Al-Muhajabah's Movable Type Tips

One thing that many victims of comment spam have noticed is that the spam is often posted to old entries. There's an easy way to prevent that from happening: automatically close comments on old entries. I use the script to close comments on all entries older than 60 days but you can set it to any span of time that you would like.

Another solution that's often suggested is changing the name of the CGI script that runs the comments, which is called mt-comments.cgi. As it happens, I've been doing that since July of 2002. It didn't have anything to do with comment spam at that time. Phil Ringnalda developed a plugin called CommentSwap. The idea behind CommentSwap is to prevent Google from indexing blank comments pages. What it does is check if the comment count on an entry is zero. If so, it inserts a link in your templates to a copy of the comments script called mt-nocomments.cgi. Only if the comment count is equal to or greater than one does it create a link to mt-comments.cgi. You can then edit your robots.txt file to tell Google not to index mt-nocomments.cgi

Of course, we now discover that spam-bots looking for links to mt-comments.cgi won't find them on your comment-less entries (which have links instead to mt-nocomments.cgi), thus providing a small measure of protection to those entries.