It's called Clickcha and what it does is present a small random clickable image with instructions on where to click such as "click the smallest number" or "click the biggest square".

The beauty of this is only a human would know where to click. So all those spammers using tools that automatically leave spam comments on blogs are out of luck.

Interestingly, it seems that ALL comment spam has stopped. In fact, even those comments I used to get that were what I would call borderline spam have stopped too. I used to deal with those by looking at the URL, and if it was anything to do with herbal remedies or gambling etc, I'd mark it as spam and let Akismet deal with it for other blog owners.

So just stopping to think about that one for a moment, it seems to be true that there's a lot more automated blog comment spam must be going on than you'd think.

In fact Akismet hasn't had to deal with one item of spam since I installed Clickcha.

That's pretty cool and is definitely a plugin worth getting.

Update: I've had a couple of problems getting Clickcha to work properly on another site and I had to edit the comments.php in order for it to work. I've also had a subscriber (hi Larry) tell me that he clicked the smallest number and it deleted his comment from this blog. I've also just found a load of comment spam in Akismet, so Clickcha doesn't quite seem to be doing what it's supposed to at the moment and I've now deactivated it. The concept is good though, so lets keep our eye on that one.

-Frank Haywood

As WordPress updates the software (currently 2.8.1 as I write this), then inevitably, some older plugins fail. This can be really annoying, and it's probably happened to you like it has to me.

What Pawan has announced he will do is take on development of older plugins.

Yee-haa.

This is pure Marketing GENIUS on the level of X-Factor and Pop Idol.

Think about this for a moment.

People will tell him what their favourite plugins are, and that they are no longer being developed. As the licences for many plugins are open source of one kind or another, he can safely and legally take on the development of those older (but popular) plugins, and in doing so they become HIS.

Think a bit more, and you'll realise that just like the X-Factor (people vote by phone), other people are doing the market research for him, and finding popular plugins he can easily make his own. And he's building a network of people who have committed to use the plugins they've asked to be revived – they're pre-sold.

Better still, there's no new development work to be done. Most of the code is already written, and it's likely that in most cases it's just a minor fix to revitalise the plugin again.

In doing so, Pawan becomes the owner of the working version of the plugin.

Because most of these failed plugins are likely to be small amendments in order to get them to work again, it's almost a case of products and advertising for free.

And of course, Pawan gets to pick and choose the ones he wants to do and we ALL reap the benefits.

But especially Pawan.

Now THAT is a true win-win, which is just the kind of thing I love.

You can go "vote" for your failed plugin below.

http://www.maxblogpress.com/blog/219/maxblogpress-revived/

-Frank Haywood

(Of course the nice thing is, my online income hasn't changed while I've been ill.)

The bit I've done where I actually feel productive (although not made any more money by doing it) is to make a few changes to the blog mainly by pottering around the web.

#1 – I've added links to some online experts in the sidebar.

#2 – I've added yet another plugin called Brians Threaded Comments. This allows visitors to make a comment about other people's comments and have it neatly bundled in a thread. Of course, people can make a comment about your comment and so on.

It's an old plugin (things get old rapidly online don't they?) but seems to still work okay, and looks correct in FF, IE and Opera. If you spot any oddities, please let me know.

#3 – I've added yet another plugin called Show Top Commentators although I think that should be commenters^* not commentators^**. It's probably a close call…

Anyway, the plugin shows the top commenters over a period of time which I've set to 10 commenters and 3 months at the moment, but I might change that. There are a few different versions of this knocking around, but the best one I could find is by Carsten Albrecht.

It works as you'd expect it to without you having to mess with PHP code, and without it overriding any of your default CSS settings. Very nice. And of course it encourages people to post to get a (rolling) permalink in the home page sidebar right back to their site. Stop posting comments and after a while, you drop off the list. I really like that idea.

#4 – I also found another plugin that I've wanted for a while now but couldn't find because I guess I used the wrong search terms. It's called Configure SMTP by Scott Reilly and allows you to use SMTP to send mail from your WordPress blog rather than the default php mail function which is getting more and more difficult to get through spam filters nowadays.

As I've said before, even though I have both DomainKeys and SPF enabled on my domain, some email still doesn't get through. That's why I use AuthSMTP.com on mail critical applications such as my support desk. And that's where I'll now also be using AuthSMTP.com – on my blog.

So the little carrier pigeon email message you get when you leave a comment (and Subscribe to Comments – another great plugin) will hopefully get through.

Can you tell I like plugins that make my blog "sticky"? You should too, it will help your internet business.

Finally, the icing on the cake for me (and I really hope this plugin works) is Extra Sentence Space again from Scott Reilly. What a wonderful find. I've always disliked that HTML by default did away with the second space after a full stop (period if you're from the US). I got fed up of manually inserting non-breaking spaces just to get that extra space back. This plugin puts the second space back again and makes your writing online as legible as your writing offline. Fantastic!

Or is that just me?

Enjoy.

-Frank Haywood

^* One who makes or writes comments.
^** An expert who observes and comments on something OR a writer who reports and analyses events of the day.