Backup my hacked akismet. I modified it to write a logfile, so I’ll put the old version back in after the upgrade. One of these days I’ll hack up a newer version.

Back up the database for the target site:
mysqldump –add-drop-table -h localhost -u username -p feorlen_org > /my/backup/location/28jun09backup.feorlen_org.sql

Back up everything on the site, just because. (Instead of only the WordPress directory.)

Disable plug-ins from the admin interface.

Copy the install package to the top level directory. Copy to a safe location wp-config.php. Delete the following:

the contents of my wordpress directory
wordpress/include
wordpress/admin

(I have no cache or widgets directories this time.)

Restore the saved wp-config.php.

Temporarily rename my custom named directory to “wordpress” and untar the archive over it. Then put it back. (Because I’m lazy.)

Go to the admin page and follow the directions. Replace new akismet with my old hacked one. Delete that crazy Dolly thing. Re-enable plugins.

Test.

For those 656 spam comments from one address, there are 655 unique authors with 655 email addresses and 656 websites. Clearly somebody had a mistake there. And they aren’t all with the same setup, as the most common user agent has only 521 hits and the rest are from 9 others, all some Mozilla variant for Windows. Whoever this is, they are spamming all my posts more-or-less the same. Spam comments are from only about the past month, with a big spike around the Labor Day holiday weekend. Then, it appears, someone went on vacation until the 17th.

But in the process of checking out a bunch of different WP plugins, I have noticed an annoying habit of hiding the configuration pages all over the map. Sometimes there’s a link in the Plugin Management page. Or maybe it’s a tab on the Settings page. Some of the widgets are configured on the Widgets page, itself buried under the Design tab. Ok, I know they were written by different people, and for different versions of WordPress. Which radically changes the administration UI with each new major release. But boy is it a pain to go and hunt down where the settings went this time just to see if this thing I downloaded actually does something interesting.