October 30, 2004

Closing Older Comments

I’ve just used Mark Cunningham’s MT-Close2 to close comments on all entries older than 28 days. I very much regret having to do this, but the spam has simply become too much for me to handle otherwise. Trackbacks are still open (I haven’t had a real problem with spammed pings—yet, sigh) and people are always welcome to mail me.

As far as I can see the script works well, with no side-effects.

Other than the erasure of discourse.

Posted by mgk at October 30, 2004 11:18 PM
Comments

Uncanny timing. I just posted a comment to the October 25, 2004 entry about black lists.
http://www.otal.umd.edu/~mgk/blog/archives/000673.html
The discourse may not suffer too much; the intercourse will.

It may push pressure on to the remaining open windows as the spider scripts get rewritten to avoid the archives and concentrate on the 30 day window -- less ground to cover and seed with more spam.

Posted by: Francois Lachance at October 30, 2004 11:48 PM | Link to Comment

One of the nice things about the version of MT-blacklist that works with MT3.1 is that it automatically moderates all comments on older entries (as well as all comments with a large # of URLs). Makes it much easier to deal with spam, since it never actually makes it onto the blog.

Before I upgraded, I regularly ran a sql command to close comments on older entries--now I'm about to open those back up, because of the protection afforded by the new blacklist software.

You may want to talk with UMD about a site license for MT; RIT just negotiated one for a very reasonable price, which will mean that students, faculty, and staff have unlimited use of the software.

Posted by: Liz at October 31, 2004 10:12 AM | Link to Comment

Yeah, I know that what I've got here is just a stop-gap. I'll be looking for an upgrade, via either Wordherders or the University, as soon as time permits. The way 3.1 interacts with both comments and Blacklist sounds like it's lightyears ahead.

Posted by: MGK at October 31, 2004 11:30 AM | Link to Comment

Very interesting point of view fdgfdg.

Posted by: angeln at November 10, 2004 04:43 PM | Link to Comment

QED.

Posted by: MGK at November 10, 2004 05:00 PM | Link to Comment
Due to the proliferation of comment spam, I've had to close comments on this entry. If you would like to leave comment, please send email to me at mgk =at= umd =dot= edu. Thank you.