Feedback

Since a couple of weeks people using WP Mollom got hit by some spam. On friday, Bert took the problem to Twitter, which caught my attention. Of course, we want to get rid of all the spam and so I notified Dries.

Over the weekend, Dries did some research in the logfiles and noticed some disturbing patterns concerning feedback sent from WordPress blogs using the plugin. Most moderated messages got reported as ‘profanity’ rather then ‘spam’. That led, with the much appreciated help of Pascal, to the discovery of a nasty bug in the feedback functions of the plugin.

On the 1st of september, kids go back to school here in Belgium. And so, with a week to go, I was able to get a new release out. I intended it to be a bugfix release with version number 0.5.3, but I got a bit carried away and some feature creep happened. So I decided to give it version number 0.6.0.

Here’s the changelog:

• fixed: html is preserved in a comment when the visitor is confronted with the captcha
• fixed: handling of session id’s in show_captcha() en check_captcha() follows the API flow better.
• fixed: broken bulk moderation of comments is now fixed
• fixed: the IP adress was incorrectly passed to the ‘mollom.checkCaptcha’ call
• fixed: the session_id is now passed correctly to _save_session() after the captcha is checked.
• improved: more verbose status messages report when using the Mollom Manage module
• improved: cleaned up some deprecated functions
• improved: handling of Mollom feedback in _mollom_send_feedback() function
• added: approve and unapprove options in the Mollom Manage module
• added: link to the originating post in the Mollom Manage module
• added: if a comment had to pass a CAPTCHA, it will be indicated in the Mollom Manage module
• added: plugin has it’s own HTTP USER AGENT string which will be send with XML RPC calls to the API
• added: detailed statistics. You can find these under Plugins > Mollom

My personal favourite are the new statistics. I like shiny bar graphs. Dries and Benjamin let me use the flash object to generate statistics based on the data of their Mollom services. But I decided to keep some statistics on the ‘client’ i.e. your site’s side.

The plugin got featured over the weekend on mollom.com. It has now it’s own place in their downloadsection. How neat is that!

During my four days of relaxing at Rock Werchter, I received some much needed feedback from you. Over the weekend, I realized there are still an issue or two which needs taking care of. There was also a minor change in the API documentation which needs implementing.

Well, nothing more to say for now: it’s out. You can download and play with it. It’s a first beta version so beasts can roar it’s head if you have a heavily customized wordpress installation with loads of plugins. Please, drop me a line with all your feedback, code, concerns, requests!

A big thank you to Dries, Benjamin, the testers and all those people that supported me!

Yesterday, I made a last codingscram and implemented the entire feedback/moderationqueue in the dashboard. It works acceptable enough to put out a very rough betaversion out to the testers. Which I did yesterday-evening. I’m very curious about their feedback. I’ve already listed some points that will need improvement.

If you’d like to participate in testing please mail me!! Remember Eric Raymond’s famous aphorism: give enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow!

A little progress update on my Mollom for WordPress plugin. The past ten days some unexpected real life events kept me back from programming. No worry, I hope to do some hacking in the upcoming long weekend.

So, where do I stand? Well, I just need to implement the last necessary feature: the moderation queue and feedback module that catches the last 0.1% of (unsure/spammy) messages that Mollom can’t process itself. Shouldn’t be much more than an afternoon’s work though.

Zo. We zijn een half dagje verder. Dit is de tussenstand: 0 spammers door de mazen van het net gegelipt. 7 spams in de moderation queue waarvan er 3 door jullie werden achtergelaten. 1 spam (Houbi) per ongeluk in de moderation queue blijven hangen. Niettegenstaande de mens legit is.

Kijk, voorlopig laat ik alles daar even hangen. Ik moet nog een feedback module in mijn plugin hangen zodat ik de Mollom servers kan terugsturen waarom iets wel of niet spam/profanity/unwanted/… is.

Jobat doet dit weekend van bloggen: in deze editie wordt er redelijk wat aandacht gevestigd op het fenomeen bloggen. De nadruk ligt hier vooral op het corporate bloggen. Of hoe je via je blog je zaak in het voetlicht kan plaatsen.

Bedrijfsbloggen is een vrij intensieve bezigheid. Je moet immers elke dag opnieuw jezelf weten te verkopen want de competitie gaat hard en een blog starten kost niets. De moeilijk is de bedrijfsblog te vullen van inhoud want content is immers king. Niet gemakkelijk want, zoals Bart het stelt, zijn bloggers zeer gevoelig voor authenticiteit. Wat fake is wordt direct verguisd en het collectieve geheugen van de blogosfeer kan je best vergelijken met dat van een olifant: het vergeet niet gemakkelijk.