The war against the spam commenters is, it seems, endless. Last week I installed a well-know plugin (Askimet) to help protect this blog - previously all comments were being moderated by me, which led to big delays for honest commenters. After a few days of successful operation, I switched off the moderation on Friday, only to be faced with a handful of spam comments making it through last night. Grrr, indeed.

So the moderation is back on again, but only for first time posters (first time since I upgraded a few weeks ago, I think that is). I’m especially disappointed that Askimet didn’t pick up on comments which were exactly the same format as the previous 200 that I had got.

Still, it’s not really the plugin’s fault - one day, there will be much vengenance wreaked by everyone who has ever run their own blog…

Stumbled across the ToryScum website this morning (I think I’ve seen it before though). The thing that lead me there were the defaced Tory posters - check out the “Subverts” category. Priceless.

Now if only I knew of an organisation that had both ladders and pots of black + white paint to hand. Hmmmm….

(For those of you trying to avoid being roped into caring about the election, feel free to ponder the joys of being able to link directly to a blog category instead of a collection of individual posts. Nice.)

(And for those of you who are really into the whole election thing: “Compulsory voting : bringing an end to low turnout caused by intimidatio and negative campaigning. Discuss.”.)

I’ve had around 700 spam comments and now trackbacks since the start of the holidays, and I’m fed up with it. For the moment all comments are being moderated until I get round to putting in place one of these anti-spam things like Mike has. The trackback spam is a new one today, but since everyone running WordPress is being hammered, I expect the new versions to be able to deal with it better.

And I feel ill, which isn’t helping.

Another of those “I couldn’t find the answer on Google so I’ll write it here” postings.

By default, Thunderbird only checks your Inbox for new messages (which stems from a POP3 legacy). If you have server-side rules (or use a web interface to do your rules), then you’ll want Thunderbird to check subfolders as well. This can be done by right-clicking the folder in question, selecting properties, and ticking the appropriate box. There’s no(t yet an) option to do this globally.

Applies to Thunderbird 0.9.

Update: April 2008

Years later, even with Thunderbird 2.0, this is still a problem. But there’s now a global option, thankfully. Although it’s completely hidden, it saves a lot of time if you’ve got lots of subfolders.

Open up the preferences dialog (either Tools -> Preferences or Edit -> Preferences), and click Advanced -> General -> Config Editor. In the filter box start typing ‘mail.check’ and then double click on mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new. It should then change the value to true (and it’ll appear in bold since you’ve changed it) and all should hopefully be hunky-dory.

I’ve now added all the posts from my old Chasing Rainbows weblog to this one. Although I’m not exactly proud of some of the posts (to put it mildly), there’s just about enough interesting things in there to make it worth while keeping them. So with a trusty SSH session and some PHP (and a fair bit of luck) I managed to convert my old weblog database into the new Wordpress format, and managed not to screw anything up.

I’m not going to turn on comments for them though, and I’m not going to go through them all and try classifying them, since that would be a bit boring.

Today’s exercise in coding reminded me again why I’ve made the switch from a home-grown weblog to using a properly developed one (not quite off-the-shelf or shrink-wrapped, but you know what I mean). Next time I want to change backend, I know that someone else will have written an import script, and I won’t have to bodge one together myself. And now that I’ve spent about two working-days on the switch, I’ve gone from entering data into the database by hand, to having a proper admin interface, categories, sub-categories, comments, pingback and trackback, drafting, private entries, searching, linkrolls, plugin interfaces… which would have taken quite some time if I’d done it myself. And every time I’m in the pub, or sleeping, or whatever else, I know someone else is improving the software that runs my weblog. Which is nice. And I was getting fed up of the whole wheel-reimplementation thing anyway.

Yesterday was fun. I went climbing with Ed, Mike, Steve King and Andy Bennet at the Westway, for the first time in almost a year. I need to work on my finger strength, and rather than buying a finger-strengthener (or stealing Jude’s again), I might just try going climbing as often as possible. I’ll aim to go climbing more than once a month, and see if I can stick to that.

After climbing, we went to the annual Ball Games in the Park, where we all had fun making up new rules in order to get people ‘out’, since our collective rule-making-ability was far superior to our actually-playing-softball skills. Although Ed was pretty impressive with his one-man-team effort. And the rain didn’t stop play, it just happened to coincide with afternoon tea.

The BBQ at the Putney flat was as good as ever, but I’m slightly concerned as to just how many of the word to South Park the movie I know. Especially considering I haven’t watched it for quite a long time.