I've been seeing an increasing amount of comment spam lately. BlogEngine.NET isn't a large target, but the spammers are starting to find it and I'm getting sick of manually culling the comments.

Before investing more time into my current install, I figured it was worth looking at an upgrade. This isn't something I'll do lightly. In the past, the BlogEngine.NET project hasn't been very responsive to my bug reports & fixes. It has taken about 6 weeks from a bug report (with an attached fix) to being committed to the repository. 6 weeks is a little beyond my attention span.

There's been a fair bit of updating since the 1.3.1.30 release that I'm currently running and the idea of switching to 1.5.1.1 is a little scary. My past experiences with Mono and BE haven't been smooth, and hunting down bugs in both Mono & BE again just to get a minor upgrade, is far too much effort. But since my previous logged issues had been fixed, I felt it was time to give BE another upgrade shot.

With my notes still lying around from last time, I decided to grab the latest BE source (r27024) and see how it went. To my surprise it not just compiled (previous versions would not even compile)... but it also ran.

I headed off to download Justin Etheredge's Akismet Extension for BlogEngine.NET. I wasn't too familiar with Akismet, but it requires you to have a WordPress API key. I headed off to WordPress to create an account and get an API key (just a blog, just an account with an API key).

I wasn't too familar with BlogEngine.NET Extensions, so after setting the Akismet Extension options, I clicked the "View" link for that extension... "Source for [/opt/blog/BlogEngine/BlogEngine.NET/App_Code\Extensions\AkismetExtension.cs] not found" Doh! Clash of the Slash!

It appears that BlogEngine.NET still doesn't have enough of a *nix following to have ironed all the bugs out. But I've reported what I've found, and just put my latest patch for BlogEngine on Mono up. You'll find it on the BlogEngine.NET Mono Patches page.

From your BlogEngine directory:

host:/opt/blog/blogengine-27024.dev# patch -i /tmp/blogengine-27024.patch -p1
patching file 'BlogEngine.NET/admin/Extension Manager/Editor.ascx.cs'
patching file DotNetSlave.BusinessLogic/API/MetaWeblog/XMLRPCRequest.cs
host:/opt/blog/blogengine-27024.dev#

P.S. I haven't actually switched my live blog to the new 1.5.1.1 code... yet. I want to test it in a development environment a little more first.