Musings

I think it’s the window.close event attached to the cancel button.

If you place this meta on the former page, but not on the latter, then the latter will still get indexed. For most people, that’s exactly what they want.

Why? Are you a spambot?

That was a commercial advertisement, albeit, for a product vaguely germane to the subject at hand.

My experience, however, is that you are utterly wrong. My total spam count since posting this original article is 8 spam comments (not counting yours). I strongly believe all 8 spams were hand-entered.

That’s an acceptable level for me (8 spams in 22 weeks).

Captchas are inaccessible, clumsy, and largely unnecessary.

I don’t disagree, 100 hits hardly a DDoS … just wishful thinking after getting hammered by an automated attack.

Perhaps if more individuals did the same …

If you don’t have mod_rewrite installed, but do have mod_alias (which is installed by default, I believe), you can use “Redirect gone /cgi-bin/mt-comments.cgi”.

I’m not saying to block comments with “breast” in them, not by far. I’m saying that comments with “viagra”, “casino”, “phenetermine”, or any other word you deem flagable (curse words, if you wish to watch that) and then those comments go into a queue, to be manually approved, deleted, or banned and reported to something like the new Feedster system.

WordPress looks to have a very impressive feature list. Sometime, when I get a chance, I intend to download a copy and play around with it. But PHP (and this may be just my lack of experience with it) does not seem very conducive to writing modular code.

Take, for instance, my visitor-selectable comment text filters. With MT’s object-oriented Perl API, this required a short (<50 lines, even with my verbose Perl coding style) plugin and patching a mere 8 lines of MT source code. And the whole thing is completely backwards-compatible with comments entered using the “stock” MT comment system (either previously-entered comments, or current comments if you leave the comment-entry templates unchanged).

It would be easy for Ben Trott to add this to the next version MT, without breaking a single person’s existing comment form. To access the new functionality, users have merely to start using the new MT tags, provided by the plugin, in their comment forms.

I don’t think that level of modularity is easily achieved in PHP. But it’s kinda important when you’re doing way-out-of-the-mainstream stuff, like you find on this blog (MathML anyone?).

Don’t get me wrong, I really like Blosxom. In fact I think the 1 file / entry idea is wonderful - it alleviates the requirement to have a particular database installed on the server and allows easy access to all the entries in a way that facilitates using any of the innumerable existing text manipulation tools on them. However, using the filesystem metadata as information about the each entry seems limiting (there are plugins to deal with this for certian cases). So my ideal weblogging system would use a bloxsom like storage system, but with the facility to hold entry metadata within the entry file itself (probably by putting all the metadata in a tool-specific xml namespace).

To get this vaugely back on topic, I suspect that Jacques is right - part of the attraction of MoveableType is that users can modify it to suit their needs albeit not directly. +plugin friendly architecture to the list of things that mpt forgot.

Nofollow doesn’t actually detract spammers at all, so it’s irrelevant to this posting.

It doesn’t deter automated comment spammers. This was the first in a series of posts about dealing with those.

Then there are the manual comment spammers (the only kind I have left) who typically try to leave relevant-sounding comments, and might be dissuaded by rel="nofollow".

The only case I can think of where nofollow is appropriate is if you can’t be bothered to spend the time to keep your weblog clean…

I think you underestimate what “keep[ing] your weblog clean” might entail. We received 91,000 trackback spam attempts and 30,000 comment spam attempts in May 2007.

I do use rel="nofollow" for Trackback and commenter URL links (but not links within the body of your comment). My rationale is explained here. As a commenter, you can still get your commenter URL without the rel="nofollow" if you make small extra effort to PGP-sign your comment. This is worth the effort, in any case.