Over on Triiibes, there is a group for wordpress users; the population seems to trend pretty heavily to blogging types, so it’s pretty lively and there’s lots of direct experience with issues.

Someone recently asked about dealing with comment spam in a way that goes beyond the super-awesome akismet plugin for WordPress, which has been 100% effective (no Type I  or Type II errors, at all, across any of my blogs) at identifying comment spam. That’s performance.

In any event, I remembered I’d read an article that talked about modifying .htaccess to block specific IPs.

Jay Tillery, a designer and WP guru, reminded me that WP 2.7 has a nice big field for entering IP addresses to be blocked. It’s on the Settings:Discussion page in your admin screens.

But, unless you’re working your blog all day (in which case you should probably be writing rather than configuring), who wants to cut-and-paste IP addresses from Akismet? I know that I don’t; it’s just an extra step.

So, here’s the latest software bounty project:

Reward: $100 for first working version. Submissions to rick@thoughtstorm.com. I will test the plugin myself and then have a colleague confirm the solution is acceptable. All submissions will be recognized here.

Also, the best version of the plugin (which may not be the first) will be sponsored by us to develop and market a “pro” version of the plugin that includes advanced features such as integration with other external blacklists/whitelists, blacklist sharing features, configurable IP block address blacklist rules, or others.