Site Upgrade Continues
Okay, I’ve figured out the comment system and have revamped things a bit with this whole Movable Type 3 upgrade.
I’ll continue with comment moderation, but there’s an easy way around it: register with TypeKey. It’s explained on this page, but essentially it’s a free registration system which will allow you to place comments here and any other Weblog using Movable Type 3 without moderation, meaning your comments appear immediately.
If you log into TypeKey and allow the cookie to stay, it works seamlessly. If you log out of TypeKey or if the cookie expires, then it’s a click-new page-click-and-back exercise, and probably takes less time than typing in your name and email anyway.
Without registration, comments are of course still open and I’ll usually be quick about approving them (my computer is usually on and the comments are emailed to me, causing Eudora to beep at me). Except, of course, when I’m asleep….
As a result of all this, the site should (knock on wood) be completely free of spam.
Additionally, the comments are now back to their normal appearance, and the search template has been rewritten so as not to look completely spazzy.
One note about the upgrade: MT-Blacklist apparently becomes far less functional, which is a pain in the neck. Under MT v. 2, MT-Blacklist will not only block new spam in comments and trackback which match blacklist criteria, but can also “de-spam,” which means that if a spammer got 500 spams into your blog before you could add him to the blacklist, the de-spamming ability would allow you to flush all that out of your blog with a few clicks of the mouse.
For some unexplained reason, MT-Blacklist 2 lacks the de-spamming ability, which is a major annoyance to me. It essentially makes the program half as strong as it used to be and makes it far less appealing. While MT v. 3 does allow for possible de-spamming of moderated comments and trackbacks in the control panel, it doesn’t work as easily as MT-Blacklist used to. I would have thought that an upgrade would enhance or add features, not chop them in half.
However, there might be a new plug-in that works as well: SpamLookup. I’ll let you know how it works. If it does, then maybe I’ll be freed from constant spam moderation. One can only hope.
The problem w/ logging in is you then get hit, real or imagined, w/ terrible junk mail from the service that you registered with.
No problem. Give them a junk email address. Use a throwaway account if it requires activation. Then ignore the email address and just use the service for login.
However, I would be astounded if SixApart/Typekey sold your email to spammers. It would be a huge slap to their reputation, with their customers in particular abhorring spam.
“MT-Blacklist apparently becomes far less functional”
Most people are vehemently of the opposite opinion, but I understand you are speaking mainly about one feature.
“Under MT v. 2, MT-Blacklist will not only block new spam in comments and trackback which match blacklist criteria, but can also “de-spam,” which means that if a spammer got 500 spams into your blog before you could add him to the blacklist, the de-spamming ability would allow you to flush all that out of your blog with a few clicks of the mouse.”
You can still do that although it works a bit different. Go to your comment listing in MT, check all spams and then scroll to the bottom. Click the link that says “de-spam checked items”.
“For some unexplained reason, MT-Blacklist 2 lacks the de-spamming ability”
Actually, it’s been explained far too many times in the last 10 months since MTB v2’s release: The developer (me) has been far too overloaded with other work to pay attention to the software. It’s certainly not from lack of desire to implement it; Just time.
“It essentially makes the program half as strong as it used to be and makes it far less appealing.”
Actually, in theory, since MTB v2 is much more powerful in terms of blocking and moderation, you should have fewer spams that get through and hence less to despam. Still, you’re right that one useful feature was not carried over.
“However, there might be a new plug-in that works as well: SpamLookup.”
Yes, I heartily recommend using SPamLookup either in place of or in addition to MT-Blacklist. I do and my spam load is nearly nothing.
At first I was badly disappointed at having lost the familiar de-spam feature in MT-Blacklist, but now I hardly notice it. A lot of it is because SpamLookup picked up the slack on trackback spam. For some reason MT-Blacklist catches the comment spam (where it used to catch both comment and trackback spam) while SpamLookup catches all the trackback spam.
But before I got SpamLookup, a lot of Trackback spam was getting by MT-Blacklist, and not being familiar with the new system, I had some trouble getting rid of it easily, and I feared the first big outbreak of comment spam to get by MT-Blacklist which would probably be even harder to delete, so I was a bit miffed.
But now everything is in place and spam is getting blocked more efficiently than before, though I should give full credit in an up-front posting soon.
Thanks for the comment!
By the way, I should add that my initial disappointment in the ‘no despam feature’ of MT-Blacklist 2 was also based partially on my heavy dependence on that particular feature, and partially on the comments I found in the MT-Blacklist forums, where people were discussing the lack of said feature. I was not familiar enough with the new system to know how to do the same thing in the new way, and so had that first ‘what the hell?’ shock and fear that I might not be able to fight spam as well as I had been, when I expected to have the same features strengthened.
By the way, I should add that my initial disappointment in the ‘no despam feature’ of MT-Blacklist 2 was also based partially on my heavy dependence on that particular feature
I hear ya. I missed it too before I started using Spamlookup. Now there’s nothing to despam.