There's been a few mutterings on the dev list about converting the blacklist into a plugin because, as it stands at the moment, it's a bit like a dictatorship that has no regard for who or what it tells to sod off and thats something that the members have had problems with for a long time. So I've decided to have a look at it and see just how feasible it is to convert it into a plugin for 2.0. This isn't something that's going to happen immediately as the blacklist is deeply intwined in the core, and just to seperate it will take a fair amount of work, to say nothing of all the new hooks that will be required (yay, dAniels gonna love me ).

Apart from abstracting (geeky term for "put in another file") the blacklist into it's own plugin I'm also thinking of extending it's abilities. One of the main things I'm going to be aiming at is to make it differenciate between a member/editor/admin making a post or comment and a spamming wanker .... urm... visitor making a comment. I'm also looking at building in a whitelist and possibly reviving one of my old antispam hacks which checks for "flooding" by a url.

As well as all that I'm also looking into ways that blog admins can network individual installs so that they just need to add a url to a single install, either manually or by doing an evo update and have all of their installs update automatically. If this was done successfully enough then we could, at the very least, reduce the load on the central blacklist, or even get rid of it altogether!!

None of this is going to happen at any great rate though, in fact it might not happen at all, it's just something I'm looking into, but if you have any suggestions/features that you'd like adding then feel free to leave a comment on this post (or, if you don't want to register, send me a PM via the forums).

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