One of the first plugins I wanted to write for WordPress was a decent spam filter. At the time (late 2004) there were several plugins already out there, but they were all rules-based and I wanted something more adaptive. So I wrote a few simpler plugins for practice and soon abandoned the idea, since I really didn’t get much spam — or even many comments for that matter.
After a seven month absence, I came back here to find over 4000 comments in moderation, most of it spam. It took a week to sort through and clean that mess up, all to preserve the 5% of legitimate comments buried in there. Then after a 2 week vacation, I was stunned to see my empty moderation queue back up to 2700 comments. No rest for the wicked, I guess. (more...)
UPDATE 27-Aug-2006: The table creation bug in the first beta has been fixed, thanks to the keen eye of Francesco Ferrucci. My apologies for including such an obvious bug, and for my 2 week absence (I’ve been on vacation).
UPDATE 4-Sep-2006: Some minor changes (now at beta3) for compatibility with MySQL 3.23, Semiologic and Chip’s tag cloud widget.
So over the past week, I’ve been working towards my promise (made only a scant 7+ months ago) of delivering a 2.0 version of “Jerome’s Keywords”. I’m glad to announce that most of the rewriting and debugging are done so there’s a beta of the 2.0 version for you to try out.
Before you do, a few caveats:
It’s strictly WordPress 2.0+, older versions of WP aren’t supported. Tags are now stored in a dedicated table for performance reasons, so you need “create table” access on your database.
What’s new:
Fixes a whole bunch of minor bugs introduced by WP2.0 (suggested keywords, including categories, etc.). Adds tag management features from LightPress. Adds an option page to make tag display setup easier. Including meta keywords in your header is now a one-click option; no template code required. Nicer template tag functions for posts and tag clouds (and no parameters required if you use the option page). Random tag cloud sort feature. (more...)
