You might remember that a while back I installed MT-Blacklist on the server to try and reduce that evil comment spam (it worked a treat by the way!). Well, to kepp my blacklist up-to-date with the latest things that look like comment spam I used MT-Blacklist Updater, which is a nifty PHP script that downloads a list of the last 100 changed to the blacklist and updates my local copy accordingly.
I was looking through my logs to see what spam had recently been killed and I noticed an annoying 'feature'
I noticed that if there is an addition for a site in the changes RSS and then a deletion for that same site in the same changes file then it adds the site to the blacklist and then removes it every time the updater script is run.
(might as well reuse my email to explain it! :)) I decided that I should fix my copy of the script so that it didn't do that, because it was annoying! In looking through the code, trying to follow how it worked so I could patch it, I stumbled across a bigger bug.
I realised that if a site were deleted and then re-added to the blacklist in the same changes file, the site would never get re-added locally (well it would briefly), as all deletions are carried out after additions in the script.
So, now I had a bigger thing to fix (well fixing the later more serious bug would fix the former problem too). Well I made the fix and decided to email the author of the script to let him know about the problem. I also gave him a copy of my fix, so if he wanted to he could include it in his next release of the script, if he so wished.
Well he accepted my fix, updated the release version on his site and posted nice words on his blog. From now on I think I'll share fixes I've done to other people's code instead of keeping them to myself. I've never really dared to do it before because I was scared that I would be treading on people's toes or whatever.
That's one of my problems I suppose, I'm waaay too shy. Well maybe not shy exactly, but petrified of making a dick of myself (maybe the two are closely linked!) not that I manage to never make a dick of myself...