In the wake of the comment spam I have had to do a little more thinking about Movable Type than has been needed in the last few months.
Elise Bauer has a great page on http://www.elise.com/mt/archives/000246concerning_spam.php on techniques to consider to combat comment spam as well as a host of other information about Learning Movable Type . Well worth a visit!
A really useful tool for users of Movable Type that I found is MT-Blacklist . Installation of MT-Blacklist is fairly straightforward, assuming you have a good FTP client like CuteFTP .
The ability to apply a pre-cooked blacklist with multiple permutations of words for pornography, online gambling etc is great. It didn't take long to delete the 1700 or so spam comments. The program seemed to intelligently offer to add URLs to the blacklist, always giving me the opportunity to select any misallocation of URLs.
A nice product. It also allows all past comments to be easily reviewed and tidied up, something that isn't easy to do from inside Movable Type where, at least as far as I have found, only the most recent 5 comments are listed.
And, of course, there is also a host of useful information about Movable Type on MovableType.org including Frequently Asked Questions" and a useful Support Forum with lots of information in its archives.
Posted by Andrew Watt at March 28, 2004 12:28 PM | TrackBack