I've updated the engine behind this blog to the latest release (2.20) of blojsom. Besides wanting to experiment with the many new great features added since I last updated (to 2.11 on 2/11), this poor little blog has been under attack from comment spammers, and I needed blojsom's comment moderation and trackback moderation plugins.

So, first of all, if you noticed that my comment form was broken in the recent past, it wasn't actually an error, but was simply a crude, interim means to prevent the display of spam in blog comments. As I suspected would occur sooner or later, eventually, folks worked around my interim measure.

My timing was very lucky, I started the upgrade to blojsom 2.20 yesterday. While I was upgrading (i.e., the live site was still running the older version of blojsom), two spam comments got through. But, the upgrade was very quick, fortunately (as always—even with the various complications I've added on top of blojsom with my custom code).

So, within a few hours after re-launching this blog under 2.20, more than 50 spam comments had come in and been blocked from display by the comment moderation plugin. As of today, about 100 spam comments have been blocked.

There are some more tweaks I'll be doing to my blojsom configuration to try to further minimize any of the headache of comment spam. Very importantly though, I can relax somewhat when the spam comes in as it will never display on my site, and therefore never be of value to the spammer (the spam is all link-oriented, and, I assume, attempting to funnel some of my pagerank-in-Google to the spammer's sites).

So, a word of notice to everyone who would legitimately comment on or trackback to this blog: your comments / trackbacks will be reviewed and approved by me before being displayed on the site. I'll always try to review and approve these as quickly as possible.

Also, if you see posts with comments or trackbacks awaiting approval, please know that some of those comments or trackbacks may be spam that will be deleted and will, therefore, never appear on the site. Any legitimate comments / trackbacks will be made visible as soon as possible.

Special thanks to "Santa blojsom", David Czarnecki for keeping blojsom up-to-date with the latest and greatest features. I am working with several blog engines right now, and blojsom is exemplary in so many ways in terms of ease of maintenance and customization—it's totally kick-ass.