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MT Upgrade, Comment Changes and new looks coming on Sunday, Sunday, Sunday!
This weekend I am going to start some well needed renovations on this site.
First of all am going to upgrade the back end to the latest version of MovableType 3. Then I am going to be enabling comment approval. The problem is the comment spam seems to be growing and every damn day there is more and more. I have MT-Blacklist installed and I try to keep the list up to date but they keep changing the URLs and adding new spellings using special HTML characters. After I do this comments posted to this site will have to be approved by me and they will show up with in 24 hours. Basically when ever I get home from work and review the comments posted that day. I know that sound like it sucks but in a way it does. Since I have a Robots.txt file on this site to keep the comments out of the search engine the comment spammers will not increase their page ranking from this site but it does not stop them. Two dozen or so daily is annoying but the really shitty days there can be hundreds. I don't really have a troll problem but the five hundred comment spams in a day gets really really tiring.
If you know anyone who has actually bought anything from a spammer it is your sworn duty as a citizen of the world to beat them with your shoe for the crime of helping the spammer bastards.
Oh yeah. I want to switch to the brand new MT 3.0 templates and incorporate this existing design on the new templates so the look and feel of this site will change a bit when I am working on the new templates and CSS.
However none of the URLs or articles will change I just need to upgrade the engine and give the old rust bucket a new paint job.
Jake at March 17, 2005 
WebDev
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Comments
Hey Jake. I was considering going the moderate-everything route on my site, but instead decided to give Conversation Killer a go. It automatically shuts comments off for all posts older than whatever time interval you set -- it defaults to 14 days, but I set it to 30.
So far it seems to be going really well -- I've gone from hundreds of attempts per day to less than ten (at least, less than ten that got through MT-Blacklist and I had to deny manually) over the past month since I installed it (and that's across three domains). The downside, of course, is that it negates any possibility of comments for posts older than whatever interval you set, but for me, that was a more acceptable downside than delaying everyone's comments until I got back to the 'puter.
YMMV, of course, I just figured I'd toss this your way as an option.
Posted by: Michael Hanscom at March 17, 2005 7:07 PM
Erk, didn't know you were stripping HTML from comments. :) Here's the URL for Conversation Killer:
http://mt-plugins.org/archives/entry/conversation_killer.php
Posted by: Michael Hanscom at March 17, 2005 7:08 PM
