Several misguided souls (or "dipshits", as we say in the business) keep posting comment spam on this site. I know this is a common thing now, but it's a pain in the butt. And Movable Type's interface makes it incredibly tedious to delete comments. (A list of the last several hundred posted comments, with checkboxes next to them, and a button to delete all checked comments, would be dandy.) Sigh.
Ahh... let me be the first to introduce you to the Blacklist plugin for MovableType (versions less than 3.0). The author's site has more info and documentation to get you started. Very easy to setup, but the docs were missing a crucial step. Upon installing the plugin, you are told to navigate to the configuration page which had been chmod'ed 755. The never tell you to un-chmod the file to prevent people from disabling the plugin. (Maybe the docs do say this, I couldn't find it.) It is very effective at removing existing spam - automatically flagging suspect comments.
ReplyDeleteHow's Emma?!
Ultimately it's one of the reasons I decided to abandon Movable Type and move to WordPress. You can configure your blog so that any comment posts require you to approve them, which removes the incentive for idiots to comment-spam your blog.
ReplyDeleteSo far, I've been lucky enough to avoid them.
Wowie. I finally got around to installing this, and it worked like a dream. Wheee!
ReplyDeleteRoberto, mt-blacklist.cgi is protected by the same login mechanism as mt.cgi (the thing that you log into to add new articles and configure the site), so why would you need to un-chmod it? Am I missing something?
ReplyDeleteUnless there's actually a security reason, it's preferable to leave it chmod 755, 'cause that's where you go to add new entries to the blacklist.