Comment Love »
For the most part, I enjoy getting comments on my entries. Nice to know that people enjoy the content, or that they feel the same - and even to see that some people have differing opinions. Though to be fair, I mostly enjoy the latter when they can at least present their arguments intelligently. Which leads us to the great disruptor of all things intelligent - comment spam.
I receive a fair amount of comment spam, but it's really not a lot, all things considered. I've got one or two that just seem to love my posts - especially the older ones - for their machinations. Luckily, with Movable Type, there are options. Jay has put together MT-Blacklist, which does a fine job of helping out. Unfortunately, it doesn't work with version 3.0D (yet). Plus it does require at least a bit of monitoring, and let's face it - I'm lazy.
I was playing with the new callback functionality of v3.0D and trying to come up with a way to use it, and I decided I could create a tiny little plugin that simply checks the comment as it's posted. The check is trivial - it just looks to see if the entry is older than 7 days. If so, the comment gets moderated. End of plugin.
Not fancy by any means. And it may not even work. I hope it doesn't choke off commenting. Not that there was a bunch - but people do like to see their comments once they've posted them. If they think they are just lost, they might not come back. Have to see how that works out. In the meantime, I caught my first comment spam troll today. He posted on an older entry and sure enough, I didn't have to worry about it showing up online or in my feeds or anywhere. Kinda nice.
I'm sure they'll figure out they can comment on new posts and spread their filth, but the good thing about that is that those posts don't generally have the rank of the older ones - haven't had time to build up a good batch of links pointing to them and the like. So maybe it will help. I sure hope so.
If it works out, and if some other small changes are made to the v3.0D callback interface, I'll release this to the public.
Comments (3)
If you want you can make a small change.
Instead of "hidding" a comment before moderated show them but a the same time put them on "reported" list. If they are spam, you`ll notice and delete them soon, if they are not, you don`t touch them :)
Sorry for poor english :(
Posted by Ilija | June 8, 2004 3:19 PM
Exactly what I wanted to do with callbacks, too, but I wasn't smart enough to go ahead with it for personal use in the current situation, where you can moderate, and even send yourself a "moderated" email, but you can't tell MT not to send you an email based on what it thought it would do before the plugin moderated it. I figured since that made it unusable for general use, no sense doing it in a way only I could use. D'oh.
I think I'm going to go with an even more complicated ruleset, though, something like more than 10 days old and newest unmoderated comment is more than two days old: if a real comment restarts the conversation among comment-feed subscribers (or even just between me and the one person commenting) on an old entry, I don't want to have to moderate every comment until it dies down again.
Posted by Phil Ringnalda | June 8, 2004 3:51 PM
Chad, that is a much better idea than closing old comments. Bravo!
Posted by Jay Allen | June 18, 2004 10:48 AM