Code of the day: The Captcha!

Why?

Well for the upgrade process I deactivated the plug-ins for WordPress (including the Captcha! Plugin) because they recommend it in the upgrade docs. All in all the site was back up about 10 minutes until I reactivated the plug-ins, so basically it had it’s trousers down for a short period of time. and what happened?

See for yourself, part of an email in my Inbox:

A new comment on the post #108 “WordPress – Captcha! Plugin and Line Breaks” is waiting for your approval:
Author : George (IP: x.y.z , undefined.x.y.z)
E-mail : Joshua@mail.com
URI : http:///images/_vti_cnf/casino-gambling/
Whois : http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryinput=x.y.z
I got a spam comment! In exactly ten minutes where the site was “vulnerable”. How ridiculous is that? How often are they trying to spam comment blog sites? I wonder how much traffic they are generating just by trying to hit the comment-post page? Well anyway, I’m very happy that I have my Captcha! Plugin for WP (see here for details). Even though development on it is not being continued, but hey it works!

Ping! and a WordPress Update

As usual it’s bin a bit quiet over here. I increase my posting frequency at large events – as you may have noticed – but I try to post some bits now and then. Actually I’m currently writing (or better preparing to write = researching) for my master thesis’s, without telling you too much yet, it’s about proactive service invocation. It’s part context-awareness (my favorite), a lot of statistics, prediction and information theory and last but not least of course the prototype will of course be implented somewhere in the .net world. Stay tuned for more (probably when I finish some of the subcomponents I’ll blog about them)…

But nevertheless I just heard about some security issues in WordPress 2.0.3, so I’m in the process of updating… So in case something goes wrong, you might neven know about it, because the update is going to happen just about 5 minutes after this post, but if you are reading this then everything went well. (I know it doesn’t make much sense…)