but she's a girl...

MT-Blacklist

p. Last week, "dvd":http://fuddland.org.uk/blog/ tipped me off to a new plugin that "Jay Allen(Journey)":http://www.jayallen.org/journey/ was about to release: MT-Blacklist. This excellent plugin for "Movabletype":http://www.movabletype.org/ has now been released as promised, and I've rushed to install it. As I mentioned ["here":http://www.rousette.org.uk/mt-static/blog/archives/000458.html], I was getting heartily fed up with having to track down spam comments, delete the spam, add the IP to the banned IPs list, then rebuild the site. Like many people, I've been getting steadily increasing amounts of spam, and the whole thing was getting to be a right royal pain in the fundament.

p. MT-Blacklist is extremely easy to install (it's just a plugin so there's no tinkering with templates to be done), and looks very easy to maintain and configure. You can add spam IPs or URL fragments manually through a web interface, and it also adds a link to the email notification so that you can quickly accomplish the same thing. If I understand it correctly, the plugin retrospectively prevents the spam comments and trackbacks from being shown (and therefore benefitting the spammer by improving their Google page rank). It's all very clever, and I think that Jay deserves a lot of donations for all his efforts towards the common good of the blogiverse. I can't believe I just used the word 'blogiverse'.

p. So far no one has dared to tackle my mighty Spam Shield Of Fire (as I've decided to call it), but I'm sure that it won't be too long before it gets a good workout. If anyone legitimate has problems posting comments, do let me know.