Squawks of the Parrot

MT supports closing comments; old comments will still be displayed, but new comments will be rejected. I manually close each comment thread after a week or so, or when the spammers start hitting it.

Yeah, I saw that. I probably ought to do so, since it's not like there's much commenting going on in the older entries. I may end up going that way, or seeing about figuring a way to turn on moderation for older comments, or something like that. Dunno. Comment spam's not too bad yet, but, then, I'm not quite as common a destination as you are. :)

How about a script that automatically closes comments after a week. Maybe have a check to make sure new comments aren't still being posted first.

Yeah, I suppose I could write a script to close an entry's comments a week after the last comment was posted. Likely the sensible thing to do. I hold out the (likely foolish) hope that, on occasion, old entries will still gather interesting and useful comments.

Plus I'm incredibly lazy at times. :)

Just because the universe is out to get me, just today I got a comment on one of my first entries. :P.

With MovableType 3, it would be nice to have public comments open for X days, followed by registered members only. Best of both worlds.

Working code to auto-close comments in MT?

That's just what I've been doing for a few months:

http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/001263.html

Enjoy,

Jeremy

Since I'm writing my own blogging code myself in HTML::Mason, I was thinking of including a number of anti-spam mechanisms like turing tests for non-registered posting, creating randomly named fields in the comment form combined with requiring a delay of a few seconds between between hitting the "comments" link and the submit button.

I dunno - half of me wants to do this because I'll be submitting the component to the Mason site, and the other half wondering with blogger, MT, LiveJournal, et al., who's really going to even use it anyway? =)

If you're going to write your own blogging software, keep two things in mind:

1. People are scum
2. When pain/annoyance outweighs the benefits, people probably won't bother

Unfortunately, taken together, you'll find it easier to discourage legitimate replies than it is to discourage spammers. There have been some weblogs that've pinged me with trackbacks in the past that I've not replied to because they wanted registrations--it just wasn't worth the minor hassle to bother.

Spammers, on the other hand, have a larger interest in doing their spamming, so are willing to go to greater lengths. The result, then, is either you raise the barrier so high that nobody bothers, or you make very specific barriers that stop (or at least slow down) the spammers without bothering the regular participants enough to stop them.

Automatically shutting down older entries to comments is one way, as are things like blacklists and bayesian filtering.

Oh, and if you're going to do it, pay attention to the infrastructure stuff Mark Pilgrim talks about and sometimes designs. Providing the automatically generated infrastructure stuff (rss/atom/whatever feeds) seems worthwhile, and is painless once it's initally set up.

Why dont BLOGS just supply with a medium for spammers to go and spam?

eliminates the work needed to remove it and filter it...

Spammers could probably benefit more from having a "Spam Blog" that conatins all the ingredients to achieve what they need... LINKS into their sites...

So I say, its just an idea... "WWW.SPAM-BLOG.COM" the blog for links for spammers...

who knows, it might be the newest craze and spammers might even pay ya..!!!

Just a thought...
Brian