Hey there, as you've mentioned the new version now has a captcha option, which should be enough to get rid of spam. If not I may try to filter entries through akismet too, like WordPress does.
You mentioned that you'd like a search feature as well, I've added that in version 1.4 and it's not perfect but it does have the option to search by URL, title or description (or all).
In future updates I'd like to accomplish some of these features:
- Play around with WordPress permalinks and use these instead of $_GET variables to display pages, categories & links.
- Collect rank of reciprocal page (if supplied) and add the ability to accept/refuse links based on this value.
- Ability to select number of links per page (with paged navigation i.e. Pages: 1, 2, 3).
- Add optional tracking of hits in/out.
In answer to your question about requiring reciprocal links I think that most people who run link directories are trying to get links back to their site and this helps accomplish that. I'd also like to modify the script to also get the pagerank of the reciprocal link page and accept or refuse the link based on that, though I may not be able to due to Googles pagerank system.
Of course for those people who just want to keep a directory of links and aren't worried about links back and SEO, etc, the option to accept all links is there, and the captcha system now gets rid of most spam. Ideally the system would accept all links that aren't spam but put them in a queue for the admin to look at before approving the link, but this will have to wait for a future update.
Anyway, just wanted to reply and say thanks for your comments.
Cheers - Sean