I don’t have the time to tackle the Poker Spammer From Hell right now quite as thoroughly as loid suggests here. But he’s certainly put together the most comprehensive analysis of how to hit ‘em where they live that I’ve seen so far.

What I’m finding with the upgrade to 1.5 is that, while comments are being moderated according to the parameters I’ve set, those nasty (really nasty) porn-type trackbacks are still getting through to the site - even where comments are closed. Back to the support forums again…

Well, mostly. Thanks to Podz, and his detailed step-by-step foolproof upgrade guide, it all works. Oh, there were some minor issues with comments, but those appear to all be sorted now.

Woo Hoo!

For fellow upgraders, note that because I ported my 1.2 layout and all the associated edits, I found that after the upgrade my comments were essentially broken. The solution, found in the forums, was to replace that file in the ‘carrots’ theme with the comments.php from the default theme that comes with 1.5

Now to clean up all those to-do items that I’ve left sitting for the last two months…

Yes, yes, yes. I know. You’ve been wondering where the heck OneWoman went. She’s still here, and getting ready to bring this blog back to life.

Before I do though, I’m going to spend my happy Presidents’ Day holiday upgrading to the shiny, new WordPress 1.5 release. Keep your fingers crossed for me, and if you see anything really goofy here in the next day or so just figure that I’m taking an ‘OhMyGodNeedMoreCaffeineNOW!’ break.

For December 2004, the top search phrases that landed people at onesmartwoman.com were:

• cats eat a woman
• disappearing walkway
• nj coumadin clinic
• aquari-yums
• breadcrumbs in wordpress
• uri in cats
• the salt mine and lincoln
• medical aid for pales
• 2004 email contractors woman
• get gmail acount

The one that makes me laugh out loud is aquari-yums. A google search returns onesmartwoman.com as the 9th result. Are my cats the only ones out there that have demanded most vociferously that I provide them with these in lieu of their former all-time favorite treat, Pounces?

They’re everywhere! In the last couple of days, reports have surfaced that both Movable Type and MSDN have been slammed by comment spam, and from reading through much of the commentary, we’re all getting hit by the same spammers.

In the case of MT, a bug in the software was apparently causing blogs to consume huge amounts of bandwidth, rebuilding constantly even if the spam went into the blogger’s moderation queue. Six Apart fixed the bug in short order, but the problem looms large for bloggers of all flavors.

Ugh.

Sean Gallagher blames Google’s page rank algorithm for much of this, and I can’t say that I disagree. If they didn’t stand to gain from throwing their links up anywhere on the net that they can, we’d likely have a much cleaner blogsphere.

My latest solution appears to have done the trick though. Since I added SpamWordBlock, not only has my moderation queue been free of drivel, but I haven’t seen a single one slip through to the blog itself.