Jenny had a post about how WordPress caching seems to mess everything up, at least in WP v2.0.2. Disabling the cache fixed a very serious error that was bringing the site down.
As it turns out, I was having a heck of a time with user management on a fresh WordPress install. When I initially logged in as Administrator, I immediately changed the default password, but then the new password wouldn’t work. After several attempts, it finally accepted the new password. Later, I tried making other changes to the profile, and they just wouldn’t take. But then later, some of the changes would start showing up. Very odd and perplexing.
Well, caching issues usually do cause very odd behavior. Sure enough, I disabled the caching, and everything was fine. And to further verify that this is a valid solution, if you look inside the ~/wp-content/cache directory, there are two user-oriented cache subdirectories: “users” and “userlogins”. WordPress v2.0.2 apparently doesn’t handle the caching very well when updating user information.
Back in the day, I used to always love mentioning the supposed quote from Bill Gates, which would have marked him as significantly short-sighted: “640k is more memory than anyone will ever need”, or some close variant thereof.
We love to quote it, because we love to hate Bill Gates and yet we can relate with the amazement of ever greater RAM requirements. For instance, I never thought when my powerhouse Mac came with 128MB of RAM that one day I would have a Mac with a video card holding more RAM than that! Insert similar nostalgic reflection here, ad nauseam.
Well, now I can just feel stupid and short-sighted without pointing the finger at Bill Gates. I never even thought to verify the quote until today for some unknown reason I decided to. Sure enough, you’ll be hard-pressed to find an official citation, and Bill Gates denied ever saying that.
Wow. While I was on vacation, Spam Karma kind of freaked out in some way and was no longer functioning. As a result, I was left with the default WordPress comment moderation facilities.
Thank goodness for the default WordPress spam blocking functionality! Even though it left over 400 spam comments to moderate for Nazin and over 200 to moderate for my personal site (over the course of a week), at least it caught them and prevented them from appearing on the site itself!
My email client checks my accounts every 5 minutes, and on every refresh, it would pull down about 5 new comment moderation messages. That means that by yesterday, my site was getting comment spam or trackback spam once every minute during parts of the day. That is incredible.
You know, comment spam seems like a logical step for spammers, but you have to admit that the Trackback Spam, or Sping, is absolutely vile in an irritatingly clever way.
When you reach this level of blog spam, you realize how helpful services like Spam Karma are, and how incomplete CAPTCHA is as a solution to spam. It was never meant to be a total blog spam solution, but some people flog it as such. I used to be one of them. And now I’m glad I have Spam Karma. Except for its glitch (which I think was database related, not actually a fault of Spam Karma), it has had a 100% success rate for positive and negative spam identification.
