Akismet in action and MT 3.3 due soon

Posted by Daniel Stout on Sun 28 May 2006 at 8:51 AM

We’ve been inundated in recent months by a steady stream of spam comments getting by our spam filters here on Manufactured Environments. I turned on comment moderation to prevent spams from getting published, but still the spam scripts driven by evil, evil people continued to bubble up from the underworld.

There are a couple of routes we could have gone with it. An easy one would have been to input some regular expressions into the filter that would have caught the vast majority of the spams coming in. One thing I noticed about the spam that was making it through the filter was that it had very specific constructions and variations. Apparently someone had spent many months to find the weak point in the default MT spam filters.

Just because I was feeling frisky, I decided to install the Akismet for Movable Type plug-in. Akismet is a spam filter that WordPress users are familiar with. It was developed by the same folks who developed WordPress. For whatever reason, they make a version of the plug-in for Movable Type, which is the software that powers this superblog.

The installation of the plug-in is easy as most plug-ins for MT are easy to install. The one onerous thing was requiring one to create a login at wordpress.com to get an API key. I thought this might be an underhanded way to get people closer to using WordPress, which it may very well be, but I see that one can create a login at wordpress.com without creating a blog as well.

In other blogging news, Movable Type 3.3 is due soon. The upgrade to MT 3.2 was tremendous, so we have high hopes for 3.3. I’ve been using Movable Type to manage this blog for the last three years. It’s only gotten better with age—it’s powerful without being overly complex. One feature I’m excited to see is the “vastly expanded template tag options for common content management tasks.” MT already has a rich template tag set—much richer than WordPress’—but it’ll be great to see what content management options Six Apart has added.

Tags: akismet · comment spam · movable type · plug-in · six apart · template tag · wordpress

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