Making the world safe for trackbacks again!

UPDATE: A bug was reported that blog posts could not be deleted. We have updated the release files with a fixed version. There’s also a quick and dirty workaround.  You only need to apply the fix if you downloaded and installed Subtext before this update message was posted.  See here for details.

Well it took me a little longer than anticipated, but I finally teased out the remaining show stopper bugs and put the finishing touches on Subtext 1.9.2. If you plan on upgrading to Subtext 1.9.2, please consider reading this entire post carefully. If not, at least remember to backup your database and site first before upgrading!

What happened to 1.9.1? Long story for another time. We are skipping from 1.9 to 1.9.2. Here is a list of releases so far just in case you were curious. UPDATE: I had only listed the versions that required an automatic upgrade. Here is the complete list with the ones in bold required an automatic database update:

  • Subtext 1.0
  • Subtext 1.5
  • Subtext 1.5.1
  • Subtext 1.5.2 
  • Subtext 1.9
  • Subtext 1.9.2

As you can see, our version numbering has been a bit less than consistent. But starting with 2.0, we should stay a bit more consistent. With the launch of IE 7, don’t be surprised if we come out with a 1.9.3 version that just includes fixes to the skins. Volunteers for that effort are welcome.

New Features

The reason we call this the “Shields Up” edition is that the focus has been on dealing with Comment Spam. I had few interesting ideas I could not implement in time, but I did implement three key features that have really made a huge difference in regards to comment spam, and may not necessitate my other ideas.

Akismet Support

Subtext now has full integrated support for Akismet spam filtering. Not too long ago, I released an Akismet API so that others can use it for spam filtering. Scott Hanselman Members of the DasBlog team implemented it for DasBlog (in their source control tree. Not yet released.) and has nothing but praise for it, saying it has completely eliminated comment spam for him.

Now let me explain what I mean by full integrated support. When you enable Akismet and are looking at approved comments in the feedback section, if you notice something that should have been filtered as spam, you can check it and click the Spam button. That will then report a false negative to Akismet, indicating that they failed to mark this item as spam and then move the item to the new Trash folder.

Likewise, if you notice an item that is flagged as spam, but should not have been, you can check the item and click Approve which reports a false positive to Akismet. By doing so, you will be training Akismet to become more adept at filtering spam.

Note, to enable Akismet, you must sign up for anAkismet API keyand supply that key to Subtext via the admin section. In order to get this key, you have to register for a Wordpress.com user account, whether or not you plan to use a Wordpress blog.

Another note, Akismet may not work in Medium Trust scenarios. So if you host your site with a hosting provider such as GoDaddy, WebHost4Life, etc… who run their sites in Medium trust, Akismet might not work for you. I wrote about the problem here.

In the comments to the aforementioned post, Scott Watermasysk points out a promising approach. Have your hosting provider set up a proxy which can be used to make requests. To that end, I did add some Web.config appSettings for enabling proxy support: ProxyHost, ProxyPort, ProxyUsername, ProxyPassword.

If specified, all web requests for subtext will use this proxy.

Invisible Captcha

Not too long ago, I released a lightweight invisible CAPTCHA validator control. As far as I can tell, it has worked pretty well at keeping out automated comment spam. But as I also warned, it did nothing to stop Trackback/Pingback spam. Hence the need for Akismet support.

Invisible CAPTCHA is probably not necessary given the Akismet support, but since Akismet is not enabled by default and Invisible CAPTCHA is, it will provide some relief until you get your Akismet API key, if you so choose.

If Invisible CAPTCHA causes problems for you for some reason, you can turn it off for the entire site (no per-blog setting) via Web.config.

Visible CAPTCHA

Some of you twisted my arm, so I am complying. I love my users so I gotta keep them happy. We now have support for the standard visible CAPTCHA you know and love.

Time Zone Fix

This topic gets its own special treatment because it is both a bug fix and a new feature. Not too long ago I mentioned some work I did for DasBlog regarding daylight savings time.

Long story short, there was no way in the .NET framework to convert from one arbitrary timezone to another. The way this manifested in Subtext is that users who had their blog hosted in another timezone always had incorrect timestamps on their blog posts.  This fix resolves that issue.

Previously, Subtext only stored a timezone offset for each timezone. For example, the offset for Pacific Standard Time (PST) is -8. However that is not accurate enough to be correct. For example, at the time of this blog post, the offset is actually -7 because of Daylight Savings Time.

Likewise, choosing -7 for a timezone is not accurate because Arizona does not observe daylight savings, but Mountain Time does. The only way to really get this accurate is to store the actual timezone and not just the offset. So that is what Subtext now does.

We now list every timezone (at least every one I could extract from the Windows XP registry). There is no natural integer identifier for a timezone, so based on a suggestion by someone at Microsoft, I used the hash code of the timezone’s Standard Name. This is the only guaranteed consistent unique identifier for a timezone. So when you upgrade to 1.9.2, we try and update your offset to the most likely timezone id. Obviously, we can’t be perfect about this, so after you upgrade, you probably want to login and configure your blog with the correct timezone if we chose unwisely.

Other Release Note Items

  • Feature [1565237] Support referencing External CSS
  • Feature [1577073] Flag All, Destroy All options
  • Fixed [1584075] Disabling trackbacks didn’t disable trackbacks properly.

Upgrade Instructions and Warnings

If you are upgrading from Subtext 1.5 or below, then please read this important note on upgrading. Subtext 1.9.2 runs on ASP.NET 2.0, so upgrading from 1.5 and below(which ran on ASP.NET 1.1) takes a few additional steps than normal.  As always, don’t forget to merge your web.config customizations into the new web.config file.

Also, for all people upgrading to 1.9.2. The Subtext 1.9.2 upgrade process performs a major database schema change, moving all comments and trackbacks into a new subtext_Feedback table. We’ve tested this over and over again working out all the kinks we could find, but we can’t guarantee that it will be 100% perfect. Thus backup your database first before upgrading!

Also, as I mentioned in the previous section, after you upgrade, please check the timezone setting in the admin section.

Lastly, in order to improve the commenting experience, we’ve added a tiny dash of Ajax using the MagicAjax control for leaving comments on a blog. However, this does not work well with the excellent ReverseDOS because ReverseDOS acts before the request is passed on the our code. If you plan on using Akismet, it is recommended that you turn off ReverseDOS support in the Web.config. In fact, the web.config file that comes with 1.9.2 disables ReverseDOS. I’ve been in contact with the ReverseDOS creator, Michael Campbell, about these issues and he has plans to work together to address them. But like all things, life comes first.

Even though Akismet does a great job with comment spam, I still think ReverseDOS is worthwhile and a nice complement to Akismet. However, we need tighter control of when ReverseDOS is triggered in the request pipeline in order to integrate it into Subtext’s existing spam filtering functionality.

Download

Ok, enough talk already, where do I download this sucker?  The download is hosted by SourceForge here: [DOWNLOAD]