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I’m working on a hack which simply closes comments if the spammer is coming from a known IP address that’s on a blackhole list. If your IP is on a blackhole list (who knows, it might be!) visit my blog and see it in action. Hopefully I’ll be able to release it soon. Also be sure to check out my self-contained SpamAssassin plugin if you have access to a SpamAssassin server.

Your web host will have to make the .htaccess file writable by the web server process. This isn’t something you can do yourself. I recommend you have the uid set to your uid, and the gid set to the gid that the Web server runs under, with permissions of 0660.

You do need to update the .htaccess file every time you make a new post/page or change a slug. If you can’t do this, and your web host won’t cooperate, you can add /index.php/ into the permalink structure and WP will handle it that way instead. For instance: /wordpress/index.php/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

If you do this, everything will go through /index.php without needing rewrite rules, but your permalinks will be a lot longer.

I’m trying to be somewhat conservative with spam blocking because I don’t want to deny commenting to a legitimate user, and I’m not quite ready to make everyone register to post comments, or make them type numbers off an image.

After the massive comment spams of the other night I installed a modified version of John Sinteur‘s blackhole solution which I’ve hacked to check multiple blackhole lists and if someone tries to comment, they get redirected to the “why am I listed in this blackhole” page for whichever list they were found on. So far no further comment spam or false positives, but I’m keeping an eye on it.

764 comment spams in one night last night. That’s a record at my site, where I usually get one or two a week. This means war.

Contact the author. I looked at the stattraq source, and I think the changes to get this to work with 1.5 are going to be non-trivial. Probably a good evening/weekend exercise if “Learning more PHP” is on your to-do list.

In terms of other advice, normal Web site analysis tools like webalizer, analog, etc., should work fine with WordPress. They won’t be tightly integrated, of course, but they’ll get you the same basic information.

You can leave that out. Better yet don’t bother with htaccess.dist at all; use the .htaccess file provided in Options » Permalinks. If you don’t see one there, then WP is automatically managing your .htaccess file and you don’t need to do anything. If you do see it there, copy and paste it into your .htaccess file, replacing any old rules you may have had.

I personally place all my files in my own folder under /wp-content/themes. Keeps the /wp-content folder a little less cluttered (and with all the junk it’s accumulating at the rate I keep uploading stuff…)