For those who have been waiting, WordPress 2.0.1 has just been released. This version has seen a month of bug fixing (over 100 bugs squashed), the majority being issues with the administration screens and their behaviour. There were some pretty detailed discussions on the developer and testing mailing lists to resolve some of these issues.
Alas, the WYSIWYG post editor is still not accessible to keyboard only users, so if you can only use a keyboard and not a mouse make sure to turn it off.
If you want to mark up your posts semantically you might want to turn it off too. With this new “Visually rich editor”, if you want to quote somebody, you need to think “indent”, and if you want to stop quoting them, think “outdent”.

The all singing new media uploader, which is right on the edit page where it should be, at least seems to work better now… but only if you can use a mouse. If you are unable to use a mouse, you will be unable to upload images and other media to your blog. Even with the fancy editor turned off. You are unable to perform this task. I know it wasn’t very friendly in the last version, but it did work, you were able to upload images, and copy and paste their tags into your post. You can no longer do that — it does not work.

I’m sorry to harp on about this but removing basic functionality, even if it were for a small number of people (which it is not — a large number of people have trouble using a mouse with precision, if at all), is still a step backwards in my book.

After monitoring the comments that Akismet blocked very carefully, I can report that I’ve had no false positives for nearly a week. I’m not quite sure what changed to fix things.
With a dynamic system like Akismet, things will change over time. That is the nature of the beast. I don’t know whether Matt and the crew tweaked something, or whether a concerted poisoning attempt stopped being effective, but I’m glad I can start trusting it again.
I suspect it was the former because the change back was very dramatic, though I’m sure Automattic would not want to admit to it.

Server Trouble

In the meantime, at around one this morning, my server went down, or rather my blog stopped working. After a quick investigation, I determined that the database server was complaining of too many connections. I checked and there were a large number of httpd processes running. Presumably each, or most had a database connection open. Static files were being served ok, but anything involving the database was failing.

I restarted the Apache and that seemed to cure it. I started checking through log files to see if I could determine the culprit, but found nothing suspicious. Fifteen minutes later the site was down again. I then spent the next two hours monitoring the situation. A quick script allowed me to watch the process count:

ps -ef | grep httpd | wc -l

It was growing quite rapidly from an initial 16 to over 100, though the site would start failing at about 80. In the end I gave up when the process count stayed stable for 20 minutes. Though when I checked after a few hours sleep, it had gone down again and was down for over 5 hours. I’m presuming it was an attack of some kind.
It has since gone down again, but the growth in number of processes seems to take a much longer time. I didn’t find anything obvious in the logs that I checked, but maybe it is one of the lesser sites which is being attacked. I will continue to investigate…

I’ve just spent a rather painful 45 minutes recovering legitimate comments from my Akismet admin panel. Painful because Akismet had over 1400 comments marked as spam from the last week.

That number is not excessive for my blog: Akismet has caught over 12,000 spam comments since I installed it; but I’ve not been keeping on top of the list this week. Unfortunately checking for false positives is impossible once you have more than 150 spam comments.

The Akismet plugin displays the newest 150 comments each with a check box to allow you to separate the legitimate ones from the rubbish (the ham from the spam). That’s great: check the boxes, push the “not spam” button.

However, the only other action is to delete all the comments that Akismet has determined are spam. But if you have legitimate comments that are not in the most recent 150, you cannot see them to rescue them.

Luckily for me, I’m technical enough that I can figure out how to get round problems like this, but most people are not.

In the end, I rescued somewhere between 40 and 50 comments. I’m not sure of the exact number because I wasn’t paying attention, and releasing them from Akismet’s clutches doesn’t trigger the email notification so I can’t count the emails either. Not one single comment was let through in the last 6 days. I don’t know whether this is a minor hiccup from Akismet or the start of an alarming trend.

I then spent another 20 minutes responding to some of them. Oh yeah, and I’ve spent another 30 minutes writing this post!

I think I will have to look at enhancing the Akismet plugin. Either by adding a ‘delete just spam in the list’ button or by adding pagination to the list of spams. The former sounds far easier than the latter.