WordPress 1.5.1 is now officially released. If you are a WordPress user, you really ought to upgrade. This version fixes many of the bugs and shortcomings that were introduced with the botched release of WP 1.5. It takes seconds to upgrade from 1.5 (just overwrite everything in your blog directory except the wp-content directory). Shout out to all WordPress developers and contributors… Great job guys…

With this, I am glad to announce the official release of Spam Karma 2’s first public beta.

In fact, it is pretty much final-grade quality and could probably do without the “beta” label… I’m just a big fan of the greek alphabet.

Many of the lingering issues with the last alpha have been fixed, a few missing features have been added (it now supports curl for those whose host doesn’t allow url_fopen). Check out the dedicated page for details.

Now go and spread the word! there are still far too many clunky SK1.x in the wild out there…

Also, feel free to contribute to the newly-opened official Wiki page for SK2: your help is much appreciated!

Update: Ahem, it would appear I spoke a bit fast. There is a rather nasty bug in this update that can bork your RSS feed. I do recommend updating nonetheless (and follow instructions in the link above to fix the bug).

Regarding that bug, let me add a little word. Honestly, I considered skipping this rant (and I waited quite a bit to ensure it really was what I was thinking about), but I am just to aggravated to keep my mouth shut. Consider this my final word on that branch of topic, though:

Obviously, and as usual, this blatant bug could probably have been avoided with a bit of real-world deployment strategy and testing before release, but I won’t even bother restating my opinion on the matter… What bears mentioning, though, is the fact that I did report it personally, more than 2 weeks before the release date.

The bug is at least somewhat directly connected to this change. I noticed it, shortly after the code was changed in SVN, emailed Matt about it, didn’t really get much of a response (apart from an invitation to basically go and fix it for him) and considered it none of my business any more (I had way enough things to take care of at the time).

It didn’t even cross my mind, though, that this code, after being clearly reported to Matt as broken, could make it seamlessly and without apparent revision into what was supposed to be a bug-fixing release.

Quite frankly, I feel rather insulted, if anything…