You may or may not have noticed, but the number of spam comments on this here fount of wonder, insight and knowledge (as we internally like to refer to TTM), has increased sharply over the last few days. I blame a post of mine on one of the TMP forums for this. It seems those forums are a favourite hunting ground for spammers to find blog links in.

Whatever the reason, I’ve decided to bring out the blowtorch and pliers and see what I can do about this. First step is upgrading the version of the blog software to the latest one to see if I can get better anti spam controls there (the current one has auto-delete for spam comments, but only after 1 day - that’s obviously not sufficient).

If you notice anything untowards during the day, that’ll be me taking down and replacing the foundations of this blog.

Update: 13:13 - the upgrade is done. Everything still looks the same on the outside, though there is still an issue with comments (they get an Internal Server error - blowtorch and pliers time)

Update 2: 14:33 - damn. They’ve changed the entire templating system in this version, wrecking the way I implemented commenting on the blog. As it seems, I’ve been lucky that the main blog still works and it’s just the comment entry system that’s exploded. So, until further notice, comments are not possible any more (which, coincidentally, solves the spam problem :) ). If you really need to say something profound, clicking on my name up there gets you my email address.

Phil, those mails are for ‘unpublished’ comments. Those are comments held back for moderation, most likely because they were published on entries older than 10 days (I think, could be 5). 99% of the case these are spam as well and need not be approved - I clean them up regularly.

Update 3: 16:48 - well that was fun. After a pleasant afternoon with blowtorch and pliers (read Movable Type templates and javascript) I’ve got the commenting system back up. Instead of a pop up window, the comment form will now open in the page itself (why? Because the comment cgi does not accept GET requests anymore, if you really want to know ) but otherwise things are still exactly as they were. I’ve got some tweaking to do (styling the comment form and making sure it does not open for all entries on the page) but the bare bones are there.

Update 4: 17:40 - and we’re done. Comment system rebuilt and integrated in the page style. CSS, javascript and freaking MT template knowledge refreshed :).