Mop and bucketIt was brought to my attention that some of you may have been having difficulty posting comments to the site. It seems the culprit was a plugin I installed to help throttle comment spammers called MT-DBSL. If you tried to post a comment you may have gotten a message something like the following:

Your comment was denied for questionable content. __ITEMTYPE_ .com .com

I’ve removed the plugin since MT-Blacklist is working so well at moderating comments, so there’s really no need for the extra layer of protection.

While I was making changes, I also installed the MT Moderate plugin so that trackbacks will be moderated by default as well. Trackback SPAM seems to be the biggest plague for MovableType right now and most of my friends have turned off Trackbacks all together. I’ve been tempted to do the same, but every now and again I do get a valid ping, so I hate to kill them all together. Now that the Trackbacks are moderated and don’t actually appear on the site automatically will help a lot and make the cleanup not so urgent.

While on the subject, I have high hopes for Brad Choate’s new plugin SpamLookup. It looks to be the successor to MT Blacklist and once it’s out of beta I’ll give her a test. I’m just leery installing the beta version at this point, even though Jay Allen gave it high marks. I’m no Jay Allen, so if something goes wrong, I don’t know that I could fix it with ease, so I’ll wait until a full version is released.

Well, that’s about it, I just wanted to let everyone know that the comments issue has been fixed and give a quick update on some of the other fixes. So post away! 😀