Don't Back Down

A little over a month ago, I implemented a new plugin to handle comment moderation. I still haven't released this publicly, as I don't particularly care for the way I did it, and it's not configurable at all at this point. That may change in the near future, as it seems that the plugin is working pretty well.

Over the last five weeks, I've received a grand total of 26 comments that could be considered spam. Not a large number, by any means. In fact, not much at all until today, when I received 20 of them (and it's not even noon). Out of those 26 comments, only 1 made it through my little plugin.

The only one that did was on The Angler Fish, easily my most popular entry in terms of comments (and traffic). The reason it made it through is because I had set a range of less than 2 days since the most recent comment in order for a comment to be automatically approved. The one comment that slipped through was posted just about 2 days after the last one on that particular entry.

I had done this with the intention of allowing conversations to regenerate themselves on older posts. So if someone posted a new comment to an old post, the conversation could pick back up and I wouldn't have to moderate it - so long as it was within that two-day window. I still like the idea, but I think it's a bit too much. So I've updated the plugin to automatically approve posts in two conditions: If the entry itself is less than seven days old, or if the entry is older than seven days, if the most recently approved comment is less than one day old. We'll see how it works.

Drop me a line if you're interested in testing this plugin - I don't claim any great success rate, but so far it's worked pretty well. The only problem with it is that the screen returned after submitting the comment is always the same - the 'approval required' screen isn't displayed, because the version of the comment in memory hasn't changed. I've been led to believe that this may change in a future version of Movable Type, and if it does, I can - and will - make a much prettier plugin.