Scratch

Here you will find older scratches, musings and other detritus that once were located on the front pages, but have now faded.

Filed away here to collect dust and cobwwwebs in perpetuity, links may break, facts may change and data may corrupt.

On occasion I may come down here to tidy, but for the most, I prefer to leave the past where it lies.

 

Comments and Spam

Since deciding to allow comments on the site, I figured I should probably do my best to stem the flow of spam and given I am using Movable Type I figured a good place to start was here.

Since I have already up to date with the installation, and I'm not a big fan of obfuscation then the first option is a Turing Test specifically a CAPTCHA. After consideration, given the problems of accessibility I figure that for the time being I should probably avoid this.

The next stop is authentication using MT3.x's inbuilt system, TypeKey (for more information on TypeKey see the Everything TypeKey page). First stop is over at TypeKey.com to register. You'll be given a TypeKey Token. Add your website root ie http://www.yourdomain.com in the Account Preferences >> Your Weblog Preferences. Take your TypeKey Token and add it into the slot in your T Weblog >> Preferences Tab. From here, select the options you want for the Comment Configuration (at this stage I have YYYYYN). Everything is pretty straightforward and made easy due to MT and TypeKey's tight integration.

The next step is content filtering, specifically MTBlacklist. Following the instructions there were only a couple of issues I ran into. After downloading the script, make sure when you unpack the archive, you alter the location of your perl installation in:

  • MT_DIR/plugins/Blacklist/mt-bl-load.cgi
  • MT_DIR/plugins/Blacklist/mt-blacklist.cgi
  • MT_DIR/plugins/Blacklist/blacklist.pl
  • MT_DIR/mt-testbg.cgi
Runscript MT_DIR/mt-testbg.cgi. The outcome you are looking for is so the two number generated don't match. If this is the case, set the LaunchBackgroundTasks in mt.cfg to 1. If LaunchBackgroundTasks isn't listed simply add it at the end.

Rebuilt the site and at this point an error occurred:

Can't locate object method "param" via package "Template error: Loading template 'menu.tmpl' failed: HTML::Template->new() : Cannot open included file C:\www\webroot\MT\tmpl\menu.tmpl : file not found. at C:/www/webroot/MT/extlib/HTML/Template.pm line 1500 ...
After a brief search I found an answer here:
Never mind - I think I solved it. I think there is a typo in the readme because I had to create a $MTDIR/tmpl/Blacklist directory and place the template files in there, instead of in $MTDIR/Plugins/Blacklist/tmpl. Either that or I read them wrong (which is entirely possible given my utter lack of sleep )

but sadly this wasn't the answer for me. I did however solve the problem by dumping the tmpl files straight into $MTDIR/Plugins/. I didn't replace error or login templates, so might need to look at those later. I entered MTB and just pretty much left the settings for the time being. Seemed ok. Rebuilt site and it failed. Went to the instructions and noticed the line:

->>> MT-Blacklist v2.04b WILL NOT WORK ON WINDOWS SERVERS.

If you are running a Windows server, MT-Blacklist will fail in either initialization or execution. This is caused by one bug in MT-Blacklist and another in MT itself. I will try to rectify the problem as soon as I can, but I could not hold up the release due to the critical weblog deletion bug that some people may experience. Sorry to make you wait.

Bummer. Mental note to self, must read instructions and FAQs. After this I set the plugin to inactive and will worry about it later.

From here I dropped in MTKeystrokes as per the instructions and that seemed to be fine.

Next I dropped in dsbl_moderate.pl from MT-DSBL which allows any comments from open relays will be queued for moderation.

Next was Phil Ringnalda's Real Comment Throttle. Given I don't intend on getting a huge amount of comments, I can limit this quite safely and manageably. Simply followed the install instructions and didn't have any problems.

Dropped in Close Comments, but have left it commented out for the time being. At present, I want to try and leave old comments open for perpetuity as closing them may stifle discussion etc. If I find that old posts are targeted, I may re-evaluate this. As a complement of this, I installed MT-Moderate so that older posts are not automatically moderated if a set amount of time passes.

Added a Project Honey Pot piece of code, donating an MX record whilst I was at it. I had some difficulty logging in and activating locally, and needed to download alternate versions of the script due to failing the MD5 checksum as I adapted them, but eventually everything was ok. Not really

The final task was to update the templates, adding MTEntryIfComments to neaten up and conditionalise (I that a word?) the code.

And with that, that's it. At some point I need to head back and configure MTBlacklist when it is Windows friendly, but at the moment, everything is in place and seems to be ok.

Fingers crossed

29 Mar 2005 15:28 | (0) comments | site


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