1. I upgraded my WordPress from 1.5 to 2.0 and it was entirely painless (yes, I did a complete backup first, just in case but, thankfully, I didn’t need it).

2. I was using Akismet for a while and then, all of a sudden, I started getting more spam than I kenw what to do with. Much if it was caught but some of it still fell through. Also, it was catching oh-so-few legit items, which I had to manually un-flag (this wasn’t so bad until the number of spams per day exceeded the queue of 150 items displayed; at that point, I couldn’t tell whether the other hundred or so–which I could not view–were legit or spam).

Bottom line on #2 is that I started using dr Dave’s Spam Karma 2 and it ROCKS! If you haven’t already, you can check it out at http://unknowngenius.com/blog/wordpress/spam-karma/

Good luck!

I’m not going to post the link to the site that sent the spingback — obviously, that’s only going to give it the linkage it’s seeking. But if you look at it (I sent you the link via email), you’ll see that it’s a blog in format only. It’s obviously an auto-generated product, solely for the purposes of aiding the dissemination of its spam — i.e., a splog.

It’s not a case of me not liking that particular subject matter. Realistically, this is just a further evolution of spamming.

I don’t mean to put across a harsh tone with you, Dan. Like I said, I appreciate the effort you’ve put toward the problem, and I’ve been happy to aid it in my small way. But the way I’m seeing it, it seems like the game’s over.

Gary: I’ve been fortunate, in that the Validator had been deflecting the scores of spam trackbacks that have been coming at me since last Fall. So if I got a trackback, it was virtually always a real one.

But yeah, like a lot of blogs, trackbacks of any sort are kinda rare. Actually, most of them come from me: I routinely send trackbacks to my own old posts when I link back to them. That’s why I’m loathe to shut them off completely; I send a couple a week on average to my old posts.

We’ll see how it plays out.

Well, it took them half a year [...]

Now, here’s the crux of the matter. If someone has set up a blog, and linked to yours from a stable URL, it kind of stretches the definition of spam. How does this differ from some blogger writing about your site, except that you disapprove of the content on that person’s blog?

Increasingly we’re forcing spammers to act less like evil resource-sucking robots, and more like real humans. I agree that now we’re all forced to look at the comments posted to our blogs and decide, on a per-comment basis, whether we “like” the contents or not. I’m not aware of any general-purpose, reliable way to automatically filter out people you don’t like. (Such a device would be a big hit in the “real” world…)

This spam problem is really too bad since trackbacks are so valuable and they so rarely get used.

Thanks for the ping! Good luck if you do the update…