On February 25, 2006 Blogware will be adding anti-spam features and performing optimization on the system. Here's an overview of the changes you'll see.

Spam Protection Settings
A section will added to Settings & Security -> Publishing Defaults page entitled ‘Spam Protection Settings’.

This section will add the following settings:

• No Follow for Comments and Trackbacks - sets any URLs in comments and trackbacks to use the NOFOLLOW attribute.
• Comment Moderation - allows blog owners to preview and approve comments
• Trackback Moderation - allows blog owners to preview and approve trackbacks

The following existing settings will be moved to this section:

• Anonymous Comments
• Comment Verification

Comment Moderation
If Comment Moderation is enabled, comments will not be immediately posted to a blog until the blog owner approves the comment for posting. Blog readers who post a comment on a blog with moderation enabled will see an informational message when the comment is accepted by the system.

Blog owners will be notified by email of comments in the moderation queue. The email notification is sent to the email address configured for the blog owner in the Blog Profile. This message is not customizable. Notifications will be sent every half hour so the blog owner is not overwhelmed with emails for every comment received. The message will indicate the number of comments in moderation.

The Recent Comments area of the Dashboard View will be updated. A Spam Flag column has been added to flag recent comments identified by Blogware as potential spam. Also, a Status flag has been added. A comment can either have the status Waiting for Approval or Posted.

Blog owners can Delete, Delete and Block, and Approve selected comments. Single and multiple comments can be selected for any action.

Spam is automatically detected by Blogware and flagged using a scoring system. The following items are checked in each comment posted to the system.

1. Is Poster using an Open Proxy?
2. Is the Comment being made to a post over a month old?
3. Are there numerous URLs in the body of the comment?
4. Have there been multiple comments to same blog over past hour?
5. Have there been numerous comments to many different blogs referring back to the same URL over the last hour?
6. Are there any typical spam words in the Content of the comment?

All comments that fail the automatic checks will be flagged as Spam. If Comment Moderation is disabled then the comment will still be posted to the blog.

Trackback Moderation
If Trackback Moderation is enabled, blog owners will be notified by email of trackbacks in the moderation queue. The email notification is sent to the email address configured for the blog owner in the Blog Profile. This message is not customizable. Notifications will be sent every half hour so the blog owner is not overwhelmed with emails for every trackback received. The message will indicate the number of trackbacks in moderation.

Blog owners can Delete, Delete and Block, and Approve selected trackbacks. Single and multiple trackbacks can be selected for action.

Trackback Spam that is detected by the Blogware system will automatically be prevented from being posted on a blog.

Currently, the following trackback checks are performed:

1. Is the trackback URL on the users' blacklist or the global blacklist?
2. Is the trackback source IP, or destination IP on the user or global blacklist? Source is defined as "where did the trackback come from" and destination as "who are they advertising".
3. Were duplicate trackbacks received within the same time frame?
4. Were multiple trackbacks received from the same IP across Blogware during the same time frame?

With this release, the following checks will be added:

1. The content of the trackback excerpt will be checked against the blacklisted URLs list
2. The content of the trackback will be tested against the keyword list to identify potential spam

All trackbacks automatically identified as spam by the system will not be posted.

Posting Comments Using the New Comment Form
The Comment Form will have new fields added to provide blog owners more information about commenters. Anonymous commenters will be able to enter contact information including a Name, URL and Email:

Authenticated commenters will be able to enter a Contact URL.

When blog owners review comments in the Publisher’s Control Panel, the contact information will be shown in the by line of the comment. The URL will be formatted as a hyperlink to the commenter’s name

Blocking Referrers
Blog owners will be able to ‘Select and Block Unwanted Visitors from their Blog.’ Referrers who are on the Blogware System Blacklist will now be prevented from visiting a Blogware site. Users who are blocked from Blogware or a specific Blog will now see an ‘Access Denied’ error message when attempting to access a blocked area.

When a blog owner select ‘Delete and Block’ comments, trackbacks, or referrers, the IP or Hostname of the blocked item will be added to the user’s firewall. The User will be able to see the list of Blocked Hostnames and IP addresses in their firewall.

Blogware also maintains global blacklists and whitelist that are applied to all blogs. In addition, Blogware will now maintain a spam keyword list. This list contains typical ‘spam’ words and will be updated as the spam-world evolves. All trackbacks and comments will be checked against these keywords as part of the automatic spam trackback and comment checks.

Optimization
The database Schema will be modified to ensure that frequently updated tables are optimized

Downloadable Statistics File
In this release, blog owners will be able to download a statistics file. The statistics file is a raw Apache log file which will be available for each day in a 7 day rotating cycle. This log file can be used in any log analysis program supporting standard Apache log file formats.

With the 1.1 release of the Performancing for Firefox (PFF) extension, Blogzerk (and all Blogware-powered) blogs are now supported. This means you can install the extension in Firefox and have a nice, quick way to post to your blog. PFF supports all the basic HTML tags and also recognizes your existing categories. I'm posting this using PFF.

Here's some other new features (see this post for a full list):

New features

• More Technorati Support
• Delicious integration
• Trackback support (including auto-discovery)
• Draft support (and default to draft option)
• Ping support
• Statusbar Icon Enhancments (drag and drop)
• More Settings Options

Blogware has informed us that they are experiencing network connectivity issues that are causing connections from some networks to the Blogware servers to be slower than normal. Whether you see the problem depends on your network routing. Some networks may see degraded performance and some may not. From our office, we are not seeing any connectivity problems.

This may affect your access to your blog and Publisher's Control Panel as well as visitors to your blog. We should have another status update shortly and will update this post when more information is available.

UPDATED 2:05 PM ET: This issue has been resolved. Tucows is continuing to monitor the situation to ensure the fix has taken effect as intended.

Due to a problem with one of the bandwidth controllers in the Tucows datacenter, Blogzerk (Blogware) blogs are currently experiencing some delays in loading. This issue is being worked on and we will have an update shortly.

UPDATED 3:40 PM ET: In addition to this problem, one of the servers in the farm went south and caused some intermittent problems with 403 errors and possibly posting errors about half an hour ago. This server has been removed and the only remaining issue should be the original slowness noted above.

Hot on the heels of our forum post on adding a "Post to del.icio.us!" link to your blog, I've added a new forum post on adding a "Digg This!" link to your blog's article and category templates. Check it out. If you like it, be sure to Digg This!

After the multilingual release on 1/10/2005, some bugs were introduced which have now been fixed. Also, some other issues were noted. We have summarized these below:

Incorrect language set with Advanced Settings-> Language Preference
The problem in which the Publisher Control Panel language was being set incorrectly by the Advanced Settings-> Language Preference for an existing user has been corrected. This bug only occurred when an existing user logged in for the first time.

Time and Date Issues
The time and date will now appear below articles. Also, the date stamp in the Category view is now correct. The date will now appear as Thursday Jan 12 rather than 01/10/2006.

Customizations in Templates
Customized Templates did not get updated by the multilingual release. The nature of customization means that a customized template can't be updated in a feature release. For blog owners who wish to use the multilingual features, you should download the latest article and category templates and add in your modifications to the new template.

Article Style line-height
The article template was updated with a new line-height setting which is now 'normal' instead of 150% as it was previously. The nature of this modification means that if a blog uses the standard article template, the line height will now be less than before. This will hold true even if explicitly overridden in your custom CSS. This bug is still open and should be fixed shortly.

With the release of multilingual support, some bugs were also fixed yesterday:

• The Rich Text Editor has been modified to have a larger default width.
• Distinct Hosts in Site Stats now accurate. As we noted previously, this was being overstated due to a miscalculation. This has been fixed but will only affect stats from 01/10/2006 forward.
• XML Requests and HTML Requests in Site Stats are more accurate. Secure XML feeds and XML feeds with querystrings are now counted. HTML requests now log the type of file (instead of using the extension) to accurately identify all HTML requests. As a result, you will likely see your XML requests increase (due to now accounting .xml?secure, for example) and HTML requests going down, (due to now not misrepresenting such things as images with no extension as HTML)
• Rich Text Editor line height fixed. Line spacing now adjusts with text size.
• The Timezone in General Settings will now set the default Timezone in the Post Article page.

Yesterday, Blogware (the software that powers Blogzerk) finished updating all the Blogware servers with multilingual support. As noted previously:

Blog owners will be able to specify the language for their blog as well as for the Publisher's Control Panel. Initially, the following languages and locales will be available:

• English - United States
• English - Canada
• English - United Kingdom
• Spanish - Castilian

Additional languages and locales will be added throughout 2006.

The spell checker will be also be updated. A language field will now appear in the spell checker dialog box allowing blog posters to select the language that should be used when spelling is checked. The default dictionary is based on the user's locale. Dictionaries are available in English (U.S.), English (U.K), English (Canadian), Spanish, Danish, German, French, Italian, Dutch, Norwegian and Portuguese.

Additional Information
Now that this release is live, we have the following additional details.

Readers and Users
Authenticated users will see the Blog environment in the language they selected in the My Profile screen (as described above). Unauthenticated users will see the Blog environment in the language selected by the blog owner.

New Users who sign up for a Reader account will be able to set their own Language Preference in the New Reader Sign Up page. When Readers login to Blogware, the blog environment will be displayed in their selected language.

Browser Settings
Blogware character data will be encoded in UTF-8. Publishers must use a Web browser that supports UTF-8. Publisher who use an unsupported format will encounter the following error "The format that you are currently using is not supported. Please ensure your browser coding is set to UTF-8. For additional help, please contact your Retailer."

Components and Templates
Blog owners can create customized components and templates that will be presented in their language of choice. Blogware has provided a glossary for words that are translated (download a Spanish translation example with all glossary words). These translations can be accessed using the new 'gettext' function. Candidates for translation appear with the following formatting:

<%=gettext("candidate word")%>

The 'gettext' function can only be used to translate words contained in the glossary file. When a Language Preference is set to a language other than English (U.S.), Blogware will retrieve the translated candidate word from the glossary file.

Timezone Bug Fix
This release will also include a fix that ensures that the Time zone set in the Publisher's Control Panel, General Settings page will drive the default time zone set in the Article page.

I've just added an article to the Blogzerk Forums on adding a custom login form component to your blog. This takes that code for the standard login component (which isn't customizable in Blogware) and extends it to add a link to log in to the User's Control Panel or request a forgotten password.

Blogware (the backend that powers Blogzerk) has scheduled a maintenance window on 01/14/2006 to conduct a database maintenance on the Blogware Environment. The blogs and the management interfaces will be offline during the maintenance.

Date: 01/14/2006
Start Time: 11:00 PM ET
Duration: 5 Hours

Impact: The Publishers' Control and blogs will not be accessible. Each interface will be made live as soon as it is available to minimize impact on end users.

More Information: The databases powering Blogware are being optimized. While it is not expected that this will take the entire maintenance window, it is scheduled for five hours to be safe.