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.