Well, it’s official. I’ve switched my blog from BlogEngine.Net to the truly amazing WordPress platform. Don’t get me wrong – I love the BlogEngine product. It is thoughtfully designed and elegantly written. It’s just that I got fed up dealing with comment spam.
If you’re using BlogEngine, then it’s just a matter of time before you run into this issue. Unfortunately, the one feature that makes BlogEngine so special (it’s extensibility), is the same one that made it so vulnerable. Turns out, one fairly enterprising hacker simply developed a Windows Forms application that enables anyone to post bogus comments to any BlogEngine blog. Although there are some pretty inventive extensions out there for managing the list of incoming comments, none of them seem to be able to automatically filter out the bogus ones. And therein lies the problem.
My email inbox was literally flooded with such gems as “Great post. I’m read your blog everyday!” or “I so happy find your blog! Keep posting!”. I finally had to turn off comment notifications altogether, and I just don’t have time to read through 100 comments per day to manually approve the good ones.
Enter WordPress. As you can see, I’m still migrating content and getting the configuration setup the way I want. But I have to say, the process has been relatively painless. And there are so many WordPress plugins available now, that it’s easy to find support for all kinds of widgets and tools.
I’m new to the PHP world, but really, it’s all about the plugins, right?
Stay tuned.
Welcome to the dark side!
Don’t suppose you could increase the length of the RSS content summary, or even better publish the entire article through RSS. I use Google Reader to triage and manage the posts I want to read (standing at about 100 blogs at the moment) I can’t read enough of your posts to be able to work out if I want to read them or not so more often than not they get skipped.
Hi Richard,
I increased the RSS content summary to include the entire article. Let me know if it is working for you.
-John
Hello John,
I don’t have experience with BlogEngine, but I really love WordPress. When I started developing with WP I did not have any clue about PHP, however, there are so many tutorials and snippets out there, that make it easer to get into it fast. So, great choice
Emma.
Hi John,
I also prefer WordPress, however I have noticed, that the usage of too many plugins will slow down the blog :-/ So I am trying to use only the most essential plugins. However WP is great and easy to work with.
Regards, Ricbi