Al-Muhajabah's Movable Type Tips

The blog author gets an email notification whenever a new comment is posted on their blog. But, often, commentors themselves would like to be notified when new comments are posted to entries that they're monitoring.

The venerable solution is the Scriptygoddess subscribe to comments script. Unfortunately, because of the way that the script is set up, it doesn't integrate very well with MT-Blacklist. Specifically, your subscribers may still receive notifications about comments that are rejected by MT-Blacklist or for other reasons. An update to the Scriptygoddess script blocked notifications on attempted comments from blocked IPs, but integration with MT-Blacklist was still lacking.

There are two main options for a successor to Scriptygoddess's script, MT Notifier and EZ Subscribe. I decided to go with EZ Subscribe because it required minimal changes to my existing Scriptygoddess-based setup.

If you're using Threaded Comments, as I am (or any other plugin or hack that adds new fields to your comments form) you will need to hack sub-to-com.cgi to include these new fields. Look for the section that contains this code:

<form method="post" action="$script_name" name="comments_form"/>
<input type="hidden" name="entry_id" value="$form{entry_id}"/>
<input type="hidden" name="author" value="$form{author}"/>
<input type="hidden" name="email" value="$form{email}"/>
<input type="hidden" name="url" value="$form{url}"/>
<input type="hidden" name="bakecookie" value="$form{bakecookie}"/>
<input type="hidden" name="text" value="$form{text}"/>

Add new lines with the names and values for the extra form fields (note: I've contacted the developer about this issue and he hopes to provide easier configuration in future releases).

Upload sub-to-com.cgi to your MT directory and set permissions to 755. Now point your browser to it to read the documentation and do configuration. You can import all your Scriptygoddess subscriptions very easily.

Once you've configured EZ Subscribe, go into your blog templates. On the comment listing template, the comment preview template, and your individual entry archive template (if you have a comment submission form on it), change the URL in the "action" element of the form (the documentation shows exactly what to do) from the Scriptygoddess file to sub-to-com.cgi. Be sure to do this for both forms: the subscription with comments, and the subscription without comments.

If you've changed the name of your comment script, you will also need to pass the new name to sub-to-com.cgi. Again, the documentation explains what to do.

After this, you should be good to go! You have the same functionality as with Scriptygoddess but can now rest secure that your subscribers won't be receiving notifications of spam or other blocked comments.