Hacks and Gadgets by HJL

Over the past few weeks, I have noticed an increasing volume of spam comments from various “sandra-” user names, which promptly get added to the comment blacklist.

Recently added: sandra-qn, sandra-oa, sandra-sc, sandra-ss, sandra-eb, sandra-ri, sandra-md, sandra-jy, sandra-ro, sandra-ew, sandra-pv, sandra-hn, sandra-mm, sandra-lb

This sort of spam really calls for a regular expression filter, if I ever get around to doing some blog maintenance.

I’ve been getting thousands of attempted comment and trackback spam across my site during the past few days. Fortunately, most of it is getting caught by the keyword filters.

This round of spam seems better implemented than previous ones. The incoming comments and trackbacks are distributed across the entire site, rather than on one or two posts, and are also coming in from a broad set of IP addresses and user agents, which makes it hard to use .htaccess rules for blocking it.

I’ve added a few more entries to the comment blacklist in Wordpress, which has reduced the number of spurious comments making it through auto-moderation.

I’ve been using this blog and my running blog for testing out Wordpress 2.0 before trying things out on the main site. This evening’s task has been setting up tagging on my running blog. I’ve been using Jerome’s Keywords for a while, but have been reading good things about Christine Davis’ Ultimate Tag Warrior and decided to give it a try.

Ultimate Tag Warrior is extremely comprehensive and flexible. There are versions for both Wordpress 1.5.x and Wordpress 2.x, although I’m only working with the later version. The plugin works smoothly after being activated, and the only tricky part has been that URL rewrites are different in Wordpress 2.x. — rewrites are now done within Wordpress rather than in the .htaccess file, which seems like a good idea, but in the meantime this plugin and others are still a little in transition.

As currently shipped, the plugin automatically generates rel=”tag” links for Technorati, and can be configured to point to other tag services or use local tags. The URL rewrite problem breaks “clean URLs” for local tags of the form http://site/tag/localtagname, so if you just want to generate Technorati tags you’re already in good shape. Without working URL rewrites, other features like local tag clouds don’t work so well though.

In the meantime, here’s a temporary fix (from comments posted by Stephen Collins) which can be added to the .htaccess file in the root directory of the Wordpress installation. The example here is for http://www.hojohnlee.com/running/, you should change the paths to match your own.

This fix is unlikely to be needed for very long, there is a lot of activity underway among Wordpress plugin developers to get things working with the new version. If you put this in place, you should probably keep an eye on the Ultimate Tag Warrior page or the Wordpress support forums for updates.

# UTW

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /running/
RewriteRule ^tag/?(.*)/feed/(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)/?$ /running/index.php?tag=$1&feed=$2 [QSA,L]
RewriteRule ^tag/?(.*)/page/?(.*)/$ /running/index.php?tag=$1&paged=$2 [QSA,L]
RewriteRule ^tag/?(.*)/$ /running/index.php?tag=$1 [QSA,L]
RewriteRule ^tag/?(.*)/page/?(.*)$ /running/index.php?tag=$1&paged=$2 [QSA,L]
RewriteRule ^tag/?(.*)$ /running/index.php?tag=$1 [QSA,L]

Update 02-08-2006 22:30 PST:
After upgrading to Wordpress 2.0.1, it looks like this fix for .htaccess is still needed with the version of Ultimate Tag Warrior that I’m currently using (2.9.2.1) over on my running blog.

Wordpress 2.x has moved the URL rewriting out of .htaccess and mod_rewrite and into classes.php. This provides access to more hooks forl plugin developers in the future, but in the meantime this seems to be causing a lot of problems with non-standard permalink structures or custom rewrite rules.