Spam
Apparently, it’s the season for spam. What you see above is Defensio’s graph of the total spam comments received at The New Wolfs Howl. As you can see, since the first week in October the total number has climbed by about 10,000. It used to be that I got maybe 10 or 20 spam comments a day; now I’m getting 200 or 300.
Luckily for me, Defensio is an excellent spam filter and I can rely on it to pick up all the crap for me.
New Defensio version released
My anti-spam plug-in of choice, Defensio, gets an update today - moving up to version 1.6. You can download it here.
I’ve been using this plug-in for several months now, initially because I wanted to move away from the WordPress standard Akismet. I’ve never had any issues with it whatsover, and it does everything I want an anti-spam plug-in to do. But I don’t get many comments, spam or otherwise, so it’s perhaps not being put through it’s paces very strenuously. I know that Collin has a different opinion.
This latest update has addressed the issue of visual compatibility with the WordPress 2.5 dashboard and also, according to the Defensio blog, “Many small things were improved and fixed”.
Defensio gets an update
One of the best Wordpress plug-ins out there, Defensio, gets a minor update today to version 1.5.1. If you haven’t yet got it installed, now would be a great time. As I’ve written before, Defensio is way better than Akismet from both a usability and - at least as far as I’ve been able to tell - accuracy point of view and is well worth checking out.
The update deals with a little niggle that I had with the widget (I’m sure I wasn’t the only one, as they said that they’d already been working on it when I asked about it) that meant it did not display in accordance with the settings selected by the user. Now, it will happily sit on the left, right or centre of your sidebar - and you can have it in light or dark too. I know, a little thing really but it’s the little things that are important.
As soon as Wordpress have updated themselves, you’ll be able to find the download at:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/defensio-anti-spam/download/
Do yourself a favour and get it as soon as you can.
Update: Wordpress have now updated their site, so you can download the latest version.
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