As you have no doubt noticed, Geeklog development wasn't exactly going forward swiftly lately, mostly due to personal and job-related commitments of the current core team members. So we've decided to enlist more personnel:

Please welcome Oliver Spiesshofer (aka tokyoahead) and Michael Jervis (aka THEMike) as new members of the core Geeklog 1.3 development team. Mike and Oliver will replenish the current team, which consists of Tony, Blaine, Vinny, and this guy.

I'm still reluctant to give a timeframe, but the next steps towards Geeklog 1.3.12 will be to stabilize what we already have in CVS with the aim to release a beta version before we move on to release candidates. The idea of the beta being to get some feedback on some of the new features that are currently under development before we finalize them.

In the meantime, if you want to keep track of the development, you can subscribe to the geeklog-devtalk mailing list to which daily digests of the (closed) geeklog-devel mailing list are posted and join in on the discussions.

The Geeklog mailing lists are back up now, after a hiatus that lasted slightly longer than planned. Some problems with the mailing list archives still have to be worked out, but at least they're up again and can be used.

One important change in configuration is that posts from non-subscribers are silently discarded now. Sorry about that, but the amount of spam attempts we get on the mailing lists has just completely gotten out of hand.

So when you post to the mailing lists, please make sure that you're posting from the address you used when you signed up with the list. The geeklog-security mailing list for reporting security issues is, of course, exempted from this change.

There's also a new mailing list, geeklog-spam, devoted to discussions on how to fight comment spam and other forms of spam that affect Geeklog sites. I'm probably going to post most of my spam warnings there, too, and reserve the spam topic for major outbreaks and important issues.

We have reached an agreement with Hendrickson Software Components, the company that has registered the name "SpamX" as a trademark:

We are going to change the display name of the plugin to Spam-X (with the hyphen) but keep the internal name as it is (so as not to break compatibility and complicate updates). We've also taken a few measures to keep the plugin's search engine ranking low so as not to confuse prospective buyers looking for the other SpamX product.

There will be an update of Geeklog's Spam-X plugin in the near future, that will - in addition to the cosmetic name change - also include new and updated modules for more effective blocking of comment spam.