Spurred on by the mystery (now solved) of Myssa Rei’s in-comment spoiler tags being eaten, I thought I’d make a consolidated note on recent changes to the blog’s commenting infrastructure.
First, I’ve replaced Spam Karma 2 with Akismet as my anti-spam plugin. So far, the rate of spam getting through (only one in the past two weeks) and false positives (also one over the same time period) have been acceptable.
Second, the Comment Timeout plugin has been deactivated. I had initially used it to reduce the ’surface area’ available for spambots. But it’s a blunt instrument for this task and probably Bad Behaviour would be a better alternative. Some very interesting and informative emails from readers regarding the contents of previous posts made me realize what I was missing out on and my own pingbacks not getting through to old posts were the deciding factors for this change.
The rest of the changes follow the Sea Slugs! lead:
Third, Simple Spoiler Enhanced now only accepts the square brackets: [spoiler] spoiler text here [/spoiler]. Not more pointy brackets!
Fourth, LMB^Box Comment Quicktags appears to be working ok too. No more having to remember if open pointy bracket is ampersand gee tee semi-colon or ampersand elle tee semi-colon! [Add: Quite irritating how the 'more than' or 'less than' signs aka Pointy Brackets keep getting 'reset' whenever the options are saved. Have to key in as '<' for it to show correctly, confusing because it's quite different from the write screen for normal posts.]
Fifth and finally, I thought that the K2 theme and the WP AJAX Edit Comments plugin was like brother and sister love but now I’ve discovered that they’re *not* actually blood related! I just had to turn off the Live Commenting function under K2 Options to untangle their AJAX incompatibilities for the Asakura wedding to go ahead. Doh. I think the trade-off in functionality is more than acceptable; I’ve made so many boo-boos in comments on other blogs so I think this is a great plugin; experiencing its convenience at Epic Win as well, was the decider for me! So far it tests ok but do let me know if there are any problems.