Fuddland

The new upgrade to Movable Type, obstensibly to close a few more holes that comment spammers have been abusing, irritates me immensely.

The major new feature is a change to the comment author link that MT generates — instead of being a simple link to the author’s website [if they have provided one], it goes to the site via a redirect script. This tactic is supposed to deter spammers because they rely on their bogus comment and its associated link [to a dodgy site dealing porn or Viagra] boosting their Google PageRank — that’s their reason for spamming weblog comments in the first place. Feeding a link to a site through a redirect script fools Google into thinking there are no links to the site, reducing its PageRank.

However, this obviously also affects innocent commenters and their own PageRank — I’m sure the majority of bloggers are not all that bothered about their PageRank, but for those that are, this cripples them somewhat.

My main gripe about the redirect script is that it breaks the back button [in IE at least]: say you click a commenter’s website link, have a quick look but then want to go back to the weblog you were originally on. You click the back button, and the browser is sent to the redirect script page, which then bounces you straight back to the weblog you just left. If you’re not paying attention, you might have missed the redirect page flashing up for a second, and be a bit confused. You need to be quick enough to press the back button a second time whilst the browser is on the redirect script page — and once it’s cached on a fairly fast machine it’s nigh on impossible to do this in time.

If you want to have an accessible site, you need to make as few assumptions about your potential users as you can — I’ve spent a lot of time making sure this site works for people who can’t or don’t use Javascript- or CSS-enabled browsers [or their own custom stylesheets with, for exampe, extra large text], and I’m fairly sure it will even be functional for those using screenreaders. To my knowledge no one who regularly visits has any special needs, but I still wanted to provide the usability. To not do that from the outset would be like an architect saying, “We’ll provide ramps as soon as the first person in a wheelchair wants to get into the building”.

To hard-code inaccessible [not to mention invalid!] HTML into a very popular CMS seems crazy to me. Of course, the advantage of MT is, if you don’t like something about the programme you can almost certainly change it: someone has very kindly taken the trouble to patch it to make the redirect optional, but patches need to be reapplied every time a new version is released, so I’d really have preferred this to be there by default.

The following is an entry which follows on from the above:

1. Throttled [Fuddland]. Excerpt: Despite my previous irritations, I've upgraded to the latest version of MT. Since they've introduced comment throttling, I've also added Distler's comment-, trackback- and search-throttling patches. If you submit a comment and realise as soon as you hi...

#1

steve | 2004 / 01 / 15 – 19:40

Worth mentioning that if you do the author link like so in the template (had to replace the with [ and ] for display purposes):

[a href=”[MTCommentURL]” title=”[MTCommentURL]”][MTCommentAuthor][/a]

Then you are not affected by the “fix” in 2.66 anyway (I have upgraded to 2.66). I use this because I wanted a title attribute in the href which you cant do with the authorlink. If the author only supplies an email address then the href and title are empty, not a problem for me although it is easy to allow for both.

#2

David | 2004 / 01 / 15 – 20:02

Re #1: Thanks Steve, that looks like a neat workaround — not perfect as you say, due to the empty <a href="" title="">Author</a> if no URL is provided, but that’s preferable to a broken back button.

BTW, I allow HTML in my comments so you can use < for < and > for >, and wrapping it in <code> tags stops SmartyPants from making the quotes fancy, but I suppose it’s much quicker to use [ and ] anyway. ;)

#3

richard | 2004 / 01 / 15 – 20:41

To be honest, I couldn’t be bothered to upgrade so I just plugged the security holes manually.

#4

David | 2004 / 01 / 15 – 21:19

Re #3: That’s one option — I was duped into thinking it’d be a simple matter of uploading the new files. Little did I know it’d cause more problems that I’d had [given that I’ve never actually received a spam comment].

I’ve worked around the “empty anchor tags when commenter doesn’t leave a URL” problem by realising I had already installed the MTIFEmpty plugin. Now I just use the following code:

<MTIfNotEmpty var="CommentURL">
<a href="<$MTCommentURL$>" title="Visit <$MTCommentAuthor$>'s site">
</MTIfNotEmpty>
<$MTCommentAuthor$>
<MTIfNotEmpty var="CommentURL">
</a>
</MTIfNotEmpty>

#5

steve | 2004 / 01 / 16 – 07:34

Exactly, that was what I was referring to in my first post. I prefer this look as I like all my URL’s to have title’s.

#6

David | 2004 / 01 / 16 – 10:15

Update: version 2.661 has been released to address the validation issue [by replacing & with &amp; in the redirect URL]. The broken back button issue still stands though; I meant to link to the W3C page about using standard redirects and The Top Ten New Mistakes of Web Design in my post, but forgot about it until now. [Note that the latter of these advice pages is nearly 5 years old!]

#7

David | 2004 / 01 / 16 – 11:25

Update update: Sheesh. Version 2.661 still does not validate [9th post].

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