Basecamp from 37 signals is by far the most useful software I’ve used in my life. It helps me organize thousands of communications, dozens of projects and countless files and lists…. and now they have gone and intergrated their amazingly cool campfire chat RIGHT into basecamp. Now.. in realtime I can communicate with designers, we can share files and make comments… it was a step forward when I could message through the system, and then a bigger stepforward when I could put files in the system and comment on them.. and now I can do it in real time. For those of you who don’t know the power of basecamp or think it’s a little confusing at first. Take your time, learn it. It will save you thousands of hours of hassle, money and time on future projects.

So.. over the past few weeks I’ve noticed a complete increase in spam that is defeating googles spam filters. The premise is simple.. take an image and embed your spam into that image.. the spam filiters can only read the file name.. the file names usually look fairly common. Here is an example:

I’ve been pondering this issue this morning.. and google is going to be HARD pressed to be able to filter this spam if the spambots use a large enough sample of servers.. about the only possible way for google to eventually stop this type of spam is to develop the ability to quickly read text on an image.. and even then just think of all the garbled insanity that is sent on a daily basis through images.. it seems to me that could really lead a large number of legit emails being filtered.

So while installing some nice spam protection, I came across some interesting conflicts between.

1. Bad Behavior (The spam filter plugin)
2. WP-Cache (The Speed the site up plugin)
3. GZIP (The zip the page and server it to you faster feature built into Wordpress).

Basically wp-cache doesn’t work with gzip and bad behavior doesn’t work with wp-cache.. how to fix this?

1st: Go out and download the newest versions of both wp-cache 2 & Bad Behavior

2nd: Turn off gzip in the options.

3rd: Edit: wp-cache-phase1.php
Add This line:
if ( extension_loaded(‘zlib’) ) ob_start(‘ob_gzhandler’);

Before this:
foreach ($meta->headers as $header) {
header($header);

4th: Edit: /wp-content/advanced-cache.php

Add:
if ( extension_loaded(‘zlib’) ) ob_start(‘ob_gzhandler’);

Before this:
foreach ($meta->headers as $header) {

Now everything shouldu play together nice. Your site should BLAZE and be protected.

Enjoy :)