On The Third Hand

Just got a note from Kevin at Wizbang that my RSS feed was not validating. He also kindly sent along a link on how to fix it. To check if your feed validates, go to this validator and enter the URL wp-rss2.php (for instance, mine is: http://site-essential.com/wp-rss2.php ) . If it doesn’t validate, this should fix it. Since a lot of people aren’t too happy with messing around with PHP coding, I have a fixed file available. Click on the link, copy and paste the text into a text editor, save it as wp-rss2.php and upload it to the main wp directory in your site. Warning: do not try to simply save the page in your browser or you will get all sorts of nonsense and the file will be totally useless.

For those who are under spam attack and getting annoyingly long moderation queues, I also have a minor ‘fix’ for the moderation.php page, which is simply a change of the default checkbox from “Do Nothing” to “Delete". That way you don’t have to either click delete on each comment in a long list or delete them one by one as you get them. The file is here. Again, cut and paste into a text editor, and save as moderation.php (see warning above; do not simply save the file from your browser). Upload to your wp-admin folder.

[update] Note on the RSS validation. This is something that has evidently recently changed so don’t expect that, just because you checked the validation before, it still validates.

I’ve been getting comments in moderation queues that didn’t seem to belong there (I keep an eye on the queues for some of my clients that were having serious spam problems). If you are using WordPress and using the ’spam words’, note that I’ve found the problem. Wordpress looks at anything that includes its spam words, even inside another word (it doesn’t require the whole word only). The spam word “cialis", for instance, is inside the word ’socialism’ . So any comment that has the word ’socialism’ (or any other word with ‘cialis’ inside) will go into the moderation queue. The same thing applies to some of the other words in the spam word list. Get rid of the ones that cause you problems.