Uhoh… in one of my early posts I think I wrote something like “I hacked heavily Gengo” but I obviously meant that I modified the Gengo Plugin to fulfill my multilanguage needs.

Yes, but someone else did actually the same to the Gengo site itself… and “heavily” too!
A couple of weeks ago I visited Stoatware (jamietalbot.com) to look for a plugin update but the homepage was errored even if the forums kept working.

Now, the whole site is completely craked / hacked! Homepage, plugin page and forums.
Apparently the visit results in a blank page… but if you view the page source you can easily notice a huge amount of spam links, cloaked by an invisible (display:none) html tag.

In his other multilanguage site wp-multilingual.net it’s all calm (too much?) and there is apparently no reaction, no news.

I (we?) hope the site can regain its “freedom” soon.

About new wordpress plugins I’m adding, I gave up trying to validate my Api Key for Akismet, one week of patience is enough I suppose. I see no obstacles on my hosting side that can prevent a call to the Akismet server. I can understand that a service has to be validated to avoid massive unknown request from nowhere but… I would like to speed up things, I give up.

So I added Spam Karma 2 (SK2) that seems very efficient:
well it’s too early to judge because the blog system is new, so still unknown to spam attacks… we’ll see. Anyway I had very massive ones in other sites I ran and it’s a real bother.

Ack, WordPress is great but its default-installed anti-spam Plugin, Akismet, is giving me troubles instead of helping me. The required API Key -received along with the wordpress.com account registration- is rejected by the Akismet configuration panel. It keeps saying:
«The key you entered is invalid. Please double-check it.»

The wordpress.com support kindly replied as follows:

The error message is because Akismet cannot access the Akismet server. The problem is one of three things [four actually]:
- either Akismet is being denied access to the internet if you are hosted locally behind a firewall, or
- the server you are on lacks the ‘fopen’ function which Akismet needs.
- your host might need to know that the default-installed SELinux security precautions (on Fedora4) causes this problem. With SELinux disabled, it works.
- ask your host if they mod_chroot enabled. If they do, that is what has caused Akismet not to work. They will be able to advise on what they can do for you.
Do talk to your host and see if there is anyway they can help.

I contacted my hosting support but they excluded all cases (i was sure about the first two but I ignored the rest).

Some say -at the wordpress.org support forums- that Akismet need a 24-48 patience period, let’s wait another day… then i’ll choose between Spam Karma 2 or Bad Behavior, other comment spam fighting plugins.

What about your Akismet activation? All smooth?