No MT Comment Notifications »
It's recently come to my attention that comment notifications are broken in recent versions of Movable Type. I never noticed this because it never affected me (more on why in a minute). After looking into this, it appears that the change was introduced in version 3.14159, when Six Apart made a change to Comments.pm to address the efficiency of comment posting - namely to keep certain processes from executing unless the comment was visible (approved). This change also affects version 3.15 of the software.
As such, this means that if your comment was visible, you would receive a notification. This is often the case with TypeKey or other authentication mechanisms, as the default setting is to automatically approve comments from registered commenters. That means the comment is approved, so the processing happens and the notification is sent.
It also means that if you are using a plugin, such as MT-Moderate, that affects the saved version of the comment, but does not affect the object being processed, the comment would appear to be approved during the post process, but in reality it would be moderated by MT through the actions of the plugin. Best of both worlds? Perhaps, but you would still get some rebuilds and such happening in this case. And it would work, so long as you don't have "enable unregistered comment notification" checked, as that goes back into the other bucket.
The quick fix? Turn off comment moderation. As a bonus measure, you could then use MT-Moderate to do that work for you. Setting the constants in moderate.pm will moderate everything to your specifications (use -1 to moderate everything), equivalent to the way Movable Type's setting would work - but because of the previously described processing, you'll get comment notifications. As a nice side effect, you also get improved moderation options.
For a slightly longer fix, you could also install MT-Notifier. As it has its own notification process, you won't have a problem - just make sure you subscribe to the places you want to see. You could also install MT-Blacklist and use its notifications for the same purpose.
To really correct the problem isn't particularly hard, but does involve moving around some code in Comments.pm. If you cannot use one of these plugins for one reason or another, and need this to happen, let me know. This is (a part of) what I do, and I would be happy to help you out for a very reasonable fee.
