Author: Molly Cliborne
I found and implemented b2evolution in early 2004, before I knew any better. It was my first blog, and I used it on a site with daily posts and many readers.
Advantages of b2evolution: It works.. it's flexible.. it allows you to manage multiple blogs. It has foreign language support. It does basically the same things that other blog software does.
Disadvantages: If you install b2evolution, you will soon receive hits from thousands of porno, online gambling, and prescription drug sites. This basically ruined my web statistics. This happens because b2evolution built in a "statistics" feature into the public portion of the site. I.E. you have the option of displaying links to the sites from which you get the most referrals. Sounds like a neat feature, but it seems the spammers caught on somehow, and you end up on "heavy rotation" as they compete to be in your top 10. Even if you have removed b2evo's "statistics" page from the public portion of your site.
And then there's the comment spam. Some mornings I would wake up to 100+ comments from aforementioned entrepreneurs.
Now, b2evolution comes with a feature called "antispam" designed to ban these sites from commenting your blog or showing up in your b2evolution hitlog. But it does nothing to clean up your server stats, i.e. your webalizer or awstats will still show hundreds to thousands of porn, viagra, and texas holdem sites. b2evo keeps a centralized list of the offending sites on their site, and you can automatically update from the backend of the blog. But there are sooooo many. The list is miles long. There were times when I updated my antispam list, then came back an hour later and updated again to find 25 new additions to the list.
b2evolution creates a table in your database called the "hitlog." It basically duplicates your server's logs within the database. One day, my server shut off my service, saying that my website had exceeded my storage limits. That's impossible, I thought. Until I went into the database and realized that the b2hitlog table was 60MB in size.
Another disadvantage-- when I installed b2evolution, there was a very robust support community. But it seems like many users have made the same choice I did to jump ship, and the user base is not nearly as large as it used to be.
In summary, b2evolution is a spam magnet.
