WordPress News Roundup November 2003: Comment Moderation and Save as Draft Arrive as the Blogrolling Hijack Exposes Hosted-Service Risks

November 2003 had no release but plenty of development. The new permalink system spread through the codebase, comment moderation arrived, and Matt Mullenweg added a Save as Draft button based on usability ideas from Matthew Thomas. Outside the code, two problems shaped the month’s conversation: rising comment spam, and the hijacking of blogrolls run through a popular hosted service.

WordPress Core Updates

• A rebuilt calendar: Mullenweg rewrote the calendar from scratch with semantic table markup, drawing on Dunstan Orchard’s work and advice from Joe Clark. It became a template tag instead of an include.
• Permalinks everywhere: Archives, feeds and internal links switched to the new permalink functions. Mike Little and Dougal Campbell fixed the bugs that came with the change.
• Save as Draft (November 6): The default button on the post form now saved a draft and returned to the editor, so long posts were less likely to be lost and nothing went live by accident.
• Comment moderation: Campbell committed comment moderation patches from a contributor known as otaku42 on November 12. Mullenweg spent the rest of the month cleaning up the moderation and comment code.
• Feed files renamed: Little renamed the b2-era feed files to wp-rss and wp-rdf and updated get_bloginfo to match.
• Smarty experiment: Donncha Ó Caoimh committed initial support for Smarty templates on November 7. It was a revival of the April debate, and the approach was never adopted.

Other WordPress News

• Forum feeds: Alex King extended the support forums’ RSS so one feed showed the latest 20 posts across all forums.
• Statistics discussion: A forum thread on built-in statistics drew Mullenweg’s support, though the idea did not make it into core.
• Comments off on the dev blog: The team closed comments on the development blog and pointed discussion to the support forums, leaving trackbacks and pingbacks open.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

• Blogrolling hijack (November 17): Blogs that used blogrolling.com to manage their link lists had every link replaced with one that redirected to a porn site. WordPress itself was not affected. The development blog used it to argue for decentralisation and for keeping links, comments and writing on your own server, which WordPress’s built-in Link Manager allowed.
• Comment spam: Campbell responded to Mark Pilgrim’s gloomy outlook on blog comment spam. Like Sam Ruby, he argued that blogs worked differently enough from email and Usenet to make the fight winnable.

Industry Trends and Insights

Comment spam was becoming the defining problem for every blogging platform with open comments, and November’s moderation work was WordPress’s first serious response. The Blogrolling incident made a related point: centralised add-on services were convenient, but one compromise could affect every site that relied on them. Both arguments favoured a self-hosted tool with features built in.

Founder of the Month: Matthew Thomas

Interface designer Matthew Thomas gave the team usability feedback that the development blog said would certainly make its way into the software. The Save as Draft button was the first visible result. His input marked an early shift toward designing WordPress around how people actually wrote, rather than around b2’s database structure.

Looking Ahead to December 2003

Moderation cleanup was continuing, and the long-requested multiple categories were next. A reorganisation of b2’s inconsistent filenames was also being discussed, to give hack writers stable file names to build on.