Until I get MT_Blacklist to work again, I'm continuing to close comments on entries older than 21 days. I haven't found a good way to do this automatically, so I'm using this command in phpMyAdmin to close the comments once a month or so.
UPDATE mt_entry SET entry_allow_comments=2 WHERE entry_allow_comments=1 AND TO_DAYS(NOW()) - TO_DAYS(entry_created_on) >= 21;
Since I keep losing track of the syntax, I'm putting it here where I can find it again.
So you can automate that? What's phpMyAdmin? I'm pretty clueless at php...
Blacklist's installed and running on my site, but for the last couple of weeks there's so much spam with new URLs that I'm cleansing several times a day. Yuck.
Having just completed Mike's "Server Side Boot Camp" class (RIT 739) I know what PHPMyAdmin is, but I didn't equate it (SQL) with Movable Type. Is there a benefit to using an SQL back-end to MT? If you were going to start from scratch, would you still do it that way? (I'm about to build a new blog in MT and was wondering if I should branch out from ye olde Perl.)
Using mySQL as the backend for MT makes a lot more sense. Unfortunately, mySQL isn't available on the RIT web server (Grace), so most students can't do it that way.
If you have access to mySQL on your server, I recommend going that route.
Jill, phpMyAdmin is software you can install on your server that gives you a graphical interface to managing a mySQL database.
BTW, Robert, MT is still written in Perl regardless of which database you use.
BerkeleyDB is the default if you don't specify otherwise--that's what's on Grace.
I use and like closecomments.php; doesn't run autonatically (I assume a CHRON job would work) but it's devilishly easy to use.
I'd be interested if someone has an ultimate answer about the way to fight comment spam. Can anyone suggest to be an article or blog entry that they thought got to the heart of the matter? Myself and two friends are working on some weblog software (still quite beta) and I'd like to work in whatever good ideas are out there. I've read several posts now, on BurningBird and Mark Pilgram's site, that refered to a security error in MT that seems to have unnecessarily opened the door to comment spam. What was that error? Google gives me too much info when I search for "MT comment spam error".