Spam is one of those few things in life that doesn’t polarize opinion.
Everyone hates spam. Even spammers hate spam. When I browse through the spam folder on my blog (which I occasionally do to check that no genuine comments have been caught), the absurdity of the spam comments never ceases to amaze me.
I assume that there must be some worth in these attempts to gain backlinks, but it is difficult to believe how.
Successful blogging is a long term play. It is very unusual for a blog to attract any notable level of traffic in its first few months. The fact is, you need four things to produce a successful blog:
Great content
Momentum
Connections
Stellar Marketing
If you are brand new to blogging, you could feasibly nail the first requirement – but the other three are likely to be more of a challenge. However, it is the serial bloggers who get things off the ground quickly, as they can utilize their network and prior experience.
I don’t know about you, but I am a complete sucker for plugins. I just can’t help myself. I generally use far too many. And whilst plugins are enormously useful and can make our WordPress sites do all sorts of clever things, we all know that you should generally keep the number of plugins you use to as few a number as possible.
Managing your WordPress comments efficiently means you can spend more time creating content and less time getting bogged down with brainless admin stuff.
If you’ve built up a decent readership on your blog and you’re starting to get a heavy load of comments, it’s a good idea to get into your discussion settings and make a few tweaks.
Just venture into the ‘Settings’ panel on the left sidebar of your dashboard, and click on ‘Discussion’ to access your WordPress comment controls.
Managing your WordPress discussion settings
You just have to love something named “Jetpack” right? I’m a bit pissed off that Automattic managed to nab that particular name within the WordPress community, it could just as well have been a kick-ass WordPress theme throttling blogging to the next level. Now I have scapped all those ideas, and I blame Automattic and Jetpack for robbing the community of this!
Wow, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? Sorry about that, unfortunately I can’t blame the dictators here at WPMU.org for that, although you could perhaps understand if they were in fact responsible. The public outcry on the localization column alone could make a less secure man cry, and make James & Co. looking for a way out. They didn’t, which obviously came as a total shock to me – that was my exit strategy for Pete’s sake!
Securing your WordPress blog or site might not be high on your agenda, as you feverishly strive to build your site’s content and focus on its design aspects. However if you don’t want to run the risk of all your efforts going down the drain in a few weeks or months down the line, I suggest you spend some time considering the security aspect of your site.
Many users are there have been asking for updates on the status of the bbPress plugin. It is well on its way and with RC4 out today. The plugin is still pre-release but can now be used on live sites. This release candidate offers tightened integration with Multisite, BuddyPress, and Akismet.
Here’s what’s new with bbPress RC4:
BuddyPress 1.5 activity streams and @mention integration
Improved Akismet integration
Improved update process
Improved importer
Improved multisite integration
Improved spam/deleted user handling
Added blacklist_keys support
Added actions to topic/reply forms
Updated green admin color scheme for WordPress 3.2
BP Labs is a cool new plugin written by core developer Paul Gibbs for the purpose of testing out some new BuddyPress experiments. Paul recently announced BP Labs 1.2-beta-1 which begins testing for Akismet integration for the BuddyPress activity stream.
The BP Labs 1.2-beta-1 includes:
Added caching to @mentions autosuggest; it speeds up multiple requests for the same query
Added Activity Stream Spam experiment
A couple of weeks ago I posted about the launch of the BP Labs plugin, a continuing project of core BuddyPress developer Paul Gibbs.
Today Paul announced a new dev blog for the BP Labs plugin and invited others to join in. He recently added some caching for @mentions to make them work faster. However, the most exciting news is the next lab that Paul is aiming to launch: Akismet support for the BuddyPress activity stream. This would enable another level of spam protection from within BuddyPress to help keep your community free of unwanted or inappropriate posts.
