Closing the Barn Door

With all due respect to Jay Allen, the best defense against comment spam on Movable Type weblogs may be to close off new comments on all your old entries. I've done it here, and helped Pete do the same. There's a plugin that's supposed to do this automatically, but if you want to do a one-time lockout of comments on all entries before a certain date, it's easy enough to do, at least on a SQL-based Movable Type install. (I don't have the perl-fu to do this on the default Berkeley database.)

Just run the following SQL statement on your database:

UPDATE mt_entry SET entry_allow_comments = 2 WHERE entry_created_on < '10/1/04'

Just change to cutoff date to your liking. Naturally, it would be wise to backup/export your Movable Type entries before you take direct action in the database.

Mind you, this will lock out all new comments on those entries, legitimate or not; you can still re-open comments on individual entries as you wish. For me, leaving most of my old entries open just isn't worth the headache of spam management.