I think I’m getting on top of the comment and trackback spam that this site was generating. If you’re running a Movable Type blog and are also getting inundated with spam, then these steps may very well help you as well. There’s nothing new here, by the way, I just read some guides on how to combat comment spam and put some of the suggestions into place. And I’m here to tell you from first-hand experience that (so far, touch wood, not that I’m in the slightest bit superstitious) they seem to be working.
First off I installed the (almost ubiquitous) MT-Blacklist plugin from Jay Allen. I’d had this installed for a long time, when I was still running a MT2.xx installation. By the way, upgrading to MT3.1 is a breeze and definately worthwhile. There are lots of new features worth having.
Once I’d upgraded to 3.1, and also re-installed MT-Blacklist, I turned on comment moderation. This is a new feature in MT3, and allows me to approve a comment before it appears on the site. I was still getting emails asking me to despam comments, but at least the comments were “pending” and not “live”.
I installed the mt-moderate plugin which allows moderation of trackback pings. I started getting emails asking me to approve spam trackbacks now. After a few weeks of putting up with this and eventually getting fed up with it, I read some guides and started getting a bit more aggressive.
I renamed the scripts that handle comments and trackbacks, which, to be honest, is the first thing I should have done. Any automated program looking for /cgi-bin/mt-comments.cgi immediately hits a 404. This cut down greatly on the number of emails I was getting.
I then went a bit over the top and disabled trackbacks for the entire blog. This may have been a knee-jerk reaction.
Getting into the spirit of installing plugins and customising my MT installation, I had another look at the Movable Type plugins directory and found conversation killer, a plugin that runs once a day and closes comments on posts that are more than 10 days old (I can change this value in the plugin configuration). It can also close trackbacks on posts more than x days old as well.
Since I put these measures into place I haven’t received a single email asking me to moderate a spam comment. All of the spam comments and trackbacks were to old posts anyway, so the two biggest upgrades I did was to install conversation killer and to rename the comment/trackback scripts. I’ve just had a look at the MT-Blacklist activity log, and it hasn’t been troubled by a single duff comment all week. Which is how it should be.
So…. I’ve decided to risk taking off the comment moderation. I still get an email when someone posts a comment, but the comment appears on the site immediately. Comments are closed on posts more than 10 days old, and I think I’ll turn trackbacks back on. And then wonder why no-one’s tracking back to me.

I’ve been playing around with the set up of my blog a lot over the last week or so. No idea why, I just got into the mood to see what was out there I could bolt on to it. I’ve added the Blogroll, I’ve added a hack to save and rebuild templates in one go, and I’ve added a plugin which should close all comments on posts more than 28 days old. This last one is a further attempt to reduce the ridiculous amounts of comment spam I’m getting.
Unfortunately, instead of getting a dozen or so emails a day asking me to approve spam comments (or not), I’m now getting an email every 15 minutes telling me there’s an error somewhere in the code. And for the life of me, I can’t find where the error is. So, if anyone else out there uses a Movable Type 3 blog (and there are one or two of you out there, I know) and have a cron daemon set up on your server, and you’re also getting this error message:
Subroutine approve_comment redefined at lib/MT/App/CMS.pm line 1996.
can you please tell me how to fix it? I know a bit about Perl, but not enough to be able to decipher 5000 lines of code in a couple of evenings, so any help would be appreciated. Ta.

This blog is going to be a year old in a few weeks time, so I’m thinking of giving it an overhaul. In order to play around with it on my PC, rather than on the main server, I downloaded and installed EasyPHP1.8, which gives me a local web server to play around on. Install Perl as well, backup my site from my ISP, download and install it locally, and I can tweak settings to my hearts content without inconveniencing anyone who happens to look at the site in the meantime. If anyone does, of course.
I’ve found a plugin for Movable Type which lets me put a quick and simple blogroll on the side, which I’m going to do. Other changes will be losing the links thing on the right, as I hardly ever updated it anyway, and removing the facility for trackback pings, because they only ever generated spam. Every time I look at my stats all I can see is online casinos and porn sites trying to link to me.
Redesigning the site is certainly keeping me busy, I’m using this colour scheme generator to work out how to get it to look cohesive and not like an accident in a paint shop, remember folks, less is more.
Also stumbled across a bloggercode generator on my travels. Apparently my blogger code is:
B4 d+ t+ k– s- u– f- i– o++ x- e- l c+
and if you want to know what that all means, copy and paste it into here and it’ll tell you.

If all went well, this entry should be posted while I’m actually in the car driving home….

I’ve successfully upgraded the blog from Movable Type 2.661 to Movable Type 3.14….. first time, without a hitch. Now, what are the new features in version 3 again? Time to RTFM methinks…

The blog got severely comment spammed yesterday. I checked my email to find about 200 comments had been added to the blog in the space of four hours. I’ve got Jay Allen’s Movable Type Blacklist plugin installed, but even if the blacklist file is kept up-to-date some devious sods always manage to get through. Spent at least an hour tidying it all up and getting rid of the rubbish. Checked the blog activity log this morning to find that it has since blocked another hundred or so attempts to add comment spam. Hopefully I’m on top of that one, but trying to block it all is always going to be a firefighting exercise. Grrr.

About ten years ago, my mother decided to take up golf. Our family had never really been in the “golfing set”, so when she started my parents began to mix with a new crowd. At the time of her joining, my brother said something along the lines of “But golf clubs are elitist, aren’t they?”, to which I replied, in a rare moment of wit, “Yeah, but it depends who you know.”
I’m coming to the conclusion that blogs are the same. I’ve been wandering around other people’s blogs a bit over the last few days, and in their blogrolling (or whatever) section I’m seeing the same names coming up over and over again. Do these people really all read each other’s blogs, or is it some sort of mutual link-exchange which I’ve not been a party to yet? Either way, I won’t be linking to all and sundry just because everyone else is. I’m only going to link to those blogs which I read regularly, and there aren’t that many of them yet. I’ve got a few up my sleeve, and if I find myself going back to look for updates every few days, then I’ll guess they’ve got my attention, and I’ll note it here. But until then, my reading habits stay my own.
Next question…… would I read my own blog??

Those of you who have a blog will already know this, and those of you that don’t, won’t. This is aimed at those that don’t, in order that after reading it, they do.
Every time I make a post on this blog, it pings a service at weblogs.com, which updates it’s main page and puts me at the top of the list of “most recently updated blogs”, which is fantastic. For all of about three seconds. Because when someone else updates their blog and pings weblogs.com, they go to the top of the list. I’ve spent the last half an hour browsing through the list on weblogs.com, and found a couple of blogs I’m going to keep an eye on.
And in that half an hour, I’ve slipped from number 1 to number 1943.

Yes, I do actually know how to spell tweak. I’m just spelling it that way to annoy you. I posted here about how I was starting to get comment spam, so I turned off comments. But if you look at the bottom of this post, you’ll see an invitation to leave a little note of your own. What happened to make me change my mind, you ask?
Two things.
One) a blog with comments disabled is like a man sitting in a room with no doors talking to himself. Enable the comments and you put a door in the room. All I have to do now is wait for someone to come in
Two) I discovered Jay Allen’s MT-Blacklist plugin, so I plugged it in. Just got to see if it works now.

I’ve added a list of RSS Feeds to the blog. Just click on the RSS Feeds link on the left (of the main page, in case you’re reading this in an archive entry) and choose your category. Click on the down arrow or the “more” button and you’ll see the latest headlines/entries etc.
I do believe I’m starting to get the hang of this interweb thingy..
However I still need to work out what the “[]” is after each headline, and also how to get it to open each external site page in a new window. I know how to do it, I just need to work my way through the php code to see which line I need to change.