More fixes

Hi Boone,

Some of the code fixes from my previous pull request were undone due to merge conflicts. (My fault mostly because my pull request wasn't based from the 1.8.x branch!)

These commits address the above:
* fc98530
* f4f0160
* b01cdf4 

There's also one additional fix for the groupblog redirect problem as reported by @mrjarbenne - commit 545f468.