UPDATE: Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that the $_SERVER['HTTP_COOKIE'] variable is no longer being sent to the Akismet servers with each SPAM-check. It seems Matt is still ignoring the fact that anyone ever complained about this, as there’s no mention anywhere that it’s gone. Very disappointing… Haven’t we learned anything from the Sony rootkit crisis? I guess the answer is obviously ‘no’…

Ok, not really, it’s just inconvenient for me when they release new versions… :)

I knew this was coming, and I actually spent several hours on Tuesday at the holy green logo’ed shrine to the coffee bean (read: Starbucks) trying to re-work my code so that it was actually an “Extension” plugin (ie: you have to have the base Akismet plugin installed, then install my version, which seemlessly extends the functionality).

Unfortunately, there’s one problem with this strategy… PHP doesn’t support function overloading. In other words, there’s no way (that I have found, at least, please correct me if I’m wrong) for their plugin to create the function akismet_conf() and then for my plugin (which is loaded afterwards) to create / delete / change it later. Now, this isn’t that big of a deal at first (as I learned), because I can have my plugin remove all the actions the default Akismet plugin created and then re-create the actions using my newly-named functions.

Well that works, until I need to change the way the plugin deletes things. See, Akismet just calls its delete() function, which is referenced in virtually everything else it does. So if I want to change the way things are deleted, I’d have to create my own version of delete(), and then create my own versions of every other function that calls delete() and replace the call with one to my newly created function. So in the end, I’ve only saved 1 function by “extending” Akismet, rather than replacing it.

So it’s back to the drawing board for me. I’ve got to run in to work tomorrow and get a few things ready for next week, but hopefully I’ll be able to get back to work Saturday and Sunday and get a new version of the Enhanced Akismet plugin released.

In the meantime, I’m still looking for feedback on the email notifications that seemed to be troublesome in the last version. Anyone tested this for me?