Antispam Bee 2.9.2 published
It took a while, but therefore the new version of Antispam Bee comes with quite a list of changes and enhancements. We will discuss the most important ones in this post.
Bugfixes
Of course, Antispam Bee is not free of bugs. But with every version we are approaching this goal. A list of all bug fixes can be found on GitHub, so here are only the most important ones.
Orphaned comment metadata
GitHub Issue 293
The most annoying bug to start with; the plugin has an option to delete old spam comments after some days:
So, if you actually want the spam to be deleted but every once in a while you also want to have a look at it to check on “false positives” (comments who are falsely marked as spam), this is your option. Unfortunately we missed to delete the meta data of those comments. In the current version, we fixed this bug. Since this can lead to quite some orphaned meta data in the database, we recommend using WP Sweap to cleanup. Besides a lot of other waste data this plugin also takes care of orphaned comment meta data and deletes those.
Wrong spam statistics
GitHub Issue 290
Once you had more than 1,000 spam comments a bug could lead to the spam statistics not showing the correct numbers
Removal of the Fake-IP check
GitHub Issue 304
This function checked the IP address of the commentator and looked up, if this was actually the IP address of a server. Unfortunately this check became less and less reliable, so we removed it from the plugin.
In some server setups, we couldn’t determine the IP address correctly
GitHub Issue 286
Of course Antispam Bee uses the IP address also in other checks. Therefore we have an internal function, which tries to determine the correct address as $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] does not always contain the correct IP. In some server configurations Antispam Bee still didn’t determine the address correctly. We fixed that bug in the current version.
Enhancements
With every version, we try to improve Antispam Bee. The list of all enhancements can bee seen on GitHub. The most notable enhancements are:
New spam patterns.
Antispam Bee uses a series of patterns to detect spam. You need to activate the option “Use regular expressions” for this functionality.
Of course spam evolves and therefore patterns become obsolete and we detect new patterns. We added two new patterns in 2.9.2.
PHP 7.4 compatibility
GitHub Issue 315
Antispam Bee was mostly compatible with PHP 7.4. Nonetheless, when you activated the plugin, the plugin threw a notice. We fixed this issue in this version.
Filter and sort
Since version 2.9.2 you can now filter spam comments on the reason, why Antispam Bee marked those comments as spam. And you can now even sort spam comments on those reasons.
