I am annoyed. I thought I was mostly free of the ravages of spam after activating Akismet and Bad Behaviour but it seems that there is one thing that is still affected by them and that is the Popularity Contest Plugin. Unfortunately even though Akisment is good enough to grab the spam after it’s been posted, the popularity plugin still logs the WordPress call and counts the comment. As a result I see posts rising to the top when they have no reason to do so and Populatiry Contest reports 50+ comments while there none (they’re all caught).
Argh! So annoying…
Now I have to find a way to reset the count for these particular posts and hopefully get a better version of Bad Behaviour that will be able to stop more [tag]spam[/tag] bots before they have a chance to post.
UDATE: Fortunately the author of the plugin anticipated this and provided a handy button to recount the comments (I initially did not push it because it said “reset”). Popularity is back to normal now. Eeeeexcellent! 🙂