Back in January, I expressed frustration at how much comment spam I was having to deal with, and declared a moratorium on comments. Since then, a few folks have written to let me know that the new version (v1.5) of WordPress might help with the comment spam problem.

So I recently upgraded my own website to WordPress v1.5 so that I could play around with it, and I like what I’ve seen so far. Fortunately, the upgrade itself was very quick and easy, and so (as you can see) I decided to go ahead and try it with phonoloblog.

The most significant change, apart from the look of the site, is that comments are once again enabled. (But note: authors have to explicitly allow comments on their individual posts by clicking on the “Allow comments” checkbox on the post-editing page. I recommend doing this from now on, but it’s certainly not mandatory.)

However: only registered users are allowed to post a comment (and, at least for the time being, I am going to moderate comments just in case). All authors are automatically registered users; as always, anyone who wants to be a user and/or an author is free to contact me (phonoloblog#gmail|com) and I will take care of it.

Another change that only authors will notice is a somewhat different look to the WordPress administrative interface. This is mostly cosmetic, and not at all difficult to figure out. All in all, the new version of WordPress is a definite improvement and I hope to have the time to take more advantage of the new features in my wishful-thinking-future-copious-free-time.

— Eric