8 version of WPBlacklist, available from the new download page. I'll give that a try. Also, it'd be nice to clear up the license -- no mention of how WPBlacklist is available, and if I'm going to work on this (and hopefully improve it), I want to make sure I can distribute any changes. I'll post a question on the forum and see what happens.