It turned out that the bug that hit me the other day wasn’t the flu, which was good, but some sort of mutant cold-type thing.  It has affected my energy level and I haven’t really felt like saying anything on here.  In the meantime, though, I’ve been tinkering around behind the scenes.  I upgraded Expression Engine (as noted below) and installed the NoFollow and Acronym plugins.  I briefly considered this plugin as well, but ultimately decided against it (Argh!).

NoFollow automatically adds ‘rel=“nofollow”’ to URLs in the comments and trackbacks, which will cause Google to ignore those links for ranking purposes.  That, in turn, will eventually take the “profit” out of comment and trackback spam, since their main goal is to drive links to their sites to increase their page ranking.

The Acronym plugin compares your text against its internal list of known acronyms and highlights them on the page.  I’ve added some common ones that weren’t already included, but that would be encountered on my site.  That should reduce the user’s frustration level below the MAF when I mention NRA, GOA, TSRA, or dealing with silly CHL rules put in place by GFW’s.

I also installed MT-Blacklist on the old Movable Type installation to make despamming trackbacks easier.  I don’t use MT anymore, but The Bitch Girls site does, so I couldn’t just remove the trackback CGI module.