b2evolution upgrades and antispam

Hopefully most of my gazillion readers have noticed the new look, but I’ve also been upgrading the blog’s backend. It now runs off b2evolution’s new(ish) Dawn release, which brings noticeably faster performance, and huge antispam improvements. With a couple of backend hacks as well, I’m down to deleting about one spam entry a day (I suspect it’s manually submitted), down from something near the hundreds before. b2evolution has always been quite good at spam removal, and made it very easy to remove huge swathes with a click or two, and ban these domains from future nefarious activity, but the speed with which spammers attack these days means that the blacklist model is always trailing behind. For anyone else running b2evolution, I suggest reading Whoo’s antispam techniques which provide some effective mechanisms for reducing spam.