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I have been working with the centralized comment spam prevention idea for some time and I have a service ready to be tested. It is in the alpha stages of development but the focus is on a simplified interface, incredibly simple installation and ZERO maintenance.

Now a lot of developers and blog gurus poo poo the centralized idea since any central system WILL be vulnerable. However, if centralization itself is distributed, that is, if a hundred people can provide spam protection for a hundred thousand, the vulnerability becomes less of a problem. In the present incarnation of this service, you install a WordPress (various other tools planned) plugin and enable it. Everything else is taken care of for you. The service learns from itself and the more spam you send its way, the better it gets.

Lots of features are planned and some are already implemented. What I am looking for are about a hundred alpha testers with the worst comment spam symptoms. During the testing period things might break horribly (well not really, just comments will be snafu’ed), and you might have to endure frequent updates, but you might very well be free of comment spam, and in the process help create something useful (and make me happy!).

So if Cialis and Viagra haunt you in your morning coffee or if you do not care for the texas-holdem person, (and are willing to be a blog guinea pig), leave a comment here with your blog name and email address (never visible) and I will send you the download link.

If you are a developer with a blog tool beside WordPress (or even a WP hack/dev) and would like to see the insides of the web service, let me know.

[EDIT]: There are no dangers really. If this plugin somehow stops responding and visitors cannot comment on your blog, you would have to manually turn off the plugin (and enable any other comment spam system you might have) Thats all.

UPDATE: Everything is now ready to go, the plugin works well with 1.2 and 1.3 installs of WP with one exception.  There has been some problem with WP 1.2.1 when running Kubrick 1.2.6.  I am looking into it now, but I thought it was not a deal breaker.  If you have any questions leave them for me here or on my site.

Hey everyone, just checking in with a little plugin update.  I am releasing a new plugin on Friday the 29th of October called Per Post Comment Text.

In a nutshell this plugin will allow you to specify the text that your link to your comments form holds.  Gone are the days of every link on every article being Comments (0), or What do you think? (0).  Now you will be able to have your post about motorcycles have this as your comment link: What kind of hog do you ride? (0); or your article about The Grudge have one that says: Did you piss on yourself in this movie? (0).

If you hit my site you can see the plugin in action.

Some months ago, Mark created the Sortable Nicer Archives for WP 1.2
In WP 1.3, the main page has been split into different sections, so the original file above didn’t look good - it worked of course, but the page layout was broken.
Using includes for the header and footer, along with a <div> correction, that is now sorted.
It can be seen working here: www.tamba2.org.uk/T2/narchives.php

The phps file is here: www.tamba2.org.uk/downloads/narchives2.phps

Note: this has not been tested against Themes.