Al-Muhajabah's Movable Type Tips

As long as you allow comments on your blog, you'll eventually run into troublemakers (often called "trolls") who persistently post offensive or abusive comments to your blog. MT has a built-in IP banning function, but you may want to try something a little less extreme first.

One idea, courtesy of Teresa Nielsen-Hayden, is to strip the vowels out of the troll's comments. There are a couple of ways to do this. The simplest is the Disemvowelment plugin, which will strip the vowels out of comments posted by a certain IP address.

But going by IP isn't always the most effective way of stopping a troll. Most ISPs dynamically assign IP addresses each time a user logs on. The same person rarely has the same IP address twice.

A workaround that I came up with makes use of the Compare plugin and the Regex plugin. The Compare plugin checks to see if a comment author's name matches the name of a known troll or not. The Regex plugin then strips out the vowels if the name is a match.

Here's the code I'm using:

<MTIfEqual a="[MTCommentAuthor]" b="trollname">
<$MTCommentBody regex="s/[AEIOUaeiou]//g"$>
</MTIfEqual>
<MTIfNotEqual a="[MTCommentAuthor]" b="trollname">
<$MTCommentBody$>
</MTIfNotEqual>

The first part checks to see if the comment author's name is a troll (represented here by "trollname"; insert the name that your troll uses). If so, it searches for any upper or lowercase vowels and replaces them with nothing. If the name doesn't match, the comment is displayed as is.