An exercise in narcissism

I know blogging can be a fairly narcissistic activity, but the lack of comments in the past few weeks on my posts was starting to puzzle me.

Not enough to investigate further though – I just assumed I’d been relegated from the E list to the F list of bloggers. It’s only when I tried to login to the b2evolution admin page from my newly-installed Kubuntu machine (sans cookie, so I actually had to login again) that I realised something was wrong – the login URL was broken. And so were all the comment URL’s. The culprit was an anti-spam Perl script I had been running, which changes the name of the htsrv directory (the directory containing the scripts used for comments and trackbacks). The spammers know about this directory, so the script changes the name every day, making things a little bit harder for them.

However, the new version of b2evolution I which I’ve been using for a while, made a minor change, losing a slash where once there was one in a directory name. So the antispam script was a little overzealous, meaning no-one could comment. I think they’ve since updated the script (although the technique, being well-known, has also been overcome by spammers, who simply look up the latest name on the fly)

So if anybody’s still out there, do say hello – it would be good to hear another voice after all this time 🙂

Related posts:

• b2evolution dawn spam
• b2evolution upgrades and antispam
• What pisses me off about spam
• Cleaning up spam referers in b2evolution
• First spam

b2evolution spam b2evo