Well, it's been a smidge since I last posted here, mainly because I've been working on a few projects which are due for release soon. Two of them involve phoenix blogs and the other one is [elsie].

I've also been working on some new anti-spam measures, although some of them won't be implementable until they publicly release the 1.8 version of the code, which is geared far more towards stopping the wankers that think spam is the way forward (if you're a spamming wanker and actually reading this, please feel free to spam this blog, the data that you provide is invaluable :D ).

As you can see from the "number of comments in the last 24 hours" I haven't actually enforced any of the antispam measures on this blog, although you have to be a logged in member to be able to make a comment that's actually published - if you're not a member, and you want to make a comment then you'll need to get hold of me via the [b2evo] forums and request membership of this blog. This is mainly so I can get a shedload of data on the methods that these wankers use when they spam. So far I have over 15,000 spam comments on record, and you'd be amazed at how much these can be condensed to "common properties".

The new anti-spam measures that are coded into the 1.8 version will make it VERY simple for anyone to write a plugin that can assist fight spam. Instead of the "true/false" blacklist that's the current method, they've implemented a "karma" system whereby comments (and posts) are analysed by a variety of plugins and an overall "chance of spam" is generated. This changes the blacklist into a grey list which is far more useful as you can have good guys and bad guys all in the same table and each can affect the eventual karma total.

It'll be interesting to see the sorts of antispam measures that other developers come up with. As all of them will be plugins you'll be able to pick and choose which ones you wish to implement on your own blogs. The goal is to have such a variety of measures that may or may not be implemented on a blog, that the spammers just piss off and shoot themselves ...... damn, now that would be a christmas present huh?

¥

Well, it looks like they're getting close to releasing Phoenix Beta, which has a lot of bug fixes in it and some new bells and whistles. The major down side is that they've "refactored" the plugins, which appears to be a fancy way of saying "renamed all the functions and hooks". This means that all of my plugins will need to be rewritten to work with the beta version, ahhh gotta love cvs. Whilst it sounds like a pain in the arse, it shouldn't actually take much work to convert them over, it'll just take time ..... damn, I almost wish I'd only written one plugin now :p

On the brighter side, I've almost finished converting my comment moderaton hack over to the beta version and I've started on expanding it into a full system rather than the "works enough for me to use" system that's in place at the moment. If I can get the code robust enough and it does what's wanted then I'll see about getting it added to the core.

Another bright point is, with the code going into beta, apart from the fact that it means it's getting closer to a full release version, it should also mean that the code is far more stable and unlikely to be "refactored" again. So this should be the last time I need to recode my plugins ...... I'm an optomist :|

In other news today, [stk] has joined forces with a certain unamed british programmer to start up "a value-added website presence",

[quote]Initially, our goal will be to provide b2evo-specific add-on features, tutorials and plug-ins. Many of these features will be free, in the spirit of Open Source software, but because we both hope to continue full-time development, we'll be accepting donations, offering site subscriptions, and taking on website consulting work. And we're planning on extending support, articles and features beyond b2evolution, covering such diverse topics as CSS, XHTML, site maintenance, design and a number of other open source applications.[/quote]

Sounds like it's going to be fun.

¥