Al-Muhajabah's Movable Type Tips

For a long time I used a simple PHP script to quickly close comments on my old entries. It doesn't do anything but that; set the comments status on old entries to "close", but I didn't need anything more.

However, after receiving some really nasty trackback spam, I decided that I needed a better option. I briefly considered modifying the PHP script to turn off pings for old entries, but then decided to take a look around. I knew that there were some other scripts that did this and I wondered if any of them also closed pings. Sure enough, I found MT-Close2. Just upload it to your MT directory, set permissions to 755, then run it in your browser. You can choose whether to close comments, pings or both, or to open them, select which blogs you want to do it for, and what the cut-off point is (i.e., comments or pings older than x days will be closed). The script is quite a bit slower than the PHP one, especially if you're changing the status for a lot of entries. I also found that I had to run it more than once to actually close all the pings I wanted, because there are several thousand entries in my blogs. It may work better to do it in smaller batches at a time.

TypePad already gets hit with trackback spam something terrible and I expect this is something we're going to see more and more in the future. MT-Blacklist already works with pings as well as comments, but since a close comments script is a valuable spam fighting tool, having a close pings script is a good addition to the toolkit.

I've closed pings on all my blogs for entries older than 90 days.