Well, things seem to be well in hand, but whatever changes were made in WordPress 3.92 caused most of the major plugins to fail. They were all updating, and I grabbed Akismet after it had been fixed, apparently.

I learned my lesson and will turn on whatever logging is available to catch comments that shouldn’t be marked as spam, but are. This is not an easy thing to do on this place because comment threads tend to wander away from the original topic and some posts have been active for months.

The current hot items among the spammers are the aforementioned designer handbags, insurance, and ED pills.

The most annoying posts are those that are pages long and are the comment array that is supposed to be used by the spambot. Hundreds of lines of innocuous comments that are used to mask the fact that the comment is being made by a bot, and not a person, by selecting a different line for every post that gets spammed. Occasionally there is a typo in the list that dumps the whole thing.

Well, it looks like I can say Goodbye Dolly as the storm annoys Mexico. It was the first storm in the Gulf for a long time and Bay of Campeche storms can get very nasty, very quickly, so I had to watch it.

Position: 21.9N 97.7W [10PM CDT 0300 UTC].
Movement: West [270°] near 9 mph [15 kph].
Maximum sustained winds: 45 mph [ 75 kph].
Wind Gusts: 60 mph [ 65 kph].
Tropical Storm Wind Radius: 140 miles [220 km].
Minimum central pressure: 1002mb ↓.

Currently about 25 miles [ 40 km] South-Southeast of Tampico, Mexico.

A Tropical Storm Warning is in effect for the Gulf Coast of Mexico from Cabo Rojo to Boca de Catan.

Note: The center of Dolly reformed to the South of the center location at 10AM CDT.

Update: At 10PM CDT the storm is coming ashore just South of Tampico, Mexico.

Here’s the link for NOAA’s latest satellite images.

[For the latest information click on the storm symbol, or go to the CATEGORIES drop-down box below the CALENDAR and select “Hurricanes” for all of the posts related to storms on this site.]