In principle, this plugin may help protect your PR. In practice? Matt Cutts’ has never commented on “No Old Spam Links” and is likely unaware of it. So, who knows?

That said, here are the recent changes to the plugin:

1. I discovered and fixed a bug that sometimes when widgets were used. I fixed the bug.
2. I discovered and fixed a bug that sometimes occurs when you have no specific people in your “nofollow” list. Unfortunately, this bug was affecting my knitting blog so I was giving out way more followed paid links than I intended! Way more.)(Yes, my knitting blog’s page rank dropped; I’ll elaborate on this in a separate post.)
3. I tested the new version with WP 2.3. It works fine.

So, if your worried about excess followed paid links, I suggest you install No Old Spam Links. If you aren’t worried about Google, or you are waiting for them to announce the plugin helps, then don’t use it.

Other plugin news:

1. Tricia is testing the new version of Kontera Control at her WP 2.2 blog. I’m testing at my test blog. She was the one who alerted me to the general issue of plugins going buggy when widgets are used.
2. I updated “Hide No Sponsored Categories” but I’m letting it sit a few days so I can do a better job detecting any bugs. The future version should work for WP 2.3, be compatible with widgets (in fact, it is widgetized) and hopefully work for all versions of WP 2.2 and above. I also coded to detect problems with early version of WP and inform the user why the options page doesn’t display. (This was, btw, the update from hell because my favorite WP category hook vanished!)

Whoo hooo!

I wanted to figure out who to thank for this Stumble and investigated. I discovered:

• At 9:02 pm my time, Big Bucks Blogger got a hit from a link at Andy Beard; this hit resolved to Finland.
• At 9:35 pm Stumblers began to arrive.
• I checked the referrer; the page was stumbled by ArttuR who describes himself as a “a 26 year old guy from Helsinki, Finland”

Thanks Andy Beard! Thanks ArttuR! I also like to give belated thanks to Charlotte who helped me iron out the bugs. And, finally, thank you every reader who tried this, my very first plugin, when it was brand new!