Don't Back Down

For anyone trying to leave a comment today, you might have had some difficulty. Sorry, my fault. I was playing again. But I think that it's all straightened out now. You may notice some differences in the comment preview template, but I think you'll like them.

For starters, I finally updated the comment preview template so that it matches the look of the site. Any longtime readers will know that it has probably never matched the look of the site. Now it does.

I also took some effort to make the preview process easier. There is a preview at the top of the screen that you can submit, or further down you are able to submit any changes to your preview. I think it will make things work a little bit easier.

Finally, I've put the other comments on the screen, as well as the original entry, in case you need to reference any of those for any reason.

During this update, I made some heavy use of the awesome Compare plugin on this page to display things appropriately if data is there or not there. For instance, rather than seeing "0 comments" under the "Previous Comments" header, you will see nothing if there are none. Small touch, but I think it makes things look so much nicer. Anyway, let me know what you think (if the comment system doesn't work for some reason, check out the contact page)!

It's really rather interesting that all the recent flutter about comment spam has already happened (two years ago, when comment spam appeared on the scene en force). At the time, more than one (1, 2, 3) person talked about the very same issues that we're rehashing now.

MT-Approval is, in fact, simply an implementation of one of the ideas floated during those discussions - putting a field into the comment form that must be there in order for the comment to be posted.

Read "And History Repeats" »

I've decided to make a change to the hash in MT-Approval 0.1.2. That version's hash included the author's password hash from the database. In MySQL, this is simply an encrypted value, that, even if displayed, wouldn't be of much use to anyone.

But in other systems it may display differently, and well, even giving someone an encrypted password to work with isn't a good idea. So I've removed it. Starting with version 0.1.3, this value won't be used any longer.

Read "MT-Approval 0.1.3" »