MovableType advice needed
Posted: February 13th, 2006 | 8 Comments »Right, I’m getting sick of this.
As you can see, I’ve fixed this blog, only now it’s getting hammered with over 200 spams per day (‘cos MT-Blacklist appears to be irreperably b0rked). I’ve installed MT3.2 elsewhere and I’m getting ready to move to it properly, only – how do I clear out all the old crap? There’s over a thousand spam messages in my export file, and while 3.2 appears to have all kinds of whizzy barbed-wire anti-spamness for incoming attacks, it seems to have no way of applying said whizziness to the buggers that have already nested. I’ve hunted through the UI, I’ve Googled around, I’ve even posted to the 6A support forums, all to no avail. Anyone? Please? Help?
(And, just to fend off the obvious, let’s assume I want to stick with MT for the moment until I’m certain there’s no chance of success, okay?)
I hope there’s a better solution, but failing that…
MT 3.2 does let you list all Comments on your weblog on one page (well, split up into pages). So if you don’t have many genuine comments among the spam, it’ll be simple to list, say, 125 comments at a time, click the unobtrusive ‘check all’ checkbox and mark them as Junk.
BTW, the option to list more Comments on that page is even more unobtrusive and is found in the ‘Show display options’ link at the bottom left of the page.
If you just upgrade from 2.x to 3.2 there is some mysterious upgrade process that *might* look for junk comments among the existing comments. But then again it might not. And it doesn’t sound like this would help you either way. Good luck!
Can’t Blacklist run against your current database? I’d consider upgrading the dirty database and running Blacklist against it. Certainly the old crappy version of Blacklist I used to run on MT 2.661 would let me run it against current comments. Might make for a slow export, but the tools in the new versions are a lot better, afaik. There and again, I moved to WordPress, which is not really a solution.
I manually – one screen at a time – deleted my comments.
Also when I upgraded from 2.x to 3.2 it broke all my permalinks. They were formerly post numbers and changed to all text. I wrote a tool that created mappings to the old links. Let me know if it happens to you and I’ll send you the tool.
I’m in reverence of you for being able to use Movable Type. Personally, I jumped ship and went to Typepad.
Well, in spite of your last bracketed statement, I’ll stick my neck out anyway and say that if MT won’t run your current anti-SPAM against your old comments, WP will. Feel free to ignore that, I’m just so impressed with WP that I felt I had to point it out
ooo, goody, does MT have the same problem as many WP installations in that the user is not notified when his comment is held for moderation and it looks like nothing happened? definately would reccomend researching a way around that, no matter what platform you use
Is that(MT) the reason why unbrokenglass.com is down?
How come it doesn’t load, YOZ?
And what about kol rina. Why isn’t that loading. Is it also working on movable type; or did Miki feed her site too much mazza on Pesach and now it’s constipated, but looking forward to shavuot to clear its bowels with cheese-cake?