On the ProDevTips blog today, Henrik has posted about an alternative to the popular Akismet plugin for the PHP blogging tool, WordPress, to help prevent even more comment spam from making it past - WP_Hashcash.

WP Hashcash is an antispam plugin that eradicates comment spam on Wordpress blogs. It works because your visitors must use obfuscated javascript to submit a proof-of-work that indicates they opened your website in a web browser, not a robot.

He includes the code that he needed to change to get the widget part of the plugin up and working correctly. You can find out more about this plugin from its page on Elliot Back's blog.

In response to an earlier blog post from another member of the PHP community, Greg Beaver has posted a few thoughts he's had on sharing what's really going on with the PEAR project.

Newly elected PEAR Group member Josh Eichorn posted a blog entry, "How would you improve PEAR" recently. I was impressed with the response, it seems many people outside of PEAR are monitoring it and have thought about how to make it better. However, I was also not so impressed with the poor job we've done letting people know about the newest improvements to PEAR. In my comments, I listed as many as I could think of, but Josh pointed out that I would do well to post these comments in a more public setting, so here goes.

He notes that most of the items mentioned in the comments of Joshua's post are already implemented, save for one - CVS over Subversion. He also shares his renewed obligation of working on the social issues surrounding the project and the efforts that the project is doing to help current developers (stable works the same) and development (get involved! get active!).