John’s Jottings

I’ve finally jumped in and installed Jay Allen’s MT-Blacklist. I waited to install this until “1.5 was released”:http://www.jayallen.org/journey/2003/10/mtblacklist_version_15_released and everything appears to be working well. I’ve already had one spammer stopped according to my activity log. Because I had previously implemented his macro solution I did have to back out some changes I had made to my templates, but doing so was very easy, particularly since Jay had documented the procedure of adding those changes so well. Working backward I made quick work of undoing the changes.

I also implemented a couple of hacks to solve a particularly vexing problem most MT users face. It sometimes take too long to process a new comment and impatient users will double or triple-click the submit button resulting in duplicate comments. The same problem happens with trackbacks, although for different reasons. The result, however, is the same - unnecessary duplicates.

I found the solution to both problems on the “MT Extensions”:http://www.nonplus.net/software/mt/ website. And the best thing was they both have been modified to work with MT-Blacklist.

“Avoiding Duplicate Comments 3.01″:http://www.nonplus.net/software/mt/AvoidingDuplicateComments.htm
“Avoid Duplicate Trackback Pings 1.0″:http://www.nonplus.net/software/mt/AvoidDuplicateTrackbackPings.htm

A future version of MT-Blacklist will support Distributed (!P2P!) XML-RPC-based blacklist sharing and trust roles, which I believe will really slam the door shut on spammers and will make management of a weblog less of a chore that it can currently be.