Vinnie, do you know how to clean all your spam at one time, instead of having to do it one at a time through the notification emails?

Nope, I don't go beyond my email, for fear of screwing up everyone else's comments

You can close comments on old posts by putting this in one of your templates:

<MTCloseComments old="60">

Replace the "60" with the number of posts you want to keep open. This will be executed whenever a page which uses that template gets rebuilt.

Vinnie: you can use the Blacklist without the final step, which is the one that has the possibility of fouling things up if used incorrectly.

Whan you get hit with multiple spams, go to http://blog.mu.nu/cgi/mt-blacklist.cgi after you are signed in to your MuNu admin page (where you write posts).

Click on the DeSpam link at the top of the page, then use the radio buttons and drop-down list to tell Blacklist that you want to see the X most recent trackbacks on your blog. (You can also list comments the same way instead, depending on which you got hit with.)

Normally, this is used to find comments containing a particular spam word or regexp, but selecting the 3rd button will give you a listing of all comments, with info about the commenter, Ip address, URL etc., along with a checkbox to select if you want to easily delete specific trackbacks/comments.

You'll want to search the last 2000 or so entries when you do this, because the Blacklist must search through ALL MuNu trackbacks/comments to find yours. Once you have the list, you just remove the checkboxes from the real trackbacks/comments and tell Blacklist to remove the rest by clicking the delete button at the bottom of the page.

If you get way too many real comments when you ask it to search the last 2000, (a pain to unclick all the checkboxes) just do another search asking it to check fewer recent comments. Leave a check in the box which asks if you want to rebuild the entries after deleting the junk.

Once Blacklist is done deleting and rebuilding, you'll get a page listing the domains Blacklist wants to add to the blocked list. This is the point where you should just close out the page and go on your way, unless you're certain you know what you're doing in the Blacklist. (Hint, the majority of the folks adding to the Blacklist are doing so incorrectly.)

If done this way, you can just delete the spam notification emails. This is much fater than following the links in each email to despam, if you've received a bunch at once.

If you have questions about this procedure, just post back!

Paul

Thanks Paul. You answered my question, too!

What's the Munuviania about?

David: Where in the template? And is that the number of posts or the number of days?

Madfish:

You can put it pretty much anywhere in the body of the main index template - it doesn't generate any output so location isn't really important, but for efficiency reasons, don't put it inside a container tag.

Old = # of days

(Umm.. Pixy... it's sticking in my mind that at some point recently you posted that this comment closing plugin wasn't actually working, but that you'd done it manually in mySQL for everything over a certain age - 60 days? Can you remind me? I can't find the reference.)

This is but one of many reasons why I love mu.nu

Thanks so much for the help!!

Paul - yes, that's right. I had to hack the Movable Type source code. Closing comments doesn't seem to do anything at all.

I'll bump up the definition of "old" by a few thousand posts, and we'll see if that helps.

I've updated it. We had approximately 60 days of posts open; I've reduced it to about 30.

Let's see if that helps.

Oh yeah - I did do a SQL routine to automatically close old posts.

Didn't work.

Hence the hacked-up MT code.

Thanks for the reminder Pixy. I'm glad to know my memory wasn't totally borked.

Paul

yes, that's right. I had to hack the Movable Type source code. Closing comments doesn't seem to do anything at all.

That's really strange - it worked for me!

If I remember correctly, it didn't work right when I put it in the main template, so I put it in the individual post template.

I thought it was just closing trackbacks that didn't work...