Comment spam, tags vs. categories and other wordpress woes

On October 26, 2007 in Suggestions Please

*There will not be any interviews today, but we have an awesome one coming up so stay tuned*

That said, time for me to gripe about wordpress (well, more like my lack of experience with wordpress). I’m hoping someone kind and more experienced will come along and point me in the right direction so I don’t have to hunt for a fix my self (and if they could bring me an ice cream sundae that would be awesome too )

– Beware, this post is just frustration venting and has nothing to do with Japan –

Before I gripe I would like to mention why I love wordpress so no one gets the wrong idea:

1. You can create posts ahead of time and set the timer to when you want them to publish (this is my favourite)
2. The easy of use, especially when editing templates, blogrolls, etc.
3. The dashboard - it is super useful
4. Plugins (mods) that will likely solve the problems I’m having once I make some time to play with them…

I have used a number of content management systems *(CMS) like wordpress before, and wordpress is a top notch CMS. But with all CMS you have to go searching for how to fix something or other, or for some add-on. It’s making me tired…

Now about the problems I’m having:

Spam comments:

Is it just me or do wordpress blogs get an insane amount of spam? The only other blog platforms I have experience with are xanga (does that even count as a blog platform?) and blogger.

With blogger I never, ever, had any spam. It was nice really…

I have seen what looked like some kind of spam blocking add-on on other blogs (I think they were wordpress blogs).

Spam trackbacks:

I did not even know that these existed before using wordpress. It seems there are sites out there that aggregate your content and send a trackback hoping to drive some of your traffic to their squatter site full of adsense ads. As one does…

Tags vs. Categories:

I wish wordpress had the tagging features of blogger. With blogger you see all of your posts on the right and on the left you can check them and apply a tag (or label) , basically just like in gmail (Mmmm gmail, I love gmail). To tell you the truth I still haven’t gotten the hang of tags vs. categories.

Rich text editor:

It’s just really, really basic. Maybe there is a better one that can be added, I don’t know. The default one does not have a text color / text size function. I know html so I can do all of that by hand, but it would be easier with an editor.

Okay. I’m done venting now. Wow, this is a very uncharacteristic post for this blog.

*UPDATE*

All solved by http://dev.wp-plugins.org/wiki/PluginDirectory

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