I took a few moments and did a hand move of the code from Doug Alcorn‘s blosxom writeback plugin (part of his MT-Blacklist functionality to writebacks into my version of Fletcher Penney‘s writeback plus. This is when the freedom of plugins available in blosxom becomes kind of a drag. When everyone has a forked version of the plugin for everything they want to customize, it becomes a management problem when you want to mix and match features amongst forked versions.
I cut and pasted the part of Doug’s code that takes the Movable Type blacklist and rejects comments based on that. I also added in the code that sends an email when a comment is recorded, just because it was there and easy. By adding to my crontab a call to his script that fetches changes to the blacklist when they exist, I should always have a copy current as of the last 12 hours. Now it will be interesting to see how often this actually stops comment spammers. It wouldn’t have, for example, stopped these guys today because their URL isn’t one in the blacklist yet. I was going to submit the URL to the system, but since they only take them in the form of forward MT-Blacklist notifications there ain’t nothing I can do with it. Oh well. Thanks to Doug for porting this over, and for using the MT infrastructure so we blosxom users can share in the blacklists.
